John Martorano tells in his book Murderman Hitman that he was a member of the Winter Hill gang and he and Howie Winter got called by Mafia Underboss Gerry Angiulo to come down and have a little chat. They met with Gerry and he told them that Indian Al and his gang had killed one of his bookies. He further told them he was moving in on his territory. He asked them to eradicate him and his gang.
Ever anxious to please Gerry, Howie and Martorano went out and murdered five or six people some being the wrong guys. These weren’t the first murders that these men were involved in. Martorano would eventually plead guilty to 20 murders and Howie was alleged to have been involved in several others during the so-called Irish gang war of the ’60s.
In the late ’70s Howie was convicted of extortion or some similar crime and ended up doing double digits in state prison. He was also indicted in the race fix case back in the late ’70s.
Howie was born on St. Patrick’s Day in the same year as Whitey which was 1929. So that makes him leaning closer to 85 than 84. He’s sort of lucky when you come down to it: no one has indicted him for any of the murders. I suppose Howie can’t get much luckier than than.
Maybe he can. You see Howie was arrested for committing extortion in June 2012. He was indicted in September 2012. Here we are stepping into November 2013, more than a year after the indictment, and Howie still is walking around awaiting trial.
This case is pending in Middlesex Superior Court and is being prosecuted by the Middlesex District Attorney. I’ve tried to find out further information on it but nothing seems to be out there in public. You’d think with all the publicity on the Whitey case someone in the media would have been following this. It has to be remembered that Howie was Whitey’s boss and may have murdered as many people as Whitey. In the usual realm of things you’d think that would matter but in Boston where we operate according to different rules it seems not to.
On other matters, I read that the former Republican nominee for the presidency is in the process of building his fifth home, this one with a secret room. It’ll be his second home in Utah with the others in California, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, although few seem to know where it is in Massachusetts. On the same day I read about Romney’s secret room home (I wonder if the secret room is counted as part of the 5,600 square feet.) I also read that the homeless occupying the NY subway system has increased. I thought the two stories on the same day were an interesting look at America.
The new FBI Director Comey had some type of ceremony yesterday that included the president and 3,500 employees. He said: “Our first half-century or so was a time of great progress and achievement for this country, and for the bureau. But it also saw abuse and overreach – most famously with respect to Martin Luther King and others, who were viewed as internal security threats, . . .” To overcome these abuses and overreachings, actually they were criminal activities, the new director wants the agents to visit the statue of Martin Luther King as well as the Holocaust Museum. Those are nice things but I don’t see what it has to do with the past criminal activities. I would much rather have heard him say they should stop hiding things and start recording the interviews with suspects. Or even better, they should wrap the their investigation of Todashev and Mark Rossetti and let us in on its secret.
.
let howie live, he’s been framed so many times,set up and stood the test each time, he is reduced to a hopeless old man who tried to help a friend in need.
Pat2e:
Howie’s a natural born criminal – I understand your sentiment – there is something roguish about him – I like the man’s attitude – he did his time without a whine – of all the group he’s the only one who didn’t become a rat – no excuses like “you can’t rat on a rat” – he was loyal to his country (the criminal land) – knew who he was – and perhaps, you are right I should let him alone and recognize that among all these so called tough guys he’s the only one who stands out and stood tall – a true Marine – wish him a big semper fi and a happy Veteran’s day for me.
Game 6 tonight at Fenway. I wonder if the Sox will let Whitey throw out the first pitch? Nah! Probably let him sing the Star Spangled during 7th inning stretch eh? In other news Man sues DHS, NSA for the right to parody them on mugs, T-shirts
“Forbidding citizens from criticizing them is beyond the pale,” lawyer says.
by Cyrus Farivar – Oct 29 2013, 4:49pm EST
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/man-sues-dhs-nsa-for-the-right-to-parody-them-on-mugs-t-shirts/
msfreeh:
It will be a sad day when parody becomes a crime but the way things are going it’s closer than I’d like to believe.
Matt: Sleep Well,eh?
see link for full story
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/10/29/feds-accused-of-harassing-boston-bomber-friends-and-friends-of-friends/
Feds Accused of Harassing “Boston Bomber” Friends, and Friends of Friends
By Dave Lindorff, Russ Baker and Milicent Cranor on Oct 29, 2013
In the six months since the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has by all appearances been relentlessly intimidating, punishing, deporting and, in one case, shooting to death, persons connected, sometimes only tangentially, with the alleged bombers.
All of these individuals have something in common: If afforded constitutional protections and treated as witnesses instead of perpetrators, they could potentially help clear up questions about the violence of April 15. And they might also be able to help clarify the methods and extent of the FBI’s recruitment of immigrants and others for undercover work, and how that could relate to the Bureau’s prior relationship with the bombing suspects—a relationship the Bureau has variously hidden or downplayed.
Who Cares? We Do
The Boston tragedy may seem like a remote, distant memory, yet the bombing warrants continued scrutiny as a seminal event of our times. It was, after all, the only major terror attack in the United States since 9/11. With its grisly scenes of severed limbs and dead bodies, including that of a child, it shook Americans profoundly.
As importantly, in its aftermath we’ve seen public acquiescence in an ongoing erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights that began with 9/11—and to an unprecedented expansion of federal authority in the form of a unique military/law enforcement “lockdown” of a major metropolitan area.
Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see.
The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt
The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures loosely connected to the bombing story began last May, with the daily questioning of a Chechen immigrant, Ibragim Todashev, and of his girlfriend and fellow immigrant, Tatiana Gruzdeva. Todashev had been a friend of the alleged lead Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a hail of police gunfire four days after the bombing. Tsarnaev’s younger brother Dzhokhar barely survived a massive police strafing of a trailered boat in which he was hiding, trapped and unarmed.
During one interrogation in Orlando, Florida, where Todashev was living, something went awry and he ended up dead from gunshots. Although to date the FBI has provided only hazy and inconsistent accounts of that incident, the killing of a suspect and potential witness in custody was clearly a highly irregular and problematical occurrence, replete with apparent violations of Bureau and standard law-enforcement procedure.
On the heels of those two deaths and the one near-death has followed what appears to be a concerted effort directed against a larger circle of people connected, if not to the Tsarnaevs, then to Todashev.
The purpose of this campaign is not clear, but it has raised some eyebrows.
In an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Center for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), described aggressive behavior directed by FBI agents at vocal friends of the dead Todashev: using suspected informants to monitor their press conferences, following targeted individuals around, interrogating them for hours—often without an attorney, and jailing them on what he says are trumped-up charges.
Shibly further claims that government agents are threatening these immigrants with deportation unless they agree to “cooperate”—a tactic which he portrays as seeking to enroll these people as de facto spies for the federal government.
Two people have left the country to escape further harassment. Another has been deported, while a fourth is currently facing deportation; none of them has a criminal record. The bulk of this group were at most friends of a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev—and apparently didn’t personally know either of the Tsarnaevs.
***
Tatiana Gruzdeva
Tatiana Gruzdeva
One of these targets was Tatiana Gruzdeva, Todashev’s 20-year-old girlfriend. She was deported to Russia on October 11.
Gruzdeva had been in the US on a student visa. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) public affairs officer Carissa Cutrell, Gruzdeva had overstayed that visa—a common situation for foreign students studying in the US—but on August 9 she had been granted a “deferred action” status valid for one year, and therefore was for that period in the country legally.
Gruzdeva was nonetheless picked up by FBI and ICE agents on Oct. 1 while attending a scheduled meeting with an immigration officer to obtain a work visa. According to Gruzdeva, she was told she was being taken because she had “talked to Boston Magazine” and had described Todashev as “a good guy.”
Actually, she had done more than that. She had described for the magazine in vivid detail what happened when several FBI agents back in May had showed up at the Orlando apartment she and Todashev shared and accused him of involvement in the Boston bombing. Days of harassment and interrogation followed, she said, as the FBI tried to get Todashev to confess to involvement in the Boston bombing, and to get her make statements implicating her boyfriend, but she continued to insist Todashev had been in Orlando with her when the bombing occurred.
Then, she said, the government agents surprised her with a new accusation: Todashev, they alleged, had been involved in a gruesome, drug-related, 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts. The agents tried, without success, to force her to implicate Todashev in that crime. Then, while she was still in shock from that latest assertion, they demanded she tell them what further criminal activities he had in store.
When she did not tell them what they apparently wanted to hear, she says, they had her arrested on immigration violation charges. Soon after, she was thrown into solitary confinement—treatment normally used only to protect inmates from other inmates, or to punish them for bad behavior. She was not released until August 8.
It was while she was held in solitary confinement that she learned of Todashev’s shooting death at the hands of an FBI agent.
123
Todashev and Gruzdeva during happier times.
Miraliev’s “Voluntary” Questioning Without an Attorney
Gruzdeva also told Boston Magazine about the FBI’s treatment of Ashurmamad Miraliev, a 20-year-old friend of Todashev’s also living in Florida.
Just days before the magazine interview, agents had grabbed Miraliev, she said, denied his request for an attorney, and then interrogated him for over six hours before dumping him in the Orange County Correctional Facility, a local jail.
Miraliev remained locked up for over three weeks on $50,000 bail on what CAIR’s Shibly, contends were trumped-up charges of brawling outside a bar and “intimidating a witness.” According to Shibly, an attorney who is representing Miraliev, the charges were subsequently tossed out as baseless.
That didn’t end the young man’s problems, however. When the county no longer had grounds for holding him, the FBI had Miraliev transferred to an immigration detention center, where he is now awaiting deportation. (Shibly says his client is currently requesting to be allowed to voluntarily leave the country, rather than be forcibly deported by ICE.)
WhoWhatWhy tried without success to obtain comment from both the FBI and the immigration authorities concerning these two cases and the other examples of alleged harassment of Todashev associates. The FBI refused to respond. A public affairs officer from ICE said she could not disclose reasons for why Gruzdeva and Miraliev were being deported because of “privacy concerns.”
When asked (by a reporter from the Miami Herald) why Miraliev’s request for an attorney during his interrogation was ignored, the FBI’s public affairs director, Paul Bresson, said that while he couldn’t comment about an “ongoing investigation,” he could state unequivocally that “anytime the FBI interviews an individual it is done either with his/her consent or with an attorney present.”
Ashurmamad Miraliev and Tatiana Gruzdeva
Ashurmamad Miraliev and Tatiana Gruzdeva
In fact, agents are actually permitted to question witnesses without an attorney, against their will, in certain narrow circumstances. This is the case when authorities assert a timely matter of “public safety”—for example when they have basis to believe that a bomb is about to go off. (FBI agents claimed such justification when they questioned the gravely wounded alleged Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for hours in the hospital shortly after his capture. That interrogation was stopped by a federal judge, who did not accept the Bureau’s assertion that Tsarnaev might know about other imminent terror attacks.)
In Miraliev’s case, the FBI never even claimed that he posed an imminent threat. Initially, they told him they wanted to question him about the alleged bar fight and the allegation that he had “intimidated a witness.” But these are local, not federal matters; clearly trivial; and not even the FBI’s responsibility.
After that ordeal, Miraliev told CAIR the FBI had never even asked about those local matters. Instead, he said, they focused only on Todashev and his presumed relationship to Tsarnaev.
Shibly calls Bresson’s implication that Miraliev willingly gave up his right to counsel “absurd”: “Knowing that his friend Todashev was killed by an agent during his FBI interrogation, it’s hardly voluntary if Miraliev agrees to answer questions after the agents holding him tell him he can’t have an attorney.”
Courts have held that authorities need not necessarily read a detainee Miranda rights—but they must desist as soon as a demand for an attorney has been made.
Release of Autopsy Report Forbidden
The FBI has shut down any attempts at unraveling the ongoing mystery. It demanded that Todashev’s autopsy’s report be sealed, and not released even to family members.
“The FBI has ordered us not to release the autopsy report while they are investigating the shooting,” says Tony Miranda, forensic records coordinator for Florida’s Orange and Osceola counties. “The hold is currently on until the first week of November, when they will contact us again and let us know if it is extended.”
Such holds on coroner’s reports, especially such lengthy holds, even in cases of police shootings, are unusual, to say the least. And that hold is certain to interfere with the Florida state’s attorney in Orlando, Jeff Ashton, who is also actively investigating the FBI shooting of Todashev.
Shibly believes, based on its overall behavior, that the FBI’s sealing of the Todashev autopsy report has nothing to do with its stated reason of enabling an ongoing investigation into the shooting. “It’s very possible that the FBI is just delaying the release of the coroner’s report because they know it will be embarrassing,” he says.
“He felt inside he was going to get shot.”
Khusn Taramiv, a friend of Todashev’s, said the FBI had begun questioning both young men shortly after the April 15 Boston Marathon bomb attack. But by May 22, the day Todashev died, according to Taramiv, his friend believed something bad was about to happen to him.
“He felt inside [that] he was going to get shot,” Taramiv told WESH-TV in Orlando.
They were talking to us, both of us, right? And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back.
They never brought him back.
The FBI asserts that Todashev had implicated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the Waltham drug dealer murders, and was about to sign a confession to his own involvement in the crime just before he was shot.
The Waltham matter, a two-year-old, extravagantly staged, ritualistic drug homicide, was apparently a cold case when, after the Marathon bombing, local authorities began focusing on Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the possible killer—and then on Todashev as a possible accomplice—an allegation Todashev’s friends have challenged as baseless.
***
444444While some of this circle of friends in Florida, like Todashev, faced pressure to confess to participating in or having knowledge of the Waltham crime, others, according to CAIR’s Shibly, have been told that if they want to be left alone and not deported, they need to become informants. He says several of those harassed have opted to return to Russia rather than become spies for the FBI in Florida’s Muslim community.
“I know of a half dozen who’ve been contacted,” says Shibly. “They’ve been told to cooperate and to spy for the FBI on mosques and local restaurants–or the government will go after their legal status.” He says the FBI’s harassment campaign is continuing and is spreading to more people in the Florida area who knew the slain Todashev.
Gruzdeva’s deportation shows that the agency’s deportion threats were no bluff. As mentioned above, on October 11 Gruzdeva, despite her clean record and her “deferred action” legal status, was whisked to the airport for a flight to Russia by ICE agents so fast she was not even able to fetch her winter coat from her apartment. She has reportedly gone to her native Moldova, a country neighboring Rumania that was formerly a part of the old Soviet Union.
Miraliev, who had been granted asylum by the US and saw it as a safe haven, is awaiting what may be a similar fate.
Spreading the Net
Shibly says several other family members and friends of Todashev’s have also been harassed by the FBI since his slaying. One is the mother of Todashev’s former wife. The mother, who works for the federal government, was interrogated by the FBI “right after attending a press conference about his killing,” Shibly says, adding that a suspected FBI informant had, unannounced, also attended that press event, apparently monitoring who participated. He says the person was identified by CAIR lawyers investigating the FBI’s harassment campaign.
By shooting Todashev, then claiming he was about to confess to a crime, then hounding Todashev’s friends and family, and sending or driving them out of the country to Russia or other regions of the former Soviet Union, says Shibly, the FBI gives the impression it is urgently trying to hide something.
“Look, the FBI screwed up in killing Todashev,” Shibly told WhoWhatWhy from Saudi Arabia, where he was on Hajj — a pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are supposed to try to make at least once in their lives. He added: “Now it is clear that they’re trying to get as much dirt on him as they can to make what they did to him look less heinous.”
What really happened? Pick a story.
From the first moments after the Boston Bombing, the public has been besieged with official accounts, often rendered through news leaks, whose profound inconsistencies have never been ironed out. (For more on that, see previous WhoWhatWhy stories, including this, this, this, and this.)
The same is true of Todashev’s killing, where essential details have varied greatly. But certain elements can be established:
Late in the day on May 22, FBI agents went to Todashev’s house and interrogated him—without an attorney present—according to some accounts, for eight hours.
The agents were accompanied by officers from the Massachusetts State Police, who were investigating the 2011 Waltham murders.
According to the Washington Post, at some point after midnight, the state cops—and, allegedly, all but one member of the FBI contingent—left the room, leaving Todashev, unrestrained, alone with one agent.
If that’s correct, then the FBI violated one of its rules: a suspect should always be in the company of more than one agent. Perhaps even more striking is that they purportedly left that one agent alone with an unrestrained man known by the FBI to have had martial arts training—and, moreover, a man very publicly being investigated for possible participation in a multiple murder case. You couldn’t have created a more perfect scenario for a no-questions-asked, quick disposition of a problematical person.
This curious scenario is further compounded by the several conflicting explanations for the incident offered by “FBI sources” who were not identified by reporters:
First, they claimed thatTodashev—who had just undergone knee surgery– had nonetheless lunged at the lone officer with a knife. No mention of how Todashev would have produced a knife since they would presumably have routinely frisked a potentially dangerous suspect.
Next, they said he had upended a table, possibly injuring the agent.
Then, they said he had attempted to grab a sword. The notion that this possible terrorist, triple homicide suspect would be left alone with a single officer, with a knife and/or even more stunningly a sword ought to raise serious questions about whom we can trust to tell us the truth. And if that weren’t enough, the weapon of choice later morphed in some reports into a metal pole, and then into a broom handle.
There is more variation in the accounts of what happened just before Todashev allegedly lunged:
After two hours, Todashev asked to take a break, went to “get a cigarette or something and then he goes off the deep end… and goes after the agent.” It was not clear “why, with at least three law enforcement officials in the room, deadly force was used…”
He started to write a statement while sitting across from the agent and one of the detectives “when the agent briefly looked away….Todashev picked up the table.”
After one of the detectives left the room, the other noticed Todashev was acting odd, and he texted that sense to the FBI agent with him… Suddenly, Todashev knocked over a table…”
Hassan Shibly
Hassan Shibly
As noted earlier, only one agent was left in the room alone with Todashev, according to the Washington Post. That scenario seems supported by the fact that all shots fired came from one agent’s gun. Shibly notes that, by training and protocol, if Todashev had constituted an imminent threat, and more officers were present in the room, all would have fired at him.
The attorney argues that there are “only two possibilities” to explain what happened to Todashev:
Either the FBI violated its own protocol by having one agent left alone in the room or there were actually two or more agents in the room and only one fired.
FBI Accountability: Zero
After Todashev’s slaying, the FBI claimed—though it produced no evidence—that he had been “about to” sign a confession to the triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Incredibly, no one had taped the interrogation—or, if anyone did, the Bureau is neither admitting it nor offering it as evidence to back up its assertions. When Christina Sterling, the US prosecutor in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev terrorism case in Boston, cited Todashev’s alleged confession during interrogation by FBI agents, she did not say she had a tape to back up the FBI’s claim. In a court filing asking the judge in that case to deny Tsarnaev’s defense team access to investigative files from the Waltham case, the only evidence she referenced was the reported hearsay from the agents who were in the room with Todashev.
***
No high officials in the Bureau or the Justice Department have publicly expressed concern about this shooting of an unarmed man in custody. The FBI says only that it is “investigating” the incident. And if past experience is any indication, the Bureau is unlikely to find itself or its agents at fault. The New York Times reports that though FBI agents have killed 70 “subjects” and injured another 80 in the last two decades, the Bureau’s self-investigations have never once found that an agent’s shooting of a suspect was unjustified.
This tragicomedy of “errors” must generate some head-shaking in a community made up of immigrants from the old Soviet Union, where people being interrogated routinely happened to fall down stairs or jump out of high windows.
At minimum, given the appearance of a cover-up, one must wonder why the FBI would kill a key associate of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, especially when the latter is currently facing murder and terrorism charges in federal court in Boston for the Boston Marathon bombing. Todashev could have been an important defense witness. Could he also have had damaging information about links between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the FBI that predated the interest of the Russian authorities in him?
The American people have to this moment not been leveled with by their government—and are only being provided with hints by the establishment media that anything is seriously amiss. Indeed, few are aware of the larger pattern, and understandably give the FBI the benefit of the doubt in light of the fear following the bloodshed of April 15. A few elected representatives have expressed concerns (see this and this) but these have been isolated and not followed by concrete action.
Moreover, no one has taken the politically explosive step of asking whether, like the friends of Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev could himself could have been pressured—successfully— to become an FBI undercover informant/provocateur. Such inquiries lead to places that make Americans deeply uncomfortable. But certain indisputable facts do suggest a basis for pursuing these questions. For one thing, there’s the FBI’s effort to hide its prior relationship with the Tsarnaevs. After claiming it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were when they were first identified as suspects on the basis of spectators’ photos of the bombing scene, the FBI was essentially forced—by the Russian government, no less—to admit that it had been monitoring and interacting with the Tsarnaev family two years before the Boston bombing.
This must be coupled with Tamerlan’s striking transition in the last few years. A seemingly happy and comparatively “normal” young man eager to become an American citizen and live the American dream morphed into a conspicuous radical, loudly acting out in a mosque and traveling to his home in Dagestan, where he aroused suspicion of being a provocateur, openly trying to convince others to take up arms.
He could have been an authentic convert, or he could have been something else.
As is well established and well documented, the FBI has a long history of recruiting vulnerable individuals to infiltrate organizations and networks, gain their trust, and in some cases to encourage violent acts. Just one of many examples is the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (the “first” attack on the WTC), with an FBI undercover informant at the core of the plot—which resulted in a bomb attack that killed six people and did considerable structural damage to one of the buildings’ basement pilings.
Deeper and Deeper
In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we’ve noticed a perplexing discrepancy. While the FBI claims that it began interviewing the Tsarnaevs in response to a request from the Russians, the New York Times has cited a meeting that would predate the Russian request:
“In January 2011, two counterterrorism agents from the bureau’s Boston field office interviewed Tamerlan and family members, a senior law enforcement official said.”
Yet, in an article that appeared three days later, the same authors reported that,
“The first Russian request came in March of 2011 through the F.B.I.’s office in the United States Embassy in Moscow.”
If these dates are correct, then the FBI was talking to Tamerlan before the Russians asked them to. Why? (An email from WhoWhatWhy to Eric Schmitt, the Times’s lead reporter on the two articles, remains unanswered.)
MS:
I’ve been saying some of that on the Todashev matter. This article says it much better. Thanks for calling it to my attention. As the Bard said: “Something rotten in the Seat of Government” (Hoover’s idea of what his headquarters should be called). That’s one of the reasons I get less excited about Kennedy’s assasination; it’s ancient history. Let’s not look back when the same tnings may be happening in front of our eyes.
1. Historians, professional and amateur, will wrangle over these issues for some time. For every 20 professors and authors who question the Warren Commission’s findings, perhaps 200 professors and authors accept them. An educated guess. I too have many doubts and no longer trust my government, but I’d like to change present things that can be changed, and we can’t do that by constantly retracing our footsteps and revisiting 50 year old issues. 2. For now, we have pressing problems: America’s Secretive Police State, Federal Invasions of Privacy, American Imperialism, American Militarism, Federal-Media Propaganda, present day cover-ups, corrupt prosecutors and corrupt judges, a bloated (tax and spend) government, cronyism, favoritism, waivers for political allies, and a Congress that exempts itself and the President from laws like Obamacare that the rest of us have to obey. 4. Right the ship of state, first; then we can sig the historians on yesteryear’s issues. 5. Professor Cecil’s work sounds interesting, and may serve as good background data, good fodder for those of us questioning current FBI/DOJ corruption, as N. pointed out in his post today. But let’s not linger in the past: Confront today’s problems. Correct them! Confront the Zeitgeist; Dismantle Big Government! Reign in Imperialism, the Police State and our self-serving Congress.
William:
1. History teaches, its lessons are often neglected, we should learn from it but not dwell in it. What purpose would it serve if we could show to an absolute certaint that the FBI murdered JFK. We need, as you suggest, to concentrate on today and do what we can to try to better today so that the future will be better for those who follow us.
2. I agree we have some present problems but not to the extent you seem to think.
3. I agree whole heartedly with number 3.
4. Before righting the ship of state we first have to do a lot of bailing.
5. I think I saw someone confronting the Zeitgeist the other day.
Matt: Just want to introduce you to Professor Matthew Cecil at Wichita State. He might send you a desk copy of his new book coming out in January
detailing how deep the FBI tentacles are into mainstream media.see
http://webapps.wichita.edu/DirectoryPublic/
FBI Files
In the course of his research over the last ten years, Associate Professor Matthew Cecil has used the Freedom of Information Act to collect the J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI files of hundreds of prominent journalists. In all, Cecil has collected nearly 90,000 pages of FBI information. The files have provided the raw material for several scholarly publications and Cecil has several more, along with a book project, in the works.
Associate Professor Matthew Cecil teaches a variety of courses including the department’s introductory course, Introduction to Mass Communication. In addition, Cecil teaches basic video production, new media, and public relations skills.
Cecil is a media historian and his research explores the relationships of journalists and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI from 1928 to 1972. Cecil has also produced documentary films, including “Soundtrack of a Man Who Will Never Amount to Anything,” exploring the career of Sioux Falls musician Rich Show.
Cecil’s more than seven years of professional experience includes stints as a political reporter and columnist and media relations practitioner in South Dakota and North Dakota. A Brookings native, Cecil previously served on faculties at Purdue University and the University of Oklahoma before returning home to Brookings and SDSU in 2005.
ms:
In my readings on J. Edgar there is no doubt he controlled the media – in fact, he set up the FBI as you know with one department, the Public Records division, dedicated to putting out propaganda and to write books that he could put his name on.
Thanks for telling me about Professor Matthew Cecil’s new book which is due – I’ll be sure to watch for it.
Matt: I called Doyle’s and they can reserve a table for 5 under the Kennedy family fresco. In other news my buddy from Quincy Ed Tatro just sent me a email to this news story.He is third man from the left. see link for full story
http://www.olneydailymail.com/article/20131025/NEWS/131029499?template=printart
October 25. 2013 1:36PM
JFK experts convene in Olney
Edgar Tatro, third from left, speaks during an introductory reception held Thursday night at The Holiday for the JFK assassination conference,
PHOTO/ By Matt Courter
Edgar Tatro, third from left, speaks during an introductory reception held Thursday night at The Holiday for the JFK assassination conference, “Changing the Historical Reality of November 22, 1963,” which will be held today and Saturday. The event will feature presentations from experts on the assassination.
A reception featuring participants in this weekend’s conference on the assassination of President John Kennedy, “Changing the Historical Reality of November 22, 1963,” was held Thursday night at The Holiday.
The panel of experts on the assassination, who at times gave detail-heavy previews of their scheduled Friday and Saturday presentations, included Douglas P. Horne, Edgar F. Tatro, Phillip F. Nelson, Dennis David, Rick Russo, Brian Edwards, Casey Quinlan and Judyth Vary Baker. Olney Central College instructor David Denton introduced the speakers.
Russo talked about his video presentation, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,” saying it includes what he considers to be the most important footage, that of eyewitnesses, and gives people an opportunity to weigh its legitimacy against the official record.
Horne, who will present medical evidence, said he worked on the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, which he said examined the record and forced government agencies to declassify certain documents. He said the ARRB was not allowed to re-investigate the case.
He said he will talk about the “extra credit work” they did, including 10 depositions of autopsy witnesses and participants, noting it “added significantly to the records of what happened the night of the autopsy.
Horne, who wrote a five-volume work on the ARRB’s efforts, said there has been a medical coverup in the case. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s been proven,” he said.
He also thinks the Zapruder film has been altered. “I believe it’s seriously compromised,” he said, adding he planned to present evidence during his Friday presentation.
Nelson, who has written the book “LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination,” and the upcoming “LBJ: From Mastermind to ‘The Colossus'” spoke on what he sees as Lyndon Johnson’s role in Kennedy’s murder.
Nelson said that in his writing he has taken information from an assortment of other books, some of which he said are well-known, and “connected the dots and constructed a narrative that explains what I believe happened.”
He said some may question his calling LBJ a mastermind. “He wasn’t that brilliant, right?” he said.
But, Nelson said, Johnson had a talent for manipulation and the book makes the argument that he was highly involved in the assassination.
In addition to being involved in Kennedy’s death, Nelson said there is “strong evidence” he was involved in the murders of 10-17 other people before the Kennedy assassination.
“LBJ was a deeply troubled man,” Nelson said, stating that he was narcissistic, sociopathic and bi-polar.
Nelson believes Johnson essentially “willed his own death,” after becoming so psychotic and depressed that he drank and smoked himself to death.
English teacher Tatro, who was animated as he discussed the case in his heavy Boston accent, said he was 16 years old when he started looking into the assassination.
He said when he saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on television, “I jumped for joy because I thought justice had taken place.
His father had a more suspicious view, telling his son, “This whole thing smells.”
Tatro has taught on the assassination and said the government and corporate media have painted conspiracy theorists as “nutcases.”
“You will see we are not nutcases,” he said of the panel’s presentations.
He went on to talk at length about incidents surrounding the case, including being at the trial of Clay Shaw as a 21-year-old. He said a mistrial should have been called because the judge told the young Tatro his opinion on the case.
He said he was also in an episode called “The Guilty Men,” part of a multi-part documentary that aired on The History Channel called “The Men Who Killed Kennedy.” He said it was later pulled and can now only be seen on YouTube, which he saw as an egregious case of censorship.
David said he was a Navy Petty Officer, First Class and a medical student who was serving as Chief of the Day when Kennedy was brought in to the hospital after being shot.
He became visibly emotional when talking about the four bullet fragments that he said were taken from the President, which he said were too many for one bullet but not enough for two.
He said that autopsy pictures and slides he saw at the time indicated that the shot entered at the back of the skull.
The four bullet fragments he saw have never been made public, he said.
Casey Quinlan and Brian Edwards, who wrote “Beyond the Fence Line: The Eyewitness Account of Ed Hoffman and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy,” said they will discuss Hoffman’s account of the assassination.
“There is more to this story than probably any of us will ever know,” Quinlan said.
Baker, who wrote a book about her involvement with Oswald titled, “Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald,” said that after her presentation, “You’re going to know who the real Oswald was.”
She said coming forward with what she knows has cost her professionally and personally, but, at 70 years old, she feels compelled to share what she know while she said.
During a discussion of some of the threats, subtle and otherwise, the panel has received, Edwards said about the accounts they would be sharing, “At some point, coincidence and conspiracy come together.”
Schedule
Friday, October 25, 2013
Dr. John D. Stull Performing Arts Center at OCC
12:00-12:40 p.m.
Introduction — David Denton
12:40-1:10 p.m.
Beyond the Fence Line: Eyewitness Ed Hoffman — Casey Quinlan and Brian Edwards
1:10-1:50 p.m.
Gunman on the Grassy Knoll South— Edgar F. Tatro
1:50-2:00 p.m.
Break
2:00-3:30 p.m.
Video 11/22/63 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt — Rick Russo
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Suspects and Motives — Edgar F. Tatro
4:30-4:45 p.m.
Questions
6:00-7:30 p.m.
Medical Evidence — Douglas P. Horne
7:30-7:40 p.m.
Break
7:40-9:00 p.m.
Zapruder Film — Douglas P. Horne
9:30 p.m.
Reception at Olney Elks Club, 311 S. Kitchell St. in Olney
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Dr. John D. Stull Performing Arts Center at OCC
10:00-11:00 a.m.
Jack Ruby and His Brother — Edgar F. Tatro
11:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.
The New Orleans Project: Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Why Mary Sherman Had to Die — Judyth Vary Baker
12:30-1:00 p.m.
Lunch
1:00-1:30 p.m. The Secret Service-David Denton
1:30-3:00 p.m.
Behind the Scenes of the Making of “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” — Rick Russo
3:00-3:30 p.m.
Early LIFE Magazine Coverage — James Wagenvoord
3:30-3:40 p.m.
Break
3:40-4:25 p.m.
CIA/Intelligence Complicity — David Denton
4:25-5:35 p.m.
LBJ — Phillip F. Nelson
5:40-6:40 p.m.
“Guilty Men” Film — Edgar F. Tatro and Rick Russo
6:40-7:20 p.m.
ms:
Aren’t we beating a dead horse regarding JFK’s murder? What does it profit us to prove it was more than the Warren Commission let us believe. I’m reading the Road To Dallas which is interesting. 50 years later and some still want to get answers but for what purpose?
Matt – Any idea what’s going on with that louse Edward MacKenzie, is he still in custody behind bars while awaiting trial, any idea when his trial starts?
Jan:
Haven’t followed the louse’s case. He’s probably back on the street having made a deal with the federals to give them some more information on Whitey.
Wow, and why wouldn’t agent John Connolly have been able to ranker a deal like that.
Matt: I see you survived the Sox game last night.You are probably aware
that the Association of Retired FBI Agents has a website called Tickle the Wire at http://www.ticklethewire.com They posted the same story about Comey and MLK. You might be interested in the 1999 Trial transcript that the MLK family has put up on their website. The MLK family was able to convince a jury that FBI agents had assassinated Dr. King. see http://www.thekingcenter.org/civil-case-king-family-versus-jowers
I suppose it would not be a leap of faith to say if the FBI did MLK did they do JFK? Last year I had a chance to sit down and interview on video author James Douglass whose new book JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE WHY HE DIED AND WHY IT MATTERS has been a best seller . see http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24521
Jim is currently writing a companion book about the MLK assassination.
Winter is out on bail in his extortion case. His name comes up many times in the WB trial as a murderer, yet he remains a free man. Winter orders the killings of O’Toole, Connors and Halloran. He’s being protected by the Feds. The Middlesex D A and the Suffolk D A should have charged him with those murders long ago. A guy makes a You-Tube video criticizing Islam and is sent to jail, gets falsely blamed for Benghazi. Connolly, Swartz, Turner, Rico, Cahill and Probation are framed. The Federal judges release eight serial killers. This is suppose to be justice. The DOJ, judges and FBI look about as honest as the ” Quiz Shows” of the fifties. 2. Is the American press today any different than the Soviet press? It’s all propaganda. CBS has a statement from BHO on 9-12-12, the day after that the attack on Benghazi was planned. Yet they hold it for a year and allow the lie of the You-Tube video to be propagated. CBS never refutes the false claims of BHO, Clinton and Rice. 3. Reading a book on Jerusalem by Montifiore. He quotes Balfour on the activities of Wilson, Clemenceau and George at the Versailles conference. ” Three all powerful men, all ignorant men dividing up continents on a map.” The ignorance and duplicity of leadership persists.
N: Great post!!
N:
1. Winter is the only guy who didn’t cooperate with the Feds or become a rat. He didn’t use the rat on rat excuse like the others but remained true to his Irish criminal beliefs that you don’t inform. Even if we assume Whitey wasn’t an informant, which I don’t, he did become one when he threw John Connolly, the guy who protected him all those years, under the bus. Couldn’t the federals have charged Winter with RICO and used the latest extortions as a way to get under the Statute of Limitations problems? The state DAs are also cowed by the federals. Did you see that O’Brien in the Probation case has to file a motion to go to his daughter’s wedding. http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/11/ex_probation_commish_petitions_court_to_attend_family_wedding. I thought those quiz shows were on the up and up.
2. The American press has become too close to the state but you can’t blame them since the state could probably shut them down if it wanted to do it. Plus, the American press knows no one really cares about bad government stories. You understand what is going on I’m sure, it’s a social thing – you want to be comfortable going to all the parties and be part of the in-crowd so the way to do that is to play along to get along.
Have you seen those articles criticising the Miami NFL players for not speaking up about the harrassing that went on in the locker room. Some times I think the newspaper writers live in gaga land – imagine being on a team of 50 guys and going to the press and complaining about your teammates. It’d sure be pleasant going back there. The NFL locker room is a mirror of the press/gvt relations.
3. Balfour could have added himself to the group. He was no shining star. Wilson was sick at the time – so sick that he most likely left the running of the government to his wife when he returned.