Fuel for conspiracy theories -- The horror! The horror!

[Joseph McBride]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2...6?lo=ap_f1

[Jim DiEugenio]

I have no idea what this column means.

I think the final day was chosen because NARA wanted:

1.) To give the intel agencies all the time to appeal and Trump to make a decision.

2.) They were going o try and work out the problems they had on the first go round. Which I wrote them about in my letter at the K and K web site.

What I find so bad about Shenon and Sabato is that they never mention any of the new information in the new documents that have already been released. I did a whole show on this at BOR. But yet they cannot find any interesting docs of the well over a thousand docs that have been released. I sure did.

[Joseph McBride]

I have no idea what this column means.

I think the final day was chosen because NARA wanted:

1.) To give the intel agencies all the time to appeal and Trump to make a decision.

2.) They were going o try and work out the problems they had on the first go round. Which I wrote them about in my letter at the K and K web site.

What I find so bad about Shenon and Sabato is that they never mention any of the new information in the new documents that have already been released. I did a whole show on this at BOR. But yet they cannot find any interesting docs of the well over a thousand docs that have been released. I sure did.

*******

Jefferson Morley article on ongoing coverup of JFK documents:

https://www.alternet.org/has-trump-cut-d...E.facebook

[Anthony Thorne]

Whatever gets released will appear in easily accessible form at the Black Vault within the fortnight afterwards. Hopefully the Harvey documents don't get held back. I honestly have no idea why 'embarrassing' an agency is enough to withhold a document. If they never wanted to be embarrassed, they shouldn't have spent more than 60 years doing stuff to be embarrassed about. Either way we'll know what's up before the end of the month.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Why did they change direction?

First they were all for full release.

Now they are saying such a release will give an army of researchers opportunity for conspiracy theories?

First time around they said the only way that could be eliminated was if everything was out there. It makes me think there is really something in there that they want no one to see.

[Anthony Thorne]

In my blunt, uninformed opinion - but I'll state it rather than beating around the bush - Shenon is a spook-linked journalist asset to the CIA who writes what the agency asks him to write. His book on the 9/11 Commission was subtitled the 'Uncensored History' on the front cover to gently lead the reader away from the fact that he was given the job to whitewash and soft pedal what had actually happened. His NYT articles throughout the Iraq war defer to Pentagon talking points and 'debunk' various issues of the time with scoops from military insiders telling us that things aren't as bad as they seem. And his book on the JFK assassination was clearly put out to look authoritative while putting out fires for the agency. John Newman made astute comments about what Shenon was up to some months back. I once spent a couple of weeks researching David Ivry, who (a.) was the onetime commander of the attack on the USS Liberty, (b.) oversaw the attack on the Osirak reactor during Operation Opera in June 1981, (c.) befriended Dick Cheney during Operation Opera, and was later thanked by Cheney in his book IN MY TIME for helping getting rid of Saddam Hussein, (d.) met with Donald Rumsfeld in 1998 while several Rumsfeld associates were carrying out a Kennedy School of Government study group into 'Catastrophic Terrorism' (e.) left his position as director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defence to become Israeli Ambassador to the US in 2000, (f.) met with senior neoconservative figures in the White House three or four times through the first half of 2001, the last meeting a few weeks before 9/11, and (g.) left his ambassadorship in 2003 when the Iraq war started to become the Vice President of Boeing International, and to join several other weapons companies with guys like Richard Perle. When Ivry became the ambassador, Shenon was drafted to write a NYT piece about what a great guy Ivry was, and there was no mention of the USS Liberty. The comment in his new article with Sabato, stating that the document release will "..simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories", is misleading and disingenuous on about four different levels.

Anything detailed and factual on - for one example - the real activities of William Harvey and David Phillips, is going to cause trouble for the CIA. That sort of stuff will be embarrassing forever. The archives released their first batch as a 'shot across the bow' (their words) to let the various agencies - but really, just the one agency, as the CIA are the ones with the most to be embarrassed about here - know that the documents were going to come out. Maybe the CIA thought they would exhaust all other options before attempting to stonewall NARA. With weeks left, it's crunch time, hence 'negotiations' between NARA and the CIA, where the latter will now try and argue that revelations about what a traitorous, criminal bunch of pricks they were back in the day will reflect badly on their attempts to perform traitorous and criminal activities today.

It doesn't look great. If documents are withheld further, it's clear there's stuff they couldn't bury that is still problematic for them. We'll know fairly soon, I guess.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Thanks for that info about Shenon.

Did not know how bad he really was.

[Anthony Thorne]

Shenon's long run of NYT articles are still archived on their site. I picked a couple at random.

From September 21st, 2006.

CLAIM 9/11 TERRORISTS WERE IDENTIFIED IS REJECTED

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 The Defense Department's inspector general on Thursday dismissed claims by military officers and others who had insisted that a secret Pentagon program identified Mohamed Atta and other terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks before the attacks occurred.

The inspector general's office, which acts as the Defense Department's internal watchdog, said in a report that its investigators found no evidence to suggest that the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified Mr. Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the attacks, or any of the other terrorists before Sept. 11.

"We concluded that prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Able Danger team members did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijackers," the report said. "While we interviewed four witnesses who claimed to have seen a chart depicting Mohamed Atta and possibly other terrorists or cells' involved in 9/11, we determined that their recollections were not accurate."

The claim that a secret Pentagon data-mining program had known of Mr. Atta and other hijackers before Sept. 11 created a stir when the witnesses' accounts became public last year, because it suggested that the Defense Department had information that might have helped pre-empt the attacks had it been shared outside of the Pentagon.

One of the people making the claims that were 'rejected' was Congressman Curt Weldon, previously a weapon industry darling from years of lobbying on their behalf. When Weldon began looking into some of the murkier events surrounding 9/11, he was targeted as a troublemaker, and removed as quickly as possible. The day before his vote for re-election, the FBI did a public raid on his daughter's house over corruption allegations. Weldon lost the election the next day. Once he had lost his seat, the FBI dropped everything and never mentioned the allegations again. Weldon discusses the incident here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o64tHp_Q...e=youtu.be

The allegations were concocted to give an excuse for the FBI to raid his family's house the day before people went to vote, and Shenon's NYT piece was designed to tell everyone, forget all that stuff Weldon was talking about, it's been debunked and you can safely ignore the whole thing.

A later Shenon piece from December 6th, 2006 -

LEE. H. HAMILTON, A COMPROMISER WHO OPERATES ABOVE THE PARTISAN FRAY.

...his willingness to hear out the White House won him the respect of the commission's Republicans, making them more willing to compromise when it came time to write a final report.

Similar complaints from Democrats about Mr. Hamilton's dealings with the White House were heard in the mid-1980s, when he led the House intelligence committee and appeared reluctant to follow up on news reports that the Reagan administration had sold weapons to Iran and diverted the proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels, called the contras.

The reports proved to be true, and Mr. Hamilton acknowledged later that he had been duped by senior Reagan administration officials. "I basically believed them," he said after the Iran-contra affair was exposed. "My attitude was, I don't have any hard evidence not to believe.' " He later led the House investigation of the scandal.

The whole article is basically about what a nice, non-partisan guy Lee Hamilton is, and that Iran Contra prosecution thing was not his fault as he went into it with blinders, trusting everyone, and they pulled the wool over his eyes, so he presumably would have gone after them if he'd known more about what was happening, honourable guy that he is.

Robert Parry did a long piece on Hamilton that made it clear his m/o is basically to look the other way.

https://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/091710.html

This is why Hamilton was put onto the Jonestown inquiry, why he was given the task of (not) investigating Iran Contra, and it's why he was chosen to sit and smile and give kiss-ass interviews to various people during the 9/11 Commission that now basically read like PR puff-pieces. There used to be a circa 2007 lecture with Hamilton at a college on Youtube where he took questions from the crowd. A friendly young woman stood up on camera and hesitantly asked Hamilton why some articles had called him "..the king of cover-ups", and could he offer any comments as to why they might say this about him? To the laughter of the crowd, Hamilton immediately turned tail and walked offstage without answering the question.

With this in mind, Shenon's NYT piece was designed to put a nice spin on Hamilton's history, and reassure readers that he's a well-intentioned guy who you could trust to do the right thing. This is so far from the truth, it's basically a joke. Spin of this sort is visible in most of Shenon's pieces, and I suspect if you spent time on Google you'd probably see it's visible in all of his pieces. His JFK stuff this year is no different.

[Peter Lemkin]

Anything still withheld or suspected of being withheld [in part or in full] at this point should be open to legal action. Of course, what judge/court and how high it goes could determine the final outcome. [probably far behind Governmental and CIA, FBI, etc. dirty tricks] The Deep Political establishment is not going to give up their dirty little/big secrets easily, and anyone who thought they would is naive, IMHO.