-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Today's Lesson From The Great Crash by John Kenneth Galbraith The most spectacular embezzlement of the period . . . was the looting of the Union Industrial Bank of Flint, Michigan. The gross take, estimates of which grew alarmingly as the investigation proceeded, was stated in The Literary Digest later in the year [1929] to be $3,592,000. In the beginning this embezzlement was a matter of individual initiative. Unknown to each other, a number of the bank's officers began making away with the funds. Gradually they became aware of each other's activities, and since they could scarcely expose each other, they co-operated. The enterprise eventually embraced about a dozen people, including virtually all of the principal officers of the bank. Operations were so well organized that even the arrival of bank examiners at the local hotels was made known promptly to members of the syndicate. Most of the funds which were purloined had been deposited with the bank to be loaned in the New York call market. The money was duly dispatched to New York but promptly recalled while the records continued to show that it was there. The money was then returned once more to New York and put into stocks. In the spring of 1929 the group was about $100,000 ahead. Then, unfortunately, it went short just as the market soared into the blue yonder of the summer sky. This was so costly that the group was induced to return to a long position, which it did just before the crash. The crash, needless to to say, was mortal. ===== TWA Big Brother The FBI and Flight 800 A Missile Expert Cries Cover-Up The Flight 800 investigation, still at a loss to explain the tragedy, has the right stuff for a thrilling spy novel. Government flacks easily spin the lazy mainstream media to sedate the nervous public. Meanwhile, a band of military insiders heads for the Internet (http://twa800.com) and reaches out to a few sympathetic independent journalists to convince readers that the truth is being hidden. For some reason�at this point only a fiction writer could provide one�many observers believe that the government is covering up the disaster's most likely explanation: it was a missile that three years ago this week, 10 miles south of Long Island, brought down the Paris-bound 747, killing all 230 aboard. As the investigation's third anniversary passes, the mystery is deepening. A few months ago, a retired army officer bearing impressive credentials approached the Voice as an intermediary for a missile expert with a story to tell. This expert is extremely fearful of losing his job�for more than 20 years he's been a military engineer who specializes in infrared missile technology. Assured of anonymity, he submitted to lengthy interviews by telephone and e-mail, detailing why he believes the investigation of TWA Flight 800 is a cover-up. After spending more than $40 million on the investigation, the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board have not found a definitive answer for why the center fuel tank exploded. Yet they have ruled out a missile as the cause. The NTSB believes an undetermined system flaw produced an electrical spark that ignited jet fuel vapors in the tank. Prior to the official embrace of this mechanical explanation, the missile expert was among several scientists invited by FBI agents to explore the missile theory. He was made privy to evidence suggesting that TWA 800 could have been shot down, consisting of eyewitness accounts of a "flare-like object" shooting skyward moments before the plane exploded. Later he examined the debris in the Calverton hangar. The missile expert has also been in contact with military labs where, he says, the chemists have been unable to make jet fuel vapor explode as the NTSB says it did in TWA 800's center fuel tank. "The labs told the NTSB there's a big problem�it can't happen." The NTSB wouldn't listen. He says, "They were adamant that [the labs] had to find something." The evidence adds up, the missile expert believes, to a "70 percent chance" that TWA 800 was downed by a shoulder-launched missile. Like others who have spoken to the Voice, the expert is exasperated with what he sees as a corrupted investigation. Asked why he is speaking up now, he says, "I wanted someone to look at the truth, not whitewash it away." The missile expert says his unit was summoned by the FBI quite early in the investigation and asked to review the eyewitness accounts and check out the potential for a successful missile hit. "We talked to Ted Otto and Steve Bongardt"�two agents assigned by FBI assistant director James Kallstrom to examine the missile theory. "We picked missiles and ran computer simulations and shipped the data to Bongardt," the Voice source says. The data showed that virtually any post�Vietnam era shoulder-launched missile would have had the range and infrared seeker capability to reach the plane at 13,700 feet, he says. But it was the eyewitness accounts that most impressed the expert�the investigation has compiled more than 100 eyewitness interviews reporting a streak of light ending in a flash or explosion, apparently contradicting the official scenario. "When we discussed this with the FBI, they said some of these people were very credible," he recalls. "The most compelling account was from a female witness, as I remember, who reported something with a small flame rising from the ocean trailing a faint smoke trail. The flame was reported to have burned out after about six or seven seconds with a puff that was seen when it hit the aircraft at about 10 seconds. I can tell you that this testimony, if the recounting is accurate, is about as precise as you can get on what you would see from a shoulder-fired infrared SAM [surface-to-air missile]." The accounts were so persuasive, he says, that Otto and Bongardt arranged a meeting in Washington, D.C., in late '96 to discuss them and other data. A high-powered group convened around the table�the CIA and other military and intelligence agencies were represented but not the NTSB. "We took a vote, and almost everyone said the plane was shot down," the expert says. Only the CIA remained silent. "The CIA was very quiet." Someone asked if there was a warning prior to the disaster of a terrorist attack. "The CIA wouldn't say," he recalls. Asked about this meeting, the FBI's Kallstrom says, "It never happened," though he allows, "There might have been a meeting where underlings were speculating, but I don't have any knowledge of it." The CIA at the time was developing its theory that eyewitnesses to the crash saw not a missile but the burning plane itself as it reared up and climbed several thousand feet after the explosion. The Voice missile expert source has no patience with the CIA's point of view. He insists that the eyewitness accounts "are information that cannot be denied." And there was more�the expert mentioned a videotape shot by a man on Long Island one night during the weeks preceding the crash, which appeared to show a rocket trail rising skyward. "The FBI showed it to us as interesting evidence," the expert says. It looked like the trail of a missile, he adds. FBI assistant director Kallstrom, now retired from the agency, says he doesn't recall any such video. Later in the investigation, only a month or so before Kallstrom shut down the criminal investigation in late '97 for lack of evidence, Bongardt called the missile expert and invited him to Calverton to view the wreckage. What he saw there hardened his suspicions. "The left wing root near the center fuel tank was clearly a potential impact point, since much of it was missing or badly damaged," he wrote in an e-mail. In an interview he added that together with the left-side wall of the center fuel tank and the left wing, these areas exhibited "a lot of damage which was not well explained, as far as we were concerned....The metal there looked like something very violent happened." The NTSB's reports confirm the view that the damage on the left side of the plane was of a different order from the damage on the right side. While the left wing upper skin, for example, was shattered into many small fragments, most of the right wing was recovered in one large chunk that had to be cut up into several pieces before it would fit onto a flatbed truck for the journey from East Moriches to Calverton. In its Sequencing Report the NTSB says that the left wing damage is consistent with "extremely high-strain energy release associated with water impact," but does not suggest why the right wing should have escaped similar damage. The missile expert interviewed by the Voice says that part of the problem was a lack of time to thoroughly examine the debris for clues. In fact, he says his group proposed that the FBI extend its investigation to evaluate the left-side damage. "The recommendation was verbal and in a letter that we sent the FBI looking to do some additional work on the case with funding from the FBI," he says. "They never replied." Bongardt asked him for a formal report, he says, but before he could write it, Kallstrom ended the criminal probe. Kallstrom told the Voice he doesn't recall any military experts recommending an extension of the investigation. Kallstrom insists, "It was unanimous among all the experts" that nothing was seen in the damaged metal to warrant further scrutiny. Kallstrom's "unanimous" claim is open to dispute. Richard Bott, of the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center, testified at a Baltimore hearing during the investigation that he had seen no evidence of a missile on any of the debris. But just a few days earlier he had signed off on a report, called "TWA Flight 800 Missile Impact Analysis," in which he drew attention to what he called "unexplained damage characteristics" that "puzzled" investigators. He recommended further tests before conclusively ruling out a missile as the cause of this damage to the left wing upper skin, the left wing front spar, and the left side of the center fuel tank. Bott did not return repeated phone messages left by the Voice. The missile expert the Voice interviewed says of the Bott report, "Much of what he states was brought up in discussions of our people." The expert insists that those discussions took place over a year before he first heard of Bott and read his report. Kallstrom is apparently indifferent to Bott's concerns. He says, "I wouldn't put much credence in that�I've got a huge pile of expert opinion to the contrary." The missile expert the Voice interviewed still insists that a forensic team should "take a real hard look" at the left side, and rule in or rule out a missile. But he also admits that the region of damage that would bear clues of the explosion of a shoulder-launched missile�which has a small warhead�would be quite small, and could easily be among the large areas of the left wing front spar and left side of the center fuel tank that are among the 5 percent of the plane that was never recovered. Voice interviews with a number of metallurgists and experts in explosives confirmed that unless investigators are able to identify the area�perhaps only a few inches across�where the explosion first impinged on the metal, it's impossible to tell what caused the structure to fail. One author of a book on explosives who has worked on government projects told the Voice, "You're looking at something bent and fractured, but to tie it to a pressure source is very difficult." Several metallurgists suggested that explosive residue on the debris would point unambiguously to a high explosion. In August '96, traces of PETN and RDX, both ingredients of the plastic explosive also found in some missile warheads, were indeed detected in recovered debris from Flight 800's passenger cabin. It seemed as if at last evidence had been found proving that a terrorist bomb or a missile had downed the aircraft. But shortly afterward it was claimed that a month before the crash the same 747 was used for a bomb-sniffing-dog exercise. Some of the explosives used, according to this account from the FBI, were apparently in poor condition and could easily have spilled. This explanation was itself recently thrown into doubt by Victoria Cummock, a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, established by President Clinton in the wake of the ValuJet and TWA 800 disasters and chaired by Vice President Al Gore. Cummock, an advocate for victims' families since her husband was killed on PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, told the Voice that when she asked at an FBI briefing to see the FAA log for the training exercise, "they said, 'It's not conclusive this particular plane was involved.' They couldn't produce the log." Nevertheless, Kallstrom says, "It's absolutely confirmed that it was that plane." And there, with the dog-sniffing dispute between Cummock and the FBI, we have another juicy subplot within the larger enigma of the TWA Flight 800 story, which like any good spy novel should continue to tantalize until the final chapter. Tell us what you think. [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Village Voice, July 14-20, 1999 Iran Iranian Students in Nation-Wide Protest "Commander-in-Chief resign!" TEHERAN, Iran -- The most widespread and sustained protests since Iran's revolution two decades ago spread throughout the country Monday, while security police and their vigilante supporters moved to crush pro-democracy student demonstrators outside Teheran University. Students demonstrated in 18 cities and towns, including major cosmopolitan cities like Tabriz, Shiraz and Isfahan and more traditional cities like Mashad and Yazd, Iran's official news agency reported. Wielding batons and lobbing tear gas canisters, the security forces emptied Teheran University Monday evening in a campaign to crush the demonstrations. In Teheran, students who had gathered inside the gates of the sprawling university complex in the heart of the capital fainted from tear gas that could be smelled more than a mile away. "Filthy swine! Filthy swine!" one red-faced student screamed over and over from inside the cramped quarters of one of the caged-in vehicles. "Jerk!" yelled another. Others yelled obscenities that are seldom heard in public in Iran. One woman, wrapped in the all-encompassing black chador, cursed the clergy with obscenities. A number of people were injured and received assistance from health personnel in a blood transfusion truck and passersby. Dozens of injured students were taken to the campus mosque for treatment, and a parade of ambulances streamed in and out of the campus as a voice on a loudspeaker called all medical students to help. Students set a huge bonfire to try to neutralize the tear gas, one witness said. The vigilantes, fervent revolutionaries who serve as volunteers for the regime, carried cables, chains and batons as they emerged from the government-owned buses that parked near the university, the witness said. The students had intended to stage an all-night sit-in, but by midnight, most of them had left the campus. The demonstrations -- and the crackdown -- reflect a deep struggle over the course of Iran's revolution. Students are impatient with the slow pace of reforms promised by President Mohammed Khatami. The students are not calling for a change in the Islamic system of government, rather for a quickening of the movement towards democracy and the rule of law. On the other side are the diehard Islamic revolutionaries, some of them in positions of power, some of them veterans of Iran's long war with Iraq, who take their lead from Iran's Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and believe that the country's moves towards democracy are a betrayal of revolutionary purism. Khatami does not control the police and security forces, who have enraged and frightened many Iranians by a campaign of intimidation that included the murders of prominent intellectuals as well as political attacks on Khatami's allies in the government. The demonstrations and the crackdowns do not mean that Iran's Islamic Republic is in jeopardy. "We should not assume that this movement could turn into a revolution," said an editorial Monday in the reformist newspaper, Neshat. "It's neither nor possible nor desirable." The five days of rage were sparked by the passage by Iran's parliament of a tough new press law and by the closure of Salam, a popular left-leaning Islamic newspaper. Security forces and vigilantes stormed a dormitory at Teheran University on Thursday night and beat students as they slept, pushing some from second- and third-story windows. Although the official death toll stood at two, Iran's newspapers, quoting students, claimed that between five and eight students had died. As striking as the extent of the protests throughout the country is the form they are taking. Until now, criticisms of Ayatollah Khamenei, who is in charge of the armed forces, the security and intelligence apparatus, and radio and television, were made privately. Now the criticism of Khamenei, who lacks the religious credentials of his predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and has resisted any embrace of reform, has burst into the open. In an effort to calm the highly charged atmosphere, Khamenei on Monday delivered an emotional speech condemning the attack by security forces on a dormitory last week after the first protests. He spoke to a hand-picked crowd of thousands in a cavernous hall reserved solely for his use. "This bitter incident has broken my heart," he said in the speech, which was broadcast on both radio and television. He added that it was un-Islamic to enter the private spaces of individuals. In a stunning acknowledgment that some of the demonstrators had turned against him, he added, "Even if things make you angry and they condemn me, even if they set fire to my picture, remain silent. Take no action until the day that the country needs it!" Men and women in the crowd moaned and wept loudly. In his speech he said, "The greatest dream and honor for me is that I give my life in this honorable, glorious magnificent path" -- a statement the security forces and the vigilantes may have interpreted as a message that they should risk their lives instead. Khamenei also blamed "enemies," including the United States, for the attack on the dormitory. Over and over, the crowd chanted "Death to America." But at the university, there was no crying for the ayatollah. When a speaker tried to read the text of Khamenei's speech, the crowd booed. "Commander-in-chief resign!" and "Down with the dictator," they chanted. There were posters of President Khatami but none of Ayatollah Khamenei, whose photographs and portraits dominate public buildings, shops and landscapes throughout Iran along with those of his predecessor. Khatami called on students to exercise restraint, saying in a meeting with education officials, "students should cooperate with the government and allow law and order to be established in society." In another incident Monday, uniformed and plainclothes security police and anti-riot police protected by shields and helmets clashed with several hundred student protesters. The police rounded up dozens of students in Valiasr Square, one of Teheran's busiest intersections, beating some of them and forcing them into cages mounted on the back of pickup trucks. The crackdown came after a police car and two police motorcycles were set on fire, apparently by students, one witness said. Stone-throwing students smashed storefront windows. Many shopkeepers pulled down the gates of their stores both to prevent looting and to get a closer look at the action in the streets. Police froze traffic just before rush hour. Helicopters kept watch overhead. Security police roamed among the thousands of people gathered in the square arresting suspicious-looking young people and rounding up photographers to prevent them from taking pictures. Throughout the day at the university, students stood up on a makeshift dais near the law school and one after one explained their views and stated their demands. Among them are the creation of a national day of mourning in memory of the students who were killed, the holding of a public trial for the people who ordered and carried out the dormitory attack, and the return of the bodies of those killed. One speaker in a black shirt criticized the lack of organization. "We have to have a plan and a leader," said the man, who, like the other speakers, did not identify himself. "We have to find out which of our friends have been killed, and who they are." Another speaker called for the execution of the perpetrators of last Thursday's dormitory attack. A number of student organizers said they believed that the all-day open microphone was a trap set by infiltrators in their midst who both tried to provoke the students into more radical action and ended up being part of Monday night's crackdown. One speaker said that some in the crowd were offering razor blades to students who might want to use violence. "It was very strange that the students were allowed to speak so freely," he said. "The whole thing is too suspicious." Siahkal News, July 13, 1999 The Bitch Who Loved Eunuch Geek Men Camille Paglia: Hillary Has No Friends Charlotte Hays Interviews Camille Paglia Cultural critic and libertarian feminist Camille Paglia tells why she thinks Hillary Clinton should never, ever be in the Senate Q - The first question I want to ask you is about Monica Lewinsky. Is she a vixen or a victim? Did she get what she wanted? A - Well, Monica Lewinsky herself bores me silly because she is a kind of a prototype of a narcissistic and spoiled American girl that I have been seeing develop over the last 25 years as a teacher -- not at my school, the University of the Arts, where most people don't have those kinds of economic advantages. But I certainly saw this coming from my first job at Bennington College and later as a visiting instructor at Wesleyan and Yale. And I have been warning about this for years and saying that we are raising a whole generation of young people who are completely removed from any sense of the outside world. To me, the most damaging thing Monica did to herself was her response to Barbara Walters' early question: ''When you went to the White House as an intern, were you interested in politics?'' And Monica Lewinsky is so shallow and her family is so shallow that she said, ''No, not at all,'' -- and in a very high and superficial voice that you would use having a drink off Rodeo Drive or something. I was just amazed at that! Our educational system at the primary and secondary level is so flawed that we have girls who would go to the White House as a tremendous career opportunity for themselves and come out of that experience in Washington undented by any sense of wider political or historical realities. Q - What would you advise her to do? A - I would advise Monica Lewinsky to get the hell off the public stage before she damages the cause of women any further. Q - What has been her impact on the establishment feminist movement? A - Ohhh, I have been in hog heaven over that! Never, never did I dream that Gloria Steinem would shoot herself in every one of her eight feet -- but she did over Monica Lewinsky! Christina Hoff Sommers was an early warrior in this battle, and we were together in all of this in the early 1990s. And now, of course, a horde of other women have come onto the scene, and we no longer have to take all the abuse. Christina and I have for years tried to get people to see that the feminist establishment did not speak for all women. In fact, I'm the one who coined the term ''feminist establishment.'' When I went out on my first publicity tour after Sexual Personae and in my early articles in 1990, 1991, 1992, I drilled that phrase in every interview. I kept on saying, ''feminist establishment, feminist establishment''-- to try to drive that wedge into media consciousness and to make them understand that the leaders of the feminist organizations based in Washington and New York not only did not speak for all women but they did not speak for all feminists either. They were as divorced from the actual historical currents within feminism as the leaders of the Communist Party were in the Politburo or the more recent Soviet Union, where they were living like the dukes of the Romanovs. At any rate, year by year, my campaign to portray -- correctly portray -- the feminist leaders as out of touch with women has really succeeded -- and they helped me enormously! I feel that my record, in terms of my feminist responses to the various sexual scandals from the early 1990s, is now being proved to have been the correct one. In 1991, I was the only feminist out there who was attacking Anita Hill! One week into those hearings, I wrote a piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer that begins, ''Anita Hill is no feminist heroine.'' And I felt Clarence Thomas was quite right: He was the victim of a high-tech lynching. Then when Paula Jones came along in 1994, I was the only feminist immediately out there saying, ''I find her case credible.'' I was on the Larry King show in May 1994 -- that transcript is in my book, Vamps & Tramps. I went against Eleanor Smeal, who was saying, ''This is just a put-up job by the right wing,'' -- the same thing Hillary tried all last year. And I said, ''Oh, really? Well, Anita Hill's case was a put-up job by the feminist establishment.'' Q - You said that the first female president will be somebody who has her sexual persona straight. Could that be Elizabeth Dole? A - No, I don't think so. Unfortunately. I had great hopes for her, watching her over the years, but her recent announcement of an exploratory committee was such a disaster. Q - Why? It was one of the worst things I have ever seen on television, by any politician, I have to say. And the media gave her a free pass on it. There's no doubt about it. Because she is a woman, people are very leery about applying on women a standard of critique that you apply to a man. It was just a canned version of her normal speech. The sprightly tone and the giddiness and the coming out into the audience were completely inappropriate for that particular context where she was walking among media people, very cynical media people who were watching with an air of disgust with their cameras and their notepads. It was just a replay of the after-dinner speeches she has been giving for years. She failed to understand that, if she is going to be a statesman, then she has to behave in a statesman-like manner now and that her presentation has to be issues oriented. I found it condescending -- that going up to people and touching them on the shoulder. I think she's a credible vice-presidential candidate, but one expects them to be able to step into the shoes of the president. We need a far more commanding figure. Q - Should Hillary run for the Senate? A - No, absolutely not! She has no talent whatever for that! The media, you'd think, would have learned their lesson because of the Clinton debacle, but they went right ahead in a big stampede and promoted Hillary Clinton, way beyond her abilities. She has no ability to be a senator. She has no ability to work on a team. Basically, she is a coterie-type personality. What she would be ideal for is what she is doing now -- which is to go out into the world and to be a spokeswoman for highly educated Western career women and to fight for women's and children's rights or as an ambassador-at-large for the UN. That's her appropriate role. I want to fall on the floor laughing imagining Hillary Clinton working well in the Senate with everybody else! Oh, give me a break! This is not a woman who has any ability to deal with the mass of humanity. She is the most arrogant, the most moralistic, the most sermonizing and annoying person on the Earth -- and it is just a joke that the media have allowed this to go on as long as it has. Q - Will the Clinton marriage last after they are out of the White House? A - I have no idea. You know, they know each other best. She has no friends. All this talk about her great female friendships! She has no friends aside from him. I think they are a dysfunctional pair. I just don't see what they would do apart from each other. I happened to be in the convention hall in 1996 for Clinton's second nomination (I was in Chicago for the Oprah show) and I saw Hillary making her speech. I looked up and saw Chelsea: The spotlight was on her, smiling and applauding her mother on the podium. And I saw sitting next to her what I thought was a prison matron or an FBI agent -- a mean-looking woman, fierce and unsmiling. Later, I learned it was Hillary's mother! Hillary is a mess. And her family was a mess, and the media won't touch it. The media will not go near the mess of Hillary's family! Those brothers, the walking wounded brothers, who look like whipped dogs! And the point is that Hillary's relationship with her family has always been bad, really bad! You can't understand what's going on with her relationship with Bill until you understand that. But, no, the media are all ''Saint Hillary'' -- wonderful wife, wonderful mother. In fact, she's a far more interesting character. She's not a lesbian. Okay? No, it's more complex than that. She is, I have said, a Protestant nun, and she's closer to Evita than to anything else. I was the first to compare her to Evita, now everyone notices that. She thinks she speaks for the common people. That woman should not be anywhere near our government, okay? Because look at the guys she surrounds herself with -- those geeks, those eunuch geeks! She loves eunuch geek men. That woman is an authoritarian who should be kept out of democratic government. She's a tyrant who thinks she knows what's best for the people. She's Orwellian in her attitude toward the rest of humanity. I think she's a great spokesman for women's and children's rights, I really do. I think she should be shepherded off to the proper position -- which is making speeches and then retiring to her hotel room to sulk and then getting into the limousine to go on to the next speech. That's all that woman can do! ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
