John Judge has died

[Tom Bowden]

Walt has serious eye problems, which only allow him to read or write on a very limited basis. The electronic version of his last newsletter arrived this week by email. I suppose most know that he posted for a period of time as Walt Cakebread. We communicate regularly.

[Dawn Meredith]

Dawn,

I've never communicated with Walt Brown, but am aware of all the work he's done (I loved The People vs. Lee Harvey Oswald). I hadn't heard he was walking away from this subject.

Do you know why he would be pulling a Gary Shaw?

In his final paper version of his newsletter he wrote this. Walt devoted his entire adult life, including 5 books, to the JFK case. He was as obsessed and knowledgeable as any person I have ever met on the subject of JFK. With the 50th anniversary and the completion of his massive chronology he has decided ...for lack of a better term.. that there is no more that he can do. (paraphrasing his last newsletter).
So I would not call this a "Gary Shaw". I believe fear drove Gary away from this buz after the death of some of his colleagues.

Dawn

[Dawn Meredith]

Walt has serious eye problems, which only allow him to read or write on a very limited basis. The electronic version of his last newsletter arrived this week by email. I suppose most know that he posted for a period of time as Walt Cakebread. We communicate regularly.

That too, I recall in an email from him a few months back he was having to use very large font.

Dawn

[LR Trotter]

Walt has serious eye problems, which only allow him to read or write on a very limited basis. The electronic version of his last newsletter arrived this week by email. I suppose most know that he posted for a period of time as Walt Cakebread. We communicate regularly.

That too, I recall in an email from him a few months back he was having to use very large font.

Dawn

To lose dedicated researchers, and students as well, is quite concerning and troublesome for the future of research and/or solutions of the crime of murder of POTUS JFK. I'm reminded of the country song recorded and performed by the late great George Jones, "Who's Going To Fill Their Shoes"? IMO, the answer is NOBODY! And unfortunely, the issues and "stand your ground" attitudes among the JFKAR community only discourage participation.
::

[Peter Lemkin]

John Judge November 2000 Interview - Part II
November 18 & 26, 2000














This interview was conducted as a "living U.S. civics lesson" was beginning to unfold following the November 7th national election. Part I explores the nature of the illusion of democracy people in the United States must deal with. Part II focuses more specifically on the Bush Crime Family.
--ratitor




In the Dukakis debate in 1988 Bush put it like a last comment while he's grinning and he said, "I've unleashed the Bush family on America." That has always been my image of this family, steeped in corruption, crime, and fascism that has taken over machinery of the country. They are a British aristocratic family, originally. The current fortune comes from dirty dealings that they had with the grandfather, Prescott Bush who was a graduate of Yale in 1909.


He was inculcated into and chosen for the Skull & Bones society, which is a secretive fraternity at Yale that taps 15 people every year into this fraternity. Basically they're made then in terms of the ruling class. So the establishment chose him the same year that they chose the Brown Brothers of Brown Brothers Harriman. He had relations with them and banking arrangements with them and they set up banks and they also worked on the International Bank of Settlements, which was responsible for financing Hitler.


He had another bank that he was invested in that dealt with Hitler from here in the United States and dealt with the Nazis until the Trading with the Enemy Act, forced them to foreclose and he got a 1.5 million dollar settlement out of that. That was sort of the founding fortune of the family in the current era.










Ratcliffe:


It's Saturday November 18th and there are supposed demonstrations across the continent today about pro-democracy in America.


Judge:


It's like when they asked Mahatma Gandhi about what he thought of western civilization, he said he thought it would be a good idea. Pro-democracy in America would be a good idea.


Ratcliffe:


It would be a good idea. It has some merits. Whether or not it is something that can break through all the type of barricades. Did you have a chance to see what I sent yesterday about somebody posting what somebody had said from Europe about a person from Africa making some observations about the election.


Judge:


No, haven't had a chance to have a look at that yet.


Ratcliffe:


This was from Tom Warner in Seattle about WTO events:


A history professor from Uppsala Universitet in Sweden, called to tell me about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a phenomenon of the developing world.


Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).
Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's `lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.
Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.


None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre-or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.


Judge:


I wouldn't say `none of us' -- Ordinary thinking people would, but there is a structure in place to make sure that would be a good election elsewhere. Because in the developing nations it's funny for them to say because they've got it so turned around with the propaganda. He says that it's not just the developing nations -- it's in the developing nations because we perfected here and exported it.


Ratcliffe:


As if the developing nations are somehow outside of that yet, they are becoming absorbed into it.


Judge:


Then if it goes awry, we can point and say that it is a developing nation.


Ratcliffe:


That's right -- where there is nothing but corruption-- they . . .


Judge:


Where here we are "fully developed." We have corruption down to an art.


Ratcliffe:


We don't have it in that "gross" sort of form.


Judge:


We do, but nobody's allowed to look.


Ratcliffe:


Nobody's allowed to look -- but the last sentence -- "All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti- democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere." The level of obfuscation and dissembling and never looking once again at all kinds of assumptions -- implicit and tacit about the way things are, the only way they can be. You were saying yesterday, on the phone briefly, about how they wanted to speed it up because we couldn't take this much time. It was taking too much time. Which everything in the culture of efficiency would cringe at anything having to take too long.


Judge:


The frustration being expressed is that we just want to get this over with. Like the relief that people felt when the buildings at Waco caught on fire: Well, we're finally done with that. It's dragged out too long. I want an end to things. I want things to happen instantly. And that's what they're used to. They've been given election night projections and a gentlemen's agreement.


Another researcher, Bill Kelly is here today and I was talking to him for a moment about the events and how the Republicans have been quick to point out that Nixon conceded in the tight election of 1960 with John F. Kennedy when the projections in the electoral college was called. Even though there were some close votes or contested questions, Nixon conceded. The Republicans are pointing to that as the way the script should go. But Anthony Summers and his new book, Arrogance of Power -- which people should get if they want to know about Nixon and how he rose to power and all the things around him -- points out that it was Eisenhower that intervened at that point and told Nixon he'd better not raise any objections for just this reason. It would create a delay and a big mess.


Ratcliffe:


And more, a question of legitimacy.


Judge:


Exactly. And so this has always been the way the script has gone. But the question is who then in the current day called Gore and told him it was okay to not concede. Because it wasn't that Nixon didn't want to. It was Eisenhower and the party told him to `keep your seat.'


Ratcliffe:


This is the way it's played.


Judge:


That's right. Gore is as much of a player as anyone else certainly. But he went out of the script. So the question is who gave him the green light.


Ratcliffe:


You were saying before that you're wondering where the glitch came from.[1]


Judge:


Yeah. I really don't know. I've begun to wonder whether the point is to make such a mockery of de-mock-racy that people just won't bother voting at all.


Ratcliffe:


So, it extends, much further in a profound way, the sense of illegitimacy that this election will forever have in people's minds no matter what does happen. That that will actually be extended and compounded by `paying out the line' here as if you're giving them some rope, but actually, in the end, it's still just, But none of that matters and this person now is the president, and we're not going to do away with the electoral college, whatever.


Judge:


That's right. We're not going to make any reforms. But we're going to just stop playing. Because I've always said that the split, the major spit between the elements of the class when they war, and these scandals like Watergate and Contragate, is that there is one segment that wants to maintain the illusion of democracy while they increase the control. There is another segment that is simply frustrated and wants to rip off the glove and let the iron fist show and get rid of the illusion of democracy and go ahead with the fascist program in the open. The question is, Is this actually going to further that agenda? In other words are they willing to show us what's under the petticoat in order to so discourage us because they then will still not fix it. In the same way Kennedy's assassination was a show, a demonstration, shooting him out in the open like that -- like a dog in the street -- was a very brutal way to show the nation their control. Is that perhaps what underlies this?


Ratcliffe:


That one at that time in 1963 was unique. Never had such a move been made, stepping out in the big-time quite like that before.


Judge:


That's right. They were sending a clear and open message by what they did and the scandals reveal it to us to some extent. But I expect the net outcome of this is that Bush carries the election anyway, as was preordained, and there is no successful move to do anything about the lack of a democratic system here. Alternately, the thing that is most commonly being proposed is that we standardize the voting machinery and technology. But that also just as easily could lead to a corrupted situation. A decentralized situation is harder to control.


Ratcliffe:


Decentralized as opposed to standardizing voting machinery?


Judge:


Yes, in other words, if you have all kinds of voting methods, it's harder to manipulate them. If you have one standardized one you could build the machinery into that standard and thereby compromise all. Like what they call `backdoor software'. You build it in and then everybody is using it and at the same time, everybody is being siphoned off. So the question is Who called and gave the green light and why did they? But we're definitely stepping outside the script here and tearing the curtain open. A lot of people are saying, `let's just get it over with.' But of course a lot of those are people that voted for Bush. Just ordinary people. It makes them nervous to watch real democracy in progress. They are much more safe and comfortable and they can just go to bed at night and the press has told them who the president is and that is the way reality goes on.


Ratcliffe:


With every other story that they ever take in from everyday after that until the next election about the way things are. You had said that at the end of your last e-mail, "Bush said he had unleashed the Bush family on America."


Judge:


That's right -- in the Dukakis debate.


Ratcliffe:


That was in 1988?


Judge:


Yes, the late 80s. He put it like a last comment while he's grinning and he said, "I've unleashed the Bush family on America." That has always been my image of this family, steeped in corruption, crime, and fascism that has taken over machinery of the country. They are a British aristocratic family, originally. The current fortune comes from dirty dealings that they had with the grandfather, Prescott Bush who was a graduate of Yale in 1909.


He was inculcated into and chosen for the Skull & Bones society, which is a secretive fraternity at Yale that taps 15 people every year into this fraternity. Basically they're made then in terms of the ruling class. So the establishment chose him the same year that they chose the Brown Brothers of Brown Brothers Harriman. He had relations with them and banking arrangements with them and they set up banks and they also worked on the International Bank of Settlements, which was responsible for financing Hitler.


He had another bank that he was invested in that dealt with Hitler from here in the United States and dealt with the Nazis until the Trading with the Enemy Act, forced them to foreclose and he got a 1.5 million dollar settlement out of that. That was sort of the founding fortune of the family in the current era.


The real history of World War II was that the battles and the war were won by intelligence operations. The intelligence agencies . . . became interrelated then and after the war and were responsible for picking and choosing who would become the leaders in the different countries. They weren't going to leave it to chance any longer.


People like John Foster and Allen Dulles, William Casey and these others, were investment bankers. At first, it was useful for them to simply know where the next shoe would fall. But eventually it became even more useful to make sure `when it falls' and to actually manipulate it. It's not just a matter of gathering the intelligence but then of influencing the events so it comes out your way and you make your money or you make your win. However you want it to go.






Prescott Bush was also part of the Committee of 100. He was a wheeler and dealer behind the scenes. He sent George Herbert Walker Bush (the son who eventually became president) to Yale as well. Prescott Bush was tapped for the class (I believe it was 1929) that he graduated in and he was tapped for Skull & Bones as well.


Part of the ritual for the fraternity -- the initiation -- is that you dig up the skull and bones of a famous person and sleep in a coffin with them for a night. There is also a confession sequence where you admit to all of you sexual activities and any crimes. All of this is standard sort of control stuff that they use in any secret society or cabal in order to compromise you. Or they have you commit a crime that you then can be blackmailed with. Many people see such societies from the other side as if the secret societies control the class. But that is not the case. They are a control mechanism of the class in order to draw people in and keep them under reign and to form a sort of hegemony by giving certain people privileges. If you go along, you get along with them.


It was said that Prescott dug up Geronimo's bones, the Apache leader, and that George Herbert Walker Bush supposedly dug up Zapata's bones. There was one other story that he dug up Emma Goldman, but Emma Goldman was buried in the Soviet Union so I don't whether that is possible. The one story at least was that he dug up Zapata's bones. That would make sense in terms of Zapata Oil[2] and other things but these were people that were rebels against the system so they desecrate their graves. At one point, George Herbert Walker Bush became President the Apache tribal elders came to him in order to ask for Geronimo's bones back so they could put them back in the earth and preserve the sanctity.


Ratcliffe:


As if Bush had actually preserved them after he dug them up?


Judge:


Apparently they are preserved there at the bunker of the Skull & Bones at Yale. Skulls on the top of the mantle piece. Presumably they are preserved. Or at least they hoped they were. Whether the elders got the bones back, I never read the outcome of the story, but a delegation had gone to the White House to ask for it.


Ratcliffe:


Based on their belief that the supposed fact was true?


Judge:


Supposedly they knew that Geronimo was dug up and Skull & Bones they had it. When he got into this public position I guess they felt they could approach him. Prescott Bush was part of the Committee of 100, which was a group of very rich investors that at the end of World War II were casting about for a presidential candidate that they could control. They actually placed an ad in the California newspapers saying that they were looking for someone to be president, no experience necessary. And then took candidates. That ad was responded to by Richard Nixon and then he became their candidate and really was their candidate that they expected to put in and win in 1960 when they felt the election was stolen from them. Some of the plotting against Kennedy began, I'm sure, as soon as that election panned out. Because he was not slated to win by at least a large segment of the class.


Ratcliffe:


That was in some respects to be said that was the last national presidential election that was out-of-bounds, that it didn't have so much control on it.


Judge:


Yes I think so. Although they certainly had some. But in 1948, they began of course with Dewey. Dewey's campaign manager was Allen Dulles, director of the CIA. The real history of World War II was that the battles and the war were won by intelligence operations. The intelligence agencies -- many of whom had already gone to bed with each other and were interlaced with double and triple agents (NAZI intelligence, U.S. intelligence, British intelligence, French and German and other foreign intelligence) -- became interrelated then and after the war and were responsible for picking and choosing who would become the leaders in the different countries. They weren't going to leave it to chance any longer.


People like John Foster and Allen Dulles, William Casey and these others, were investment bankers. At first, it was useful for them to simply know where the next shoe would fall. But eventually it became even more useful to make sure `when it falls' and to actually manipulate it. It's not just a matter of gathering the intelligence but then of influencing the events so it comes out your way and you make your money or you make your win. However you want it to go.


So Allen Dulles and Harold Talbott (Secretary of the Air Force under Eisenhower), were the campaign managers for the Republican ticket in 1948. And Dewey was slated to win by them. In fact the press reported it -- the press being controlled by CIA and mob -- reported that Dewey had won and then Truman, who ended up getting the actual vote, held up the newspaper grinning. Then, of course, they compromised Truman as well.


It became clear that, over time, they were not going to just let anybody off the street run. They made it too expensive -- the media made it expensive -- so that it wasn't possible to just rise out of nothing and run for president. You had to have millions of dollars behind you. That of course gave them their control as it did in many other sectors of the society. Just as philanthropy really was for the most part a guise for control like the Carnegies putting all this money into education but then the Carnegies also instituted the whole acredidation system and geared the education for corporate use.


Ratcliffe:


As a meritocracy? So, that only those who would rise in that way would be suitable for leading corporate agendas?


Judge:


That's right. They would train people how to work in the corporate world and how to come out of the schools -- trained even at the high school level -- to take orders and raise your hand, and be compliant and fit in. The courses that were accredited or pushed were the ones that would give them the basic skills to carry out the corporate agenda. Then, you had higher education for the manager level. But only those schools that taught those things and structured themselves in that way were then being accredited by these national organizations that were run by Carnegie.


On the one hand, you're doing a public benefit of educating people, but on the other hand, you're manipulating how or what the paradigm in which they are going to be educated is, for your use. So in the same way, they are smart enough and rich enough to bet both horses in the race and made sure what the race looks like.


But in 1948, they had planned for Dewey to win. His running mate was Earl Warren. Warren, of course, later did their bidding on the Warren Commission and played out their games in exchange for the positions they'd given him for when he was just a nobody in California. He was politically discovered by a hatchet man for Nixon named Murray Chotner. Chotner helped him rise up in the Republican ranks. They painted him as a crime-buster and this honorable man that they could then come in -- having created this persona -- they could in and have him put the sanctity of his name to the phony conclusion of the Warren Commission in order cover-up the crime. He balked at it even. But Johnson gave him military orders.


They had a direct hand in the electoral politics, certainly in the post-war period. 1947-48 is the establishment of national security law, the national security state. History goes down the memory hole and they own history. They can classify it and they began in the postwar period to consolidate their intelligence gains and to run things from behind the scenes. But there was some machinery that still had to be tweaked. If they got the wrong guy in they could compromise him. Remember that Truman signed their bill.[3] They would used the intelligence to tell them the wrong things in order to manipulate them.


Kennedy, if you remember, began to balk at that. He realized that he had been lied to about the Bay of Pigs. He was furious about the agenda that they clearly had set out: to go to war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis and to have an actual nuclear war and end the matter. He was not playing the game.


They continued to try to control through assassination of candidates like Wallace and RFK, or through discreditation like what they did with Gene McCarthy and others. Whatever they have to do (the Chappaquiddick incident with Ted Kennedy) in order to keep the wrong people from running even if they could get enough money and to keep the wrong person from getting in, they've continued to do that.


At the same time the running tickets represent these varying elements in the class. Especially the division between the old banking establishment moneys that the Bushes came out of it and the southern rim economy of speculative capital: oil, munitions and aerospace, and land speculation that the Bushes melded into. That family crossed the border of both elements of the class. The rise of the military-industrial complex is out of the southern rim which is what Eisenhower saw coming and warned about as against the old banking money in the east.


They had different world views. How they saw other countries. The extent to which they were nativist or just wanted the control to rest here or to the extent that they saw England or Europe as important or something that they would cooperate with. How they sought to control the populace. The southern rim are definitely more impetuous, more trigger-happy and more nativist.


Ratcliffe:


What do you mean by Nativist?


Judge:


Nativist in terms of America-first and America-only. We don't really have to have an international president because those other countries don't matter. We just take care of our own stuff. Whereas the Rockefellers and the investment bankers had gone out and been internationalists for a long time. This other mentality is more a sort of `Fortress America' within our own borders, and that's enough, and shut the world out.


That internationalism was what the investment bankers saw as an advantage in relations between monarchists and big industrialists and the rich in the post-World War I period. Especially after the rise of Bolshevism and their response to that, their fear of that, got Rockefeller and the others in trouble with the more populist and nativist elements here in the United States. A lot of the rise of the whole right-wing conspiracy theory in the John Birch analysis of the Rockefellers and Eisenhower and these people as "communists", came from their lack of ability to understand their internationalism and that their international diplomatic efforts didn't always match an `America first' agenda.


But Prescott Bush was also part of the America first view. He and Pat Buchannan's father were in that together, and Gore's family. Gore Vidal is the cousin of Al Gore. He changed his name around. He is part of the Gore family. Gore Vidal was quoted just recently -- I heard him on the radio -- saying that he is the only member (of this upper class school that he went to I think up in Connecticut) he was the only member of the America First committee on campus. But his father had been more a populist and more in that tradition and to keep America out of international affairs.


All I'm saying is that there are differences. For a while they tried balancing the ticket, where you would have a Kennedy from the eastern establishment and a Johnson from the southern rim. But the ascendancy was always, I believe, for the military-industrial complex in the southern rim. So they eventually starting knocking the eastern establishment out of it's seat.


Now the tickets are more unbalanced. You'll have Gore and Clinton from the Trilateral Commission and the eastern establishment money but there is always some cross-over into the other themes. Then on the other side you have Bush and Cheney from the military-industrial complex. But it's not a pure line but I think the tickets have been less balanced by a president and a vice president from one end of the class to the other to more of an open contention between the two elements of the class. One side putting up their boys and the other side putting up theirs.


But you have cross-overs like Bush. They wanted Nixon to win and they had this dirty money and they'd been proto-fascist and they were moving but they kept losing these elections and they weren't happy with it. George Bush moves from the east, goes to Texas, and invests the family money in oil speculation. He's making money on that and extends that into Mexico and does some dealings there, some of which aren't legal by Mexican law, and forms partnerships.


Then, apparently, Bush has early connections with the intelligence networks because he is doing oil which is always tied with intelligence and manipulation worldwide and because he is dealing with Mexico and other countries. I remember in that time there was even moves by people around William F. Buckley and the right-wing of the Republican party -- Buckley had oil in the Katanga province in the Congo -- to have the CIA intervene there with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in order to protect assets.


If you remember Buckley and George de Mohrenschildt started a Cuban-Venezuelan oil venture and then were kicked out of Cuba and lost their money there. But the development of access to oil, and oil manipulation, and how oil would move, was often part of the CIA agenda after intelligence was created.


We're exporting exactly the kind of corrupt democracy we have here, which is rigged and manipulated elections and press manipulation in order to keep in power or put in power the people that we want to be in those countries for the purpose of having our investments protected and milking what we can out of the resources and the labor available in any of those countries.






The resource agenda is the reason we go to war. The reason we do many of the things we do on an intelligence level, or the reason that we manipulate elections in other countries, has to do with direct access to certain key resources or the manipulation of those resources so others can't get them.


In that way that is probably why the cross-over went. De Mohrenschildt knew Bush. George de Mohrenschildt was a White Russian and an intelligence agent who came out of the Soviet Union. His father had been the main person in charge of the Nobel oil fields in Russia, a very rich family in the pre-Bolshevik period who knew the Czar and were tight with the Czar and the court. His father was called the Minister of Mobility in Minsk and Byelorussia (in White Russia), because he could move somebody up the chain and get them in to the court and basically pick people. He was like a Skull & Bones person.


When the revolution came, the brother Vaughn de Mohrenschildt was captured by the Bolsheviks and imprisoned. When they finally got him out of prison, the de Mohrenschildt family took what they could of the family fortune and ran to Germany. They made relations there with the emerging Solidarists network of White Russians, eastern European revanchists, and the emerging Nazis from the 20s on -- the reactionaries in those countries that were rising against any change and supporting the monarchist and fascist agendas.


George de Mohrenschildt's cousin, Baron Constantine Maydell, was part of the Brown network which was a pre-war spy network that went all over the world for the Nazis. He came and did pro-Hitler propaganda in the United States and made films. De Mohrenschildt became a spy himself for the Nazis in France and was caught spying later at Corpus Christi in Texas during the war and only by dint a letter he had from Rockefeller was he not charged. He was kicked out of Mexico for spying with Douglas McArthur's nephew. He was tight with the entire spy network around the Tolstoy foundation, Anna Tolstoy, which was White Russian and an anti-Communist and CIA-funded.


So this reactionary, anti-Communist George de Mohrenschildt befriends the supposed communist, red defector Lee Harvey Oswald and becomes his manipulator. But de Mohrenschildt knew Kerr of Kerr-Mcgee. He was an oil geologist and a speculator in oil. He had lost many fortunes to Soviets and Russian communism but also to the rise in China because his wife's family Jean de Mohrenschildt, her father had formed the Trans-Siberian railroad and they lost investments to the change-over in China when communism came in. George de Mohrenschildt lost another small fortune in Cuban-Venezuelan oil when Castro came in. He had no love for the Communists. They had kept him from his capitalist aspirations. He also had George Bush's number in his notebook.


Bush seems to have played a role in the Bay of Pigs. Bush seems to have been (by documents we have), approached right after the Kennedy assassination and debriefed by Naval Intelligence and CIA about what was the reaction in Florida by the anti-Castro community in Miami to the assassination of Kennedy. Apparently, he knew people in that circle. That would make sense in terms of this network of spies that figures in from the Bay of Pigs, through the Kennedy assassination, through Watergate, on up into the current time into Contragate.


These same characters show up over and over again out of this anti-Castro Cuban network that was imported here and then used as basically a standing mercenary intelligence army. So Bush had his finger in many of those things and then rose up eventually to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then on to the presidency.


Of course, as you say, in any other country, if we were looking disdainfully (as we do) at other countries, if the head of the CIA became the president and there was a scandal, everybody would see it for what it is. But here, being that the CIA is considered somehow "benign" or "patriotic", but only if you refuse to look at what it does -- unless you're very rich -- then it helps you out. For ordinary people, it does horrendous things in the name of America.


In the period when Reagan came in, I believe Bush took over. He was vice president and rose to power, I believe, on March 31 1981 when Reagan was nearly assassinated. The person placed as the patsy, not the person that actually shot Reagan but the person placed as the patsy in the case, was John Hinkley. His family ties were to oil. Through that oil connection, Neil Bush -- George Herbert Walker Bush's son, who worked in oil -- knew Scott Hinkley who also worked in oil. Neil had been involved with Scott in many oil operations -- both working for oil speculation and oil companies.


The two families lived close to each other. They knew each other socially and financially. When the Hinkley oil company started to fail in the sixties, Bush's Zapata Oil financially bailed out Hinkley's company. It went from being Vanderbilt Oil to Vanderbilt Energy or Vanderbilt Resources in the 60s after Bush intervened. The Hinkleys had been running an operation with six dead wells but then they were making several million dollars a year after the Bush bailout. I always thought this was some sort of a money-pass front where they were laundering money through on this phony oil operation but actually operating some type of an intelligence pay-off.


The father in that family, John W. Hinkley Sr., was also the president of the board for World Vision. World Vision is a far-right evangelical missionary operation that does missionary and "good work" operations in countries where there is a political purpose for it to be there. From it's inception, it was rabidly anti-Communist and it focused on refugee populations of people running from countries that had been taken over by Communism. This was from the fifties on.


World Vision had a hand in the movement of the Cubans into the United States and other refugees of revolutionary regimes. When you're a refugee you're cut loose, basically, and pretty much fair game to be manipulated by whoever is willing to give you a hand because you don't have a home or any place to stay and somebody has got to accept you.


World Vision was able to recruit out of these mercenary populations, people who could be politically turned to their intelligence purposes. World Vision served as a penetration force -- not as visible as the military actually going in or the CIA going in -- going in as missionaries and working among the people.


This link between missionary and intelligence for capitalistic infiltration operations goes way back. It was part of the internationalism with the Rockefellers. It's talked about in a book called Thy Will Be Done[4] about Rockefeller, Venezuela, and Latin American Oil, the Summer Linguistic Institute, World Vision and others. But they operated in this way for a long time.


They were paid by the CIA for a long time during the Vietnam war and went into SE Asia -- Cambodia and Laos. Throughout Vietnam they were given U.S. military equipment to use. They still maintain a budget under USAID, which was just (Agency for International Development), which was just a pass-over in order to give the CIA more cover. They ran operations through USAID. The current cover replacing that is the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which is supposed to be how we're exporting democracy around the world.


But of course, we're exporting exactly the kind of corrupt democracy we have here, which is rigged and manipulated elections and press manipulation in order to keep in power or put in power the people that we want to be in those countries for the purpose of having our investments protected and milking what we can out of the resources and the labor available in any of those countries.


World Vision was part of that scheme and they did some nasty things. They ran the refugee camp in Sabra-Shatilla where the fascist Phalange were allowed in to kill the Palestinians. Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland syndicate mobster, had building operations and construction stuff going on in Miami that the anti-Castro Cubans were hired to take part in. They meld them in -- and so they recruit from them, whoever they can.


They ran the Cuban and Thai refugee camps in the United States. Mark David Chapman -- who eventually shot John Lennon -- worked at the Thai refugee camps out in Arkansas that World Vision operated there. They ran these camps brutally, forcing people into political education against Castro, refusing to feed people, beating people -- by many reports -- and bringing in Alpha 66 and Omega 7 people (the worst of the killing teams -- or murder squads -- of the anti-Castro Cubans in the United States) to run the camps in Florida, Fort Chafey in Arkansas and other places where the Cuban exiles were. These people came in and there were eventually riots in the Cuban refugee camps against their treatment there. This according to legitimate refugee charity workers and organizations that I have spoken to.


Ratcliffe:


This is during what period?


Judge:


This is in the seventies, after the boat lift and all that. But they were in there trying to recruit a whole new batch of anti-Castro Cubans that could be used in, not only domestic, but international operations. It was anti-Castro Cubans that were used in the murder of Lumumba for instance, by the CIA. These people were interchangeable units but World Vision was part-and-parcel of running these camps and manipulating these refugees. At the same time doing a television presence that made them seem as if they were some sort of charitable Christian operation.


Their CIA funding and their background had been exposed over a long time. The chairman of the board for some period was John W. Hinkley Sr.. The son worked at Fort Chafey at the Thai refugee camps. There were pictures of him after the Reagan shooting running in his World Vision T-shirt around the edge of the camp. He was tied-in but he was not going along with the program at the same level as Scott was. Scott was already doing the wheeling and dealing and was tight with Neil Bush. Bush's daughter was making the dating arrangements for Scott Hinkley and helping to set him up for dates.


They knew each other socially quite well. The press said that they were to have dinner -- Scott Hinkley and Neil Bush were to have dinner on March 31 1981. But they cancelled the dinner after the news of the shooting. The press said that that was ironic. It gives a new meaning to the word `irony'. Because if Robert Oswald, Lee Harvey's older brother and Lynda Bird Johnson were going to have dinner the night of the JFK assassination, somebody would figure out it meant something.


What it means is that Bush was part of the planning of the take over -- and it was a take over, I believe. There were elements that matched the Kennedy assassination. Richard Bartholomew, a researcher in Texas, told me that he himself talked to Strategic Air Command bomber pilots who, like the pilots I talked to that were in the air the hour of the Kennedy assassination, told him that on March 31 they had no code books aboard.


The black box, the presidential communication box for national emergencies -- the "nuclear football" as they call it, disappeared in Dallas after the Kennedy shooting and did not fly back on Airforce One with LBJ and didn't get back to him for many hours.


Similarly, Rodriguez, an Army Colonel that was in charge of carrying it with the president, at the time of Reagan's shooting, ducked, hit the ground during the shooting, got up and ran in the other direction and came back hours later with a Secret Service Agent trying to get the control card out of Reagan's wallet that was under the control of the FBI. FBI Agents had taken his clothes as they were clipped off in the emergency room. At that point an FBI Agent called William Sessions, the Director. But he wasn't at the Agency. He was in the situation room where the big fight had emerged between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists. Sessions told him to hold on to the card.


Ratcliffe:


Sessions told the guy who had taken the football with him?


Judge:


No, he told the FBI Agent who had the card. The nurses were taking Reagan's clothes off, cutting them off, whatever they had to do and in his wallet was the card that activates the box. The FBI had control of that back at the hospital. The guy in control of the box itself ran off and came back with a Secret Service Agent trying to get the card, as well. The FBI guy said `Wait a minute. I have to call headquarters.' Sessions told him `No, don't give up the card.' That's the level at which the battle was going on.


Ratcliffe:


And Sessions would be with Bush or Reagan?


Judge:


Sessions would have been loyal to Reagan, I believe.


Ratcliffe:


Rodriguez was loyal to Reagan?


Judge:


Well, Rodriguez was obviously playing the other side. Rodriguez was running off with the box.


Ratcliffe:


He didn't stay with the Commander-in-Chief?


Judge:


That's right. He broke rank. And then, whoever in the Secret Service -- the Secret Service helped to set-up Reagan too. Reagan was told not to wear his vest that day -- his protective vest. I'll bet he wore it after that. They did not call the procedure with the limousine. He should have come out the door and gone directly into the limousine. That's how he arrived.


He came, the Secret Service formed two rows on either side of the back door, they opened the back door and he goes in. When you hire a limousine, they don't go to the house down the street, they come to your door. When you're the president, they'll move it six inches to make sure that it's in the right place. It was in the right place when he arrived. He got out and went in through the phalanx of the two rows of agents. He's safe into the VIP entrance.


He comes out the same exit and where's the car?' It is nowhere near the door. It's 40-50 feet down the pavement. So, he's got to walk out into the open. What's supposed to happen? The Secret Service is supposed to surround him like a diamond and protect him. One guy goes forward, McCarthy, to open the door for him. The rest don't surround him. They all file out like a line of ducks off to the right and they leave Reagan walking in the open with Brady and these other guys. Then, the shooting happens.


The damage that was done there once the shooting started was quite extensive. Brady was hit which literally took a large chunk of his brain and knocked him on to the ground. A black cop was nicked in the neck, a big beefy cop, and he spun and hit the ground hard by the shot. McCarthy, 160 pounds, was lifted by the shot, that hit him in the groin at the back door of the car, and thrown through the air to the front bumper of the car. He himself says that was no 22.


All of the early press reports said that Hinkley was firing a 38 and that is much more consistent with these kinds of reactions. A 22 will hurt you, enter you and do damage inside you, but it's not going to knock you over. A 38 is a much larger caliber of bullet. Hinkley purchased a 38 at a pawn shop on Elm Street in Dallas -- the same street where Kennedy was assassinated.


The problem was that Reagan didn't get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn't shot to the extent that he can't move. . . . But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration. . . . There are different loyalties. That was clear in a number of instances.


One was when Bush helped to get Haig appointed as Secretary of State. The entire Cabinet staff underneath him was already pre-appointed and he wasn't allowed to pick or choose any of them, or fire any of them. So it was like he was a figure head put up at the head of this agency that he wasn't really allowed to run. Then just a few days before the shooting of Reagan, there was a switch where Bush replaced Haig as the head of an emergency preparedness committee or unit that they had at the White House. The press was asking Bush right after he was appointed in place of Haig -- this was just three days before the shooting -- `What constitutes an emergency for the purpose of this special office?' And Bush said, "The president will know it when he sees it." I think he meant that he -- Reagan -- would know it when he saw it lying on the ground dying.


This I believe was a coup. The black box disappeared for several hours. . . There was that kind of transition-of-power going on -- who was actually going to control things and there were switch-overs about the Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, again, not having code books aboard on March 31, 81 like they didn't on November 22, 63. This was a classic transition-of-power situation.






All of this was to give us an early signal that this is one of their jobs. But at the same time none of Hinkley's bullets hit Reagan and that was clear from Reagan's lack of this kind of reaction. Reagan gets to the car still standing. He is pushed into the car by McCarthy. He's got some pain in his rib, which he thinks McCarthy caused by pushing him in and eventually coughs up a little blood. But even when he finally gets down to G.W. [George Washington University] Hospital, he is still standing when comes in and walks into the hospital and they put him on the gurney. He's not at all in the same shape as everyone else that's hit by Hinkley's 38.


Then the official story changes after three or four hours and Hinkley supposedly had a 22. I went through the ABC footage and you can actually see the replacement of the 22 and the pick-up of the 38 by a Secret Service agent.


Ratcliffe:


How do you mean `see the replacement?' -- you can see it in watching the replay?


Judge:


In watching the footage, you can see a Secret Service agent at the outer edge of the crew. There's a group that have sort of tackled Hinkley and they're taking him in and you can see the gun is on the ground. Hinkley's 38 is on the ground at the edge of the that crowd near the retaining wall. The Secret Service agent kind of sidles over to the wall, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, kneels down, like crouches, and lifts the gun up and puts it in his pocket.


Meanwhile, a DC cop in a slick yellow raincoat comes to the outer edge of the crowd -- this is after they already have Hinkley subdued -- and for no apparent reason he comes to the edge of the crowd and puts his hand out. He's a motorcycle cop.


That motorcycle rentinue did not leave with Reagan's limousine when he did leave. He has no escort when he goes. That is not explainable either, especially if there has just been an assassination attempt -- why he would be put out there without escort. But he does, he goes without anybody.


This cop comes over, off of his motorcycle, spreads his arms and kind of moves back and forth in front of -- at the edge of the crowd. He's not serving any purpose but he's there and after a moment the camera pans back and you can see at his feet, this 22, as if he's dropped it. One of his hands goes in towards the center of his coat and then comes out and right after that, as the camera is panning all around, it pans right between his feet, and you can see this 22 that becomes the official weapon.


There is also a weapon near Brady's head that one of the Secret Service guys drops. That's how they explain the 38, saying that it was a confusion because it was really the Secret Service guy's gun. I believe, Hinkley was firing a 38. Hinkley damaged everybody but Reagan, also put holes in the car and the building across the street. But he only had six rounds and each one of those is explained and then a seventh round has to explain the wound in Reagan.


Reagan's wound is so minimal that it doesn't match either a 22 or a 38. It is described as a little thin razor line when they finally get his clothes off. They think he's having a heart attack -- actually his lung had collapsed because of the thing penetrating him. Then finally a nurse sees a little line of blood underneath his left arm pit. She determines that something has gone in but it's a little razor cut. They know what a bullet hole looks there in the emergency room at G.W.U.. They get them all the time.


They do poke around until they finally find this thing in the x-ray. They try three times to get it out and finally pull it out and it is a little disc, a flattened disc, that was described as `thin as a dime' and `razor-edged.' This fits the profile of these aerodynamic discs that are used by the intelligence agencies in weapons that the Church Committee showed during the time that they did their testimony. They are fired with a CO2 (carbon dioxide) cartridge, so they are relatively silent. They just make a little puff. They have an accuracy up to a great length. They can be fired out of a regular gun or even out of these little tubes with the CO2 cartridge at the back. They also can be loaded with toxins.


One of the uses they had for them was making them out of plastic and filling them with shellfish toxin which goes in and makes a razor split in the skin which wouldn't be noticed during an autopsy. The x-ray won't pull up the plastic and the shellfish toxin, once it gets into any part of the bloodstream, will cause a heart attack within 30 seconds. Very lethal -- several milligrams of the shellfish toxin is enough of a dose. Whether this thing had a poison load in it or not, who knows? But it didn't immediately kill him so if it did have such a load, it didn't work. It didn't shoot off.


It bounced off of his rib. It would have cut into his aorta but bounced on his rib and missed the aorta by a quarter of an inch and went into the lung instead. But they did finally get it out. The lung was collapsed from it but they got him stabilized.


Meanwhile, all night, there were people trying to move him back to the Bethesda. Because when the car takes off from the Hilton where the shooting happens, they're screaming `Rawhide is okay' into the radio. Rawhide is the code name for Reagan. They're radioing back according to McCarthy, `Rawhide is okay, Rawhide is okay.' But I don't think he is supposed to be okay. I think he was supposed to have been killed there and they've got a problem.


So the car goes up to Connecticut Avenue and if they were going to go to G.W.U. Hospital, they needed to either go straight across down Florida to 21st and then (it's close) around a little traffic circle. Or they could have gone left further down to M Street and then turned across M to 21st.


McCarthy's story is that they went under the bridge at M Street and then he coughed up some blood and then they realized he'd been hit and they said `get to the nearest hospital.' But they still didn't even turn on M, which they could have easily done. They went all the way down to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue -- four or five more blocks. Then they turned to the right from 17th over to 21st and then came back up to 21st until they hit G.W.U. Hospital, which is going along three sides of a triangle instead of just cutting across. So if you're in a hurry -- the president's in an emergency -- you take the quickest route.


But what McCarthy says in his book is that when the car went up to Connecticut Avenue, that they went right and went toward the White House. If you turn right on Connecticut off of T, where they were, you're not going towards the White House, you're headed north toward Bethesda Hospital and out Connecticut Ave.


That was confirmed for me later when ABC News had on the doctor who was the head of the trauma room after they had the press conference with the doctors. The head of the trauma room was there with the news anchor. The newscaster said `I understand that there were people that wanted to move President Reagan out to Bethesda Naval Hospital after he had come into your trauma room.' And the doctor said, `Yes, there were people.' There were reports that it was Secret Service up to as late as 6 a.m. the next morning, insisting to move him. But in fact, he wasn't moved and it was because this trauma room doctor said, `When someone comes into my trauma room in that condition, I don't care who they are -- President of the United States or not -- they are not going to be moved.' He doesn't understand that he saved Reagan's life.


If they had gotten Reagan to Bethesda, they could have finished the job there and then done the same phony autopsy they did on John F. Kennedy at Bethesda Hospital. But instead, this trauma room doctor intervened and kept Reagan there and then Reagan recovered in relatively safety and security.


The patterns are always the same. You have a patsy that takes the blame. You have a second gunman that never comes to light. And you have an ascendance of power. That's what I think happened after that point: that Reagan was basically allowed to function but Bush was President.


That dynamic is born out by other instances including the Contragate scandal where the Tower Commission determined in testimony of all the top people, McFarland and the people at the highest levels, that one day, July 15, 1985 was this day they all name as the key day when the President of the United States signs a Finding allowing the shipment of TOE missiles to Israel . . . I went back and looked that day up -- that all of them had named in the Tower Report -- to see what Reagan was supposedly doing that day. Because Reagan later said that he could not remember signing that. In fact, on July 15, 1985 Reagan was in an eight-hour prostate operation all day and Bush was acting President of the United States for those eight hours.


It was clear to me that Bush had signed the Finding. That it was a covert operation that Reagan didn't know anything about and wasn't allowed to know anything about. When the stuff started to break, they had to then shred the signed papers and get Oliver North and the boys in there to do the shredding because it would have shown Bush's signature all over it. Bush was actually calling the shots for Contragate.






There was a strange incident that Mae Brussell noticed that they brought blood in to him. First, it is unusual for them to bring blood because the Secret Service already knows when they travel to a city what hospital has blood and what the closest one is. They make sure that the hospitals nearby where the president travels, and those DC hospitals, have enough blood of his type in storage. It was unusual, first, that they didn't have enough and secondly, this vehicle that arrived to bring the blood wasn't anything formal from the pictures. It looked like some kind of a van where somebody had painted a red cross on the back of it but it clearly was not an official vehicle. Mae thought that tainted blood might've been brought in and caused Reagan problems later with cancer or other things.


Generally, his care there was certainly better than what would have happened to him. Interestingly enough, when the ABC News Anchor asked the doctor this and he said, `In my trauma room, they are going to stay there and we're not going to move him.' The response of the news anchor was, `No matter how much the Navy yells?' The doctor said, `That's right. No matter how much the Navy yells.' The question that we have to ask, `What is the Navy yelling about moving the president for after he's been shot?'


Meanwhile, Brady, who's lying on the ground, and still on the ground five minutes after Reagan takes off, ends up getting to G.W.U. before Reagan does. Reagan's on his way to Bethesda. Brady, who takes five extra minutes to even get the ambulance in to load him, gets to G.W.U. and is taken in on a stretcher surrounded by Secret Service agents. That became confused with Reagan. In the first hour, they said Reagan was shot, he wasn't shot, he was dead, he wasn't dead, Brady was shot, he wasn't shot, he was dead, he wasn't dead. The stories went back and forth on the news about who had been shot and who was alive or dead. Nothing was clear. And then that Reagan had gone in to the hospital on a stretcher and then another story that Reagan had walked in on his own.


The problem was that Reagan didn't get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn't shot to the extent that he can't move. But that's what confused the story as to what condition Reagan was in. At first, I wondered if they were buying time or what was happening.


But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration.


There was a clear split along those lines because Reagan represents the southern California (what they used to call) `Irish Mob Money' out there and the southern rim economy -- the military-industrial complex and Bush is somewhat of a cross-over coming out of Yale and the upper class schools but also having his money in the south. There are different loyalties. That was clear in a number of instances.


One was when Bush helped to get Haig appointed as Secretary of State. The entire Cabinet staff underneath him was already pre-appointed and he wasn't allowed to pick or choose any of them, or fire any of them. So it was like he was a figure head put up at the head of this agency that he wasn't really allowed to run. Then just a few days before the shooting of Reagan, there was a switch where Bush replaced Haig as the head of an emergency preparedness committee or unit that they had at the White House. The press was asking Bush right after he was appointed in place of Haig -- this was just three days before the shooting -- `What constitutes an emergency for the purpose of this special office?' And Bush said, "The president will know it when he sees it." I think he meant that he -- Reagan -- would know it when he saw it lying on the ground dying.


This I believe was a coup. The black box disappeared for several hours. There was an attempt to get the card that activated the black box by the Secret Service and Rodriguez -- the guy that was carrying it, that took it away from the President as he wasn't supposed to do -- came back three hours later to get the activating card that the FBI had taken out of the pants they had cut off of Reagan in the emergency room. The FBI guy said `I'd better call the Director.' Sessions was down in this big fight that they were having in the situation room and Sessions told him `no -- hold onto the card.'


There was that kind of transition-of-power going on -- who was actually going to control things and there were switch-overs about the Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, again, not having code books aboard on March 31, 81 like they didn't on November 22, 63. This was a classic transition-of-power situation.


I think, the loyalists won the concession that Reagan will be allowed to stay alive but Bush would come into power and at that point Haig emerged from the situation room to the press and said, his famous quote, "Gentlemen, I am in charge here until the Vice-President returns." That meant two things: number one, that they were going extra constitutional -- beyond twenty-fifth amendment, a military take-over and Haig in this office of preparedness, prior to Bush and basically he's taking charge. The press were questioning What does this mean? It's not the twenty-fifth amendment which goes to the Speaker of the House or the Vice-President. What's happening that Haig can come up and say this?


What they don't understand is all that Constitution stuff is pushed aside once they declare National Emergencies. Then they go into FEMA and they have whole other orders of succession that have to do more with the military and the Pentagon than with any of the civilian sector.


So Haig is jumping into that breech. Haig has his own strange progress up the chain-of-command and at one point jumps over literally hundreds of other people that were in line to be promoted when Califono moves him up into these high positions to take over the White House for the removal of Richard Nixon. So Haig is part of their larger game.


The second thing Haig is saying is `until the Vice-President returns.' Bush is said to be in a jovial mood on a flight between (of all places) Fort Worth and Dallas when he gets the news. There is no indication that his joviality diminished. He says that he'll come back in a few hours. There is no rush to get back on his part. Again this lack of any emergency response indicates to me that the thing is planned, they knew it was going to happen, the only thing that didn't work out right was that Reagan actually survived the shooting and survived this small disc going in under his arm.


They've got a patsy. But Hinkley, instead of being taken under civilian custody or even federal custody -- he is in a military district in DC but he is also in several federal districts -- he's whisked off to Quantico Marine Base and that's where he is held for questioning. I think that that was part of his debriefing and deprogramming. But he's not taken under civilian control, he's taken under military custody.


Then he's moved from there for psychiatric evaluation to Fort Butner, South Carolina, which was the first prison that was developed where the cells (and the blueprints) were called labs. It was the first mind-control experimentation prison in the country. He spends his time down there. Again with a group of psychiatrists that are interlinked with other assassinations and then he is eventually brought to court and declared not guilty by reason of insanity for the assassination attempt.


Contragate involved the anti-Castro Cubans, it involved covert operatives, it involved drug dealings, as well as the illegal shipment of these missiles. It was a huge scandal that again began to break open like Watergate did. But it was delimited by the people who were put in to investigate it and it was never allowed to go to the full extent of what it represented, including martial-law and military take-over plans that existed both at the time of Watergate -- the Thomas Charles Houston Plan -- and Oliver North's joint plan with FEMA, for a military take-over and martial-law at the time of Contragate.


But when Senator Jack Brooks brought that up, Senator Inouye -- who had also intervened back during the Watergate hearings -- blocked it from any open testimony and it went into a closed hearing. Then Congressperson Carl Stokes came out of that meeting and was quoted on CNN saying that they had decided that no such plan had ever existed.


But the plan not only existed, it had a name. It was Readiness Exercise '84 -- Rex '84 -- the plans were very clearly in the works and Ed Meese and Tom Turnage and Reagan's top people had participated in martial-law planning in California earlier. A lot of that stuff was not allowed to come to light and a much broader scandal than what was talked about was buried.






It's a convoluted story but the patterns are always the same. You have a patsy that takes the blame. You have a second gunman that never comes to light. And you have an ascendance of power. That's what I think happened after that point: that Reagan was basically allowed to function but Bush was President.


That dynamic is born out by other instances including the Contragate scandal where the Tower Commission determined in testimony of all the top people, McFarland and the peopl...

[Peter Lemkin]

The fund for John Judge is still active and asking for donations to pay for JJ's memorial and to ensure his enormous collection of books and papers is preserved. http://www.gofundme.com/7c7h2g

[Magda Hassan]

The fund for John Judge is still active and asking for donations to pay for JJ's memorial and to ensure his enormous collection of books and papers is preserved. http://www.gofundme.com/7c7h2g

Good idea. No money will be wasted in that. Peter, do you know who is organising his memorial service and where it wil be? Probably early days yet but can you keep us informed?

[Peter Lemkin]

Washington, DC --- John Patrick Judge passed at the age of 66, just as he had lived with courage in the midst of pain. An internationally acclaimed researcher, writer and speaker, as well as a lifelong anti-militarist anti-racist activist, and community organizer, Judge died on April 15 due to complications from a stroke suffered in early March.



Judge's primary areas of research were the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as totally unique research which he conducted on-the-ground about the massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. He is a co-founder of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), and organized COPA's annual conference in Dallas. The 2013 COPA conference drew more than 300 researchers and activists to Dallas on the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's death. Amidst the national furor when the feature film "JFK" came out in 1992, Judge was one of the key public proponents behind the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board. One of his last efforts was to press for release of some of the thousands of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination records still kept classified by the CIA and the FBI.




As co-founder of 9/11 Citizens Watch, Judge also did investigative research on the background and details of the attacks of September 11, 2001. He worked with family members of the victims to push for a federal investigation and closely monitored the work of the 9/11 Commission.




Judge was also a co-founder of CHOICES, an organization engaged since 1985 in countering military recruitment in DC area high schools and educating young people about their options with regard to the military. Beginning with the war in Viet Nam, Judge was a life-long anti-war activist and supporter of active-duty soldiers and veterans.



From 2005 to 2007, Judge served as Special Projects Assistant to Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. One of his many undertakings in Congress was to advocate on behalf of active-duty soldiers who received harsh sentences for declaring themselves conscientious objectors and others who claimed to have been tortured in military brigs. He helped write the Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush which Representative McKinney introduced in December 2006, before leaving office.



At the time of his death, John Judge was working on creation of a Hidden History Museum and Research Center in Washington, DC, to educate a new generation about covert operations, and to support the work of investigative journalists and researchers looking into the National Security State and the rise of secrecy, government plans for extra-Constitutional jurisdiction during emergencies, and threats to civil liberties and international relations. Some of his writings can be found at judgeforyourself.org.



Acclaimed nationally and internationally for his vast store of historical knowledge, Judge wrote: "Under the evil genius of Allen Dulles, whose espionage attacks on the Soviet Union date back to the 1920's, $200 million in Rockefeller and Mellon funds was directed into the hands of Hitler's spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and his 350 Nazi spies, who formed and founded our Central Intelligence Agency in 1947."



An avid public speaker, Judge never spoke about himself but rather, humbly retained a tireless devotion to the search for truth beyond the official government or mainstream media record. Until his final days, Judge was a seeker of truth and justice of the first order. He is irreplaceable in the annals of serious research and documentation.


John Judge is survived by his long-time companion and life partner, Marilyn Tenenoff and thousands of friends and admirers across the country and around the world. A celebration of his life will be held in late May. In lieu of flowers, tax-deductible donations can be made to support the preservation of Judge's books and archives in a new Museum of Hidden History, P.O. Box 772, Washington, DC, 20044.

[Magda Hassan]

A lovely remembrance of John Judge from Bill Kelly.

John Judge RIP - Dec. 14 1948 - April 15 2014

JOHN JUDGE RIP December 14 1948 - April 15 2014[/FONT]

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By Bill Kelly [/FONT]

I met John Judge in the fall of 1969 outside the University of Dayton Cafeteria at the Kennedy Union where he was manning a table and passing out literature for Conscious Objectors next to a US Marine Corps recruiting table. One of the papers on his table was a copy of Jim Garrison's interview in Playboy, which I began to read and he told me to keep it, beginning our great life-long adventure together. [/FONT]

[/FONT]
When we first met I was a freshman and he had just graduated, but he stuck around campus as a political agitator. My class was the first freshman class that didn't have mandatory ROTC for men, a requirement that was lifted after Judge and others protested the forced military commitment, and won. [/FONT]

[/FONT]
John Judge was born in Washington DC on December 14, 1948. John attended a special school in Washington where his exceptional intellect and high IQ were recognized early and cultivated, though John's sense of rebellion must have started early, as he seemed to shun the suit and tie and Ivy League business models and attended the out of the way and less academically recognized University of Dayton, Ohio, a Catholic college run by the Marinast order, and where the Dayton Flyers basketball the biggest sport in the region. [/FONT]

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While more liberal and less strict than say the Jesuits, the Marinasts had been running a tight ship since 1850, really do have ivy covered walls, and were quite reluctant to change the way things were done, especially in their Engineering Research and Development, which received many millions of dollars in research grants from the military, and Wright-Pat Air Force Base had a big presence on campus. [/FONT]

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Once John got me interested in the assassination of President Kennedy, he took me over to the UD library, the newest and largest building on campus, which housed a complete copy of the Warren Commission volumes of testimony and exhibits, which I began to read, taking special interest in the Cuban connections. [/FONT]

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It was at Dayton when I first began to identify, locate and attempt to interview witnesses. The first was Mrs. Margrete Hoover, of Martinsburgh, Pa., a small town off the Pennsylvania Turnpike where Cuban exile Julio Fernandez had taken up residence and taught Spanish at the local high school. Mrs. Hoover had discovered some burnt trash that she suspected was from her estranged husband, as she thought the names "Ruby" and "Lee Oswald" were women he was seeing, but her daughter determined that the burnt trash had blown over from the neighbor's yard, where it was apparent Fernandez had been burning his trash and papers. [/FONT]

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When Mrs. Hoover told her brother that on the night of the assassination her neighbor was awake all night and burning papers in his backyard some of which mentioned the names of "Ruby" and "Lee Oswald," he notified the Pennsylvania State Police who investigated, as did the FBI. Knocking on the door of the neighbor, Julio Fernandez, admitted burning papers in his backyard, but denied knowing Ruby or Oswald and proclaimed himself an anti-Communist patriot, one who then quickly quit his job and disappeared from Martinsburg to an undisclosed location.

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I found Mrs. Hoover's name in the public phone directory and John Judge said we should call her, so he took me over to the offices of the student body president in Kennedy Union, where he said we could use the phone to make the long distance and at the time, otherwise a prohibitively expensive phone call.[/FONT]

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Mrs. Hoover confirmed most of what was in the Warren Commission documents, and that word on the streets of Martinsburg was that Fernandez had fled to Rye, New York. And she also mentioned that I wasn't the only person still interested in the incident and Fernandez two men in black suits came by knocking on her door asking about it. [/FONT]

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One of John's radical and revolutionary friends Kevin Keefe was a six for six Icabod Crain type character who was elected student body president. Kevin went around campus in bare feet and a robe, like Jesus Christ, and used his office to bring in a series of special guests Paul Krasner, the editor and publisher of the satirical Realist magazine, radical educationalist Michael Hoffman and at the urging of Judge Mae Brussel, who brought up the assassination of President Kennedy as a subject worthy of our interest. [/FONT]

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After Mae's well attended lecture, I assisted by carrying her bag of books to the parking lot, about a block away. Once there, we were approached by a man who called out to Mae and sheepishly said hello, and then asking Mae, "Don't you know who I am?"[/FONT]

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Under the street light in the parking lot Mae looked and squinted and said, "You look like Lee Harvey Oswald." [/FONT]

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"A lot of people say that," the guy responded. "I'm Don Norton." [/FONT]

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"Oh, Don!" Mae said, "thank you so much for your letters and support. I put your money to good use."[/FONT]
"That's my conscience money," Norton said. [/FONT]

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John then invited Norton to accompany us back to his house where Mae was spending the night, and since I was a young, seventeen year old college freshman with a heavy date on the other side of campus, I left them at the parking lot while they went back to John's living room to talk some more. [/FONT]

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While I now wish I had accompanied them, I did find out a lot more about Don Norton, and the fact that there are two Don Nortons Don P. Norton and Don O. Norton, and then yet another Don Norton who wrote a defense industry history. Don O. Norton was a supposed Oswald look-a-like and East Coast fisherman, while Don P. Norton was a homosexual piano playing private at a officers club when he was recruited by military intelligence to report on gay military officers. Don P. Norton said he met the real Oswald in Mexico and obtained documents and money from him that he delivered to Canada. He later became a subject in the Garrison investigation. [/FONT]

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John Judge also had me accompany him to nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, Glen Helen park, Ruth Paine's brother, Dr. Paine and a documented Oswald sighting investigated by the Dayton Police intelligence squad. [/FONT]

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Founded by Horace Mann - the Father of American Education, Antioch was a rural, radical college that was light years ahead of education reform at the time no grades, co-ed dorms, important internships and a non-violent Quaker-like tradition whose graduates include the Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruth Hyde Paine, whose brother lives in Yellow Springs today. [/FONT]

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John took me to Antioch for a nighttime seminar being given on the history of Vietnam by a recently returned CIA station chief or so he was described, and it was a fascinating lecture, as he explained that this was a nationalistic revolution not a communist one, and that we had backed the wrong regime we had trained and educated Ho Chi Min and when he asked for it, we should have supported him rather than the corrupt Catholic Diems. I later attended graduate school at the Antioch College Baltimore satellite campus Center for Strategic Policy and Action, where we were once again lectured by former CIA officers and analysts. But in 1970 I didn't know any of this and was just a confused teenager, eyes wide open, who was being led around by John Judge.[/FONT]

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A few years later, in the spring of 1972, school was out except for a few special programs, so John and I were pretty much alone in the cafeteria eating lunch when John looked up from his newspaper and said, "Get a load of this!" [/FONT]

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He then began reading the short, one column three inch news report on the Watergate burglary. [/FONT]
"These are the same guys who killed Kennedy!" John said on the spot. [/FONT]

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Back to the library where before the day was out we had put together good profiles of the Watergate burglars, and called Mae, probably from Kevin Keefe's office. [/FONT]

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While Keven Keefe was long gone, John Judge's Dayton sweetheart Kathy was also politically active and was elected student body president, possibly the first women to do so. After graduation Kathy moved to New York City where she lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park and across the street from the Dakota, where John Lennon was killed. Kathy saw Lennon moments before he was shot, was an ear witness to the murder and was an important source for the cover-story news article I wrote for the Atlantic City Sun the next day. Even after they broke up, John and Kathy stayed close and John visited her every Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday for many years. [/FONT]

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At some point, I don't even remember if it was in the late 70s, John took me to my first JFK conference at the NYU Law School where we met with Mae, and John introduced me to Penn Jones, the scrappy editor and publisher of the Midlothian, Texas Mirror news. We also hooked up with Kevin Keefe, who was now an assistant to Sri Chinmoy, the spiritual advisor to the United Nations. "It's going to be a good year for all of us," Kevin said optimistically. Actually Kevin says that every time I see him, sometimes decades apart.[/FONT]
Walking around the NYU law school class rooms I sat in on one lecture by Fletcher Prouty, who was making caulk diagrams on a blackboard on the nature of covert operations how and why they work, how there are multi-levels of connections and communications and how they are designed to protect the identity of their actual sponsors. [/FONT]

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Near the end a press conference was called where Ralph Schoeman held up copies of some official FBI documents that he said proved conspiracy records that tie one of the Cubans arrested with Oswald in New Orleans to Teamster Union officials in Puerto Rico. I took a copy of the documents and got Schoeman's address near Princeton and wrote up an FOIA request for some more records. [/FONT]

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This was not my first request for JFK Assassination records from the National Archives, I had previously written and asked about a film that George deMohrenschildt had made on a walking trip through Central America, where he arrived in Guatemala when the Cuban brigade was preparing to invade Cuba, but I received a letter from Mr. Marion Johnson that the film was never entered into evidence or the archives. [/FONT]
This time, I received a number of documents that clearly indicated that person arrested with Oswald in New Orleans was only 17 years old at the time, and was not the same person of the same name mentioned in the FBI Teamster Union documents from Puerto Rico, a much older man. So I called Ralph Schoeman on the phone and arranged to visit him near Princeton from my Ocean City home and drove up to see him. [/FONT]

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Ralph and John Judge went back a long way, and John gave me some deep background on him, as he did with everybody. Although he was married to Temple University professor Joan Mellen at the time, she wasn't there and I wouldn't meet her for many years, but Schoeman was very polite to receive me and review the documents I had, and agreed that he had been mistaken and there were indeed two different men with the same name.[/FONT]

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While John Judge knew and associated with Carl Oglesby, Bob Katz and those involved in the Assassination Information Bureau (AIB 1322 18[SUP]th[/SUP] Street, NW) I only visited their DC office with John on one occasion, and we found it open but no one there, so I never got to meet them, but knew how they had helped spark Congress to form the HSCA an amazing achievement. [/FONT]

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From Dayton I knew John Moore, a Congressional aide from Colorado who knew Gary Hart and saw to it that I met with a lawyer from the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee, that looked into some of the intelligence connections to the assassination of President Kennedy, and I had shared records with Richard Sprague, the first chief counsel to the HSCA, but for the most part, I stood back and observed these committees work. [/FONT]
When the HSCA issued its report, then locked its records away for 50 years, I sat down with John and we discussed how much new stuff was in the reports, but the real evidence was being locked away, and that was a wrong that had to be righted. [/FONT]

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So John and I went to the National Archives building for the first time and read the engraving on the wall outside: "The Past Is Prologue," and went in and asked the man at the desk about the JFK assassination records, and he got on the phone and in a few minutes a man appeared Marion Johnson, who was responsible for the JFK assassination records. [/FONT]

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I only had a few questions for Mr. Johnson, the first being why are the records locked away for 50 years and not say 20 or 100? Why 50? [/FONT]

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And is response was that 50 years is the amount of time it is estimated that the people mentioned in the documents are dead. [/FONT]

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Well to me that was an anachronism which means "against time," since if they were dead, they couldn't answer any questions or correct the official records if it was wrong. [/FONT]

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My second question to Mr. Johnson was how do we change that requirement and get them released. [/FONT]
The answer an Act of Congress. [/FONT]

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Well while that seemed impossible at the time, we sat down again and went over everything and decided to form a not for profit lobby organization to work towards the release of the HSCA records which we called the Committee for an Open Archives (COA). We officially applied for non-profit status, opened a post office box and had a in stamp made with the name and address to put on envelops, and began making the rounds of Congress, without much success. Nobody was interested. [/FONT]

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Then when Mae Brussell died, John said that he had promised her he would use her extensive archive and library as the foundation for a West Coast research center in Santa Cruz, near Carmel, where Mae lived. John recruited me to drive a U-Haul truck full of his books and belongings from DC to Santa Cruz. Our last stop in DC was a office of radical Guatemalan activists who were opposing the dictatorship there. John was helping them raise funds. [/FONT]


It was a wonderful cross-country trip, we met many interesting people and when we got to Santa Cruz, set up the Mae Brussel Research Center in a small three bedroom rancher a few blocks from the beach, where you could hear the seals bark from the backyard. While on the West Coast we hooked up with Paul Krasner, who Larry Flint had named editor and publisher of the radical color glossy Rebel Magazine, which included an article by Mae on the Nazis at Dealey Plaza. Eventually Mae's daughter took over the MBRC and John moved back east after a short West Coast hiatus.

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After the NYU conference the next important conference on the JFK assassination was the ASK conference in Dallas where a panel was formed on freeing the records and to form a more permanent organization based in Washington. While the ASK conference(s) were well organized and attended, they were put together by a for-profit group who really weren't interested in the assassination and just wanted to make a profit. We wanted to form our own organization and organize our own conferences, not to make money, but to further the research, free the files and determine the truth. [/FONT]

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There were two meetings to plan the new organization in Dallas, and John Judge arranged for us to use the main room of the Capitol Hill Quaker Meeting House for two consecutive days, over which the foundations of COPA were laid out. A larger general organization meeting was held at a DC hotel in Chinatown, and the Coalition on Political Assassinations became a reality. [/FONT]

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But it wasn't until the early 1990s when interest in the assassination began to increase, mainly because of the mainstream media preoccupation with the making of Oliver Stone's film "JFK," even before the film was finished. After Stone gave a luncheon speech at the National Press Club, John Judge and I met with him privately at his hotel room, where he asked us what he could do to help us, other than give us money. [/FONT]

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We had discussed this among ourselves and decided that Stone could do one thing to help release the JFK assassination records. We recalled for Stone how at the end of the movie Executive Action they ran a little trailer listing the mysterious deaths, a very controversial subject. We told Stone that if he at the end of his moive, make mention of the fact that the JFK files were sealed from the public for 50 years, that alone would call attention to the issue. And indeed it did, much more than anyone anticipated. [/FONT]

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The movie motivated enough citizens to contact their Congressman to complain about the secret JFK assassination files that Congress was inspired to pass the JFK Act of 1992, which came about just as COPA was expanding and holding national conferences in Washington. [/FONT]

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For many of these years John lived in Philadelphia, where he worked for various Quaker Peace groups, mainly as a consular for conscious objectors. Though not a lawyer, John was an expert in military law and the draft, and counsel those who wanted to legally avoid the draft and Vietnam because of their personal beliefs. [/FONT]

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While most people would think of John Judge as a radical revolutionary who distained the government, he was a non-violent activist who worked through the system always applying for permits for protests and demonstrations, filling out the tax forms and doing the right thing by law. [/FONT]

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Others who I met through John Dick Gregory for instance, were not so formally inclined, and had no qualms about demonstrating without a permit, handcuffing themselves to the CIA's front gate or getting arrested for a good cause. A few years after Judge introduced me to Dick Gregory I ran into him at Union station, both of us on the way to catch a train. He asked me how Judge was doing and when I asked him, he agreed to attend the next conference in Dallas. [/FONT]


TO BE CONTINUED - BK [/FONT]

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Washington, DC - John Patrick Judge passed away at the age of 66, just as he had lived with courage in the midst of pain. An internationally acclaimed researcher, writer and speaker, as well as a lifelong anti-militarist anti-racist activist, and community organizer, Judge died on April 15 due to complications from a stroke suffered in early March.[/FONT]

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Judge's primary areas of research were the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as totally unique research which he conducted on-the-ground about the massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. He is a co-founder of the Coalition On Political Assassinations (COPA), and organized COPA's annual conference in Dallas. The 2013 COPA conference drew more than 300 researchers and activists to Dallas on the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's death. Amid the national furor when the feature film "JFK" came out in 1992, Judge was one of the key public proponents behind the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board. One of his last efforts was to press for release of some of the thousands of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination records still kept classified by the CIA and the FBI.[/FONT]

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As co-founder of 9/11 Citizens Watch, Judge also did investigative research on the background and details of the attacks of September 11, 2001. He worked with family members of the victims to push for a federal investigation and closely monitored the work of the 9/11 Commission.[/FONT]

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Judge was also a co-founder of CHOICES, an organization engaged since 1985 in countering military recruitment in DC area high schools and educating young people about their options with regard to the military. Beginning with the war in Viet Nam, Judge was a life-long anti-war activist and supporter of active-duty soldiers and veterans.[/FONT]

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From 2005 to 2007, Judge served as Special Projects Assistant to Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. One of his many undertakings in Congress was to advocate on behalf of active-duty soldiers who received harsh sentences for declaring themselves conscientious objectors and others who claimed to have been tortured in military brigs. He helped write the Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush which Representative McKinney introduced in December 2006, before leaving office.[/FONT]

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At the time of his death, John Judge was working on creation of a Hidden History Museum and Research Center in Washington, DC, to educate a new generation about covert operations, and to support the work of investigative journalists and researchers looking into the National Security State and the rise of secrecy, government plans for extra-Constitutional jurisdiction during emergencies, and threats to civil liberties and international relations. Some of his writings can be found at judgeforyourself.org.[/FONT]

Acclaimed nationally and internationally for his vast store of historical knowledge, Judge wrote: "Under the evil genius of Allen Dulles, whose espionage attacks on the Soviet Union date back to the 1920's, $200 million in Rockefeller and Mellon funds was directed into the hands of Hitler's spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and his 350 Nazi spies, who formed and founded our Central Intelligence Agency in 1947."[/FONT]

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An avid public speaker, Judge never spoke about himself but rather, humbly retained a tireless devotion to the search for truth beyond the official government or mainstream media record. Until his final days, Judge was a seeker of truth and justice of the first order. He is irreplaceable in the annals of serious research and documentation.[/FONT]

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John Judge is survived by his long-time companion and life partner, Marilyn Tenenoff, and thousands of friends and admirers across the country and around the world. A celebration of his life will be held in late May. [/FONT]

[/FONT] In lieu of flowers, tax-deductible donations can be made to support the preservation of Judge's books and archives in a new Museum of Hidden History, P.O. Box 772, Washington, DC, 20044.[/FONT]

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There's usually a nasty plot behind what seems so decent.
It's often greed or selfish hate, in ancient times and recent.
John Judge's aim is just to find the truth and then to show it.
So we can change the world by letting all the people know it."
(from a poem by Susan McLucas)[/FONT]

[URL="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LGizZnzJ13Y/U1RxAIZ_OrI/AAAAAAAAdP0/t9x9sPFlhsA/s1600/JJ_COPA.jpg"]

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com.au/20...l.html?m=1
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[Peter Lemkin]

Yes, a very good [or half of...] Obituary. Bill Kelly was just about John's longest and best living friend on JFK-Assassination matters. John knew just about everyone important in the Deep Political field from the 60s to his death. His knowledge of things 'deep political' and all nature of hidden history [from WWII to the present] was encyclopedic and always in his memory - he never forgot a name, an event, a date, or the connections between them. He had an uncanny way of immediately cutting through the lies of the press and propaganda machinery and right to the heart and truth of a matter - or to research it, if it wasn't immediately apparent. We really lost a giant. Those who didn't know John, don't realize how very much of what we now consider established deep political analysis he played a role [often a major role] in exposing and espousing. He touched so many lives and was the spark to start many on their paths - including mine.

To those newbees who are not aware of Bill Kelly's blog called JFK Countercoup, it is excellent and can be found here http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com