A Summary of real US Conspiracies

[DickMcManus]

A Summary of real US Conspiracies

A Summary of a Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes

April 25, 1992
Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit
of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a corporate or
government "conspiracy", the Post then subjects its readers with a
salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko
"CONSPIRACY THEORISTS".

Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule
the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had
conspired to do wrong. And when, in their syndicated column, Jack
Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the
Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring
the Anderson column before printing it.

In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and
public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a US arms-for-drugs trade
that kept weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and
cocaine flowing to US markets. In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out
of Control, a seminal work on our illegal war against Nicaragua. The
Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges
of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-
smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics
Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel
[D-NY] of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial
correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel.

Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism,
Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed US Government
complicity in the drug trade.

In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by
eight of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full,
impartial investigation" of the October Surprise /hostage allegations.
The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the
conference itself.
On February 5, 1992, House of Representatives authorized an "October
Surprise" investigation.

Lee Hamilton [D-IN] chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra
Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella,
a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988. Like
the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the
US arms-for-drugs operation. He had accepted Oliver North's lies, and
as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House
Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions
about Contra support activities of government officials and others.
After CIA operative John Hull was charged in Costa Rica with
"international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's
security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to
intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling
Hull's case "in a manner that will. not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican
relations.". The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa
Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as
our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens.”

Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on
Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's
official Warren Commission, finding that a single gunman, acting
alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story
of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful
prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection
with the assassination.

And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of
conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who,
had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam.

The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along
lines suggested by
"JFK" . Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken
Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been
called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never
supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis.

In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975
and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the
Warren Commission," and that the 1979 Report of the House Select
Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably
killed" as a result of a conspiracy" , a truly astounding number of
Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just
another conspiracy .

Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen
Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George
Lardner Jr . They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second
thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no
historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale
Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and
investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense
of the"JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in
Vietnam. But the Post team just continues ranting against the
possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering
little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly
shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's
contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie.

Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and
the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came
out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and,
contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of
this copyrighted movie. Also in this article, Lardner discredits Jim
Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate
Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to
the Clay Shaw trial, in a US Government criminal action brought
against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who admitted under oath
that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter,
he, Gervais, had said that the US Government's case against Garrison
was a fraud. The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal
mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner abou
tthis, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it.

Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way
through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early
draft of the movie. He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais
by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the
movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it. He again
ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination,
President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam
War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after
Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the
assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy".
In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination
by McGeorge Bundy [Kennedy's Assistant for National Security
Affairs]. Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following
the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided
for escalating the war against Vietnam -- facts that Lardner avoided.
The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly
dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy
Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is
buried in the Post . Nor do current readers of this newspaper find
meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about
both the FBI and the CIA.

Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at
field stations to counteract the
"new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's
findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown
suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem
with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and
editors’

end to

"employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the
critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly
appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to
provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the
conspiracy theorists..."

In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The
Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her
newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of
whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin
Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" .
Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told
Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do
is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that
special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the
truth".

The Post bullied Harcourt Brace Jovanovich into recalling the book and
they shredded 20,000 copies. Davis sued Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for
breach of contract and damage to reputation, who settled out of court.
Davis published her book spelling out how Bradlee had been deeply
involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda . Deborah Davis wrote
that former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that
the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent
for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what
became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists
by the CIA".

The Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by
refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his
indictment was announced ...for crimes committed in his official
capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica".

When he sat on the US District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge
ClarenceThomas violated US law when he failed to remove himself from a
case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment
against the Ralston Purina Company. Ralston Purina, the animal feed
empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John
Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to
56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article.

Or take the fine report produced by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen
titled All the Vice President's Men. It documents "How the Quayle
Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and
Environmental Programs".

Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward
published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice
President Quayle. Their article’s handling of the Council's disastrous
impact on America was inadequate. It revealed little about Quayle's
abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts
about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive
Nader study of Quayle's piss poor record in the Bush Administration.


This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions
of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from
that of any other cartel – like oil, diamond, energy, [or
manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent
commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" .


It is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrong doing involves
government or corporate conspiracies, yet the Post does its best to
guide our thinking away from real conspiracy. Here are some
examples.

The fact about the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil
companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition".

"Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of
the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G. Farben...of
Germany....By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United
States was effectively prevented from developing or producing during
World War Two any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said
Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.

The fact of the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil
of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for
criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and
diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related
products to transportation companies throughout the country". For
example, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis,
Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles.

The fact of the "gross antitrust violations" and the conspiracy of
American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to
strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the
CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh.Or the CIA-
planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba .


The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying
crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring
with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders".
COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery,
surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.
citizens in the 60's.

The fact of the conspiracy of President Richard Nixon and the
Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after
the 1968 US presidential election.

The fact that US Government agencies knowingly withheld information
about dosages of radiation that is "almost certainly produces thyroid
abnormalities or cancer” and to people contaminated who lived nearby
the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington. Or various
branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around
to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites, and State
and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public
relations strategy.

"The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some
twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the
public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war
against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually
minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has
largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or
ignoring the causal role of avoidable exposures to industrial
carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace."

The Bush Administration cover up of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq.

The fact of the widespread plans of business and government groups to
spend $100 million in government funds to promote a distorted and
truncated history of Columbus in America., rather than examining more
realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold,
terror, and death".

The fact surrounding the US Justice Department’s theft from the
INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software
which "now point to a wide spread conspiracy implicating lesser
Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology" , says
former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson .

The fact of the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" where
the White House knew of the criminal activities at"the Bank of Crooks
and Criminals International"
[BCCI], where US intelligence agencies did their secret banking, and
where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of
doing business".

The fact of the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff [D-
CT] and the US Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects
in the 1.2 million Corvairs manufactured by General Motors in the
early 60's.

The fact of the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon
Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings
of the Shield's hazards and which
"stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the cover ups...
[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic
infections."

The fact that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company
and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the
unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364
passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974.

The fact of the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug
Diethylstilbestrol [DES] was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests
which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with
each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage
purposes" .

The fact that Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers, Federal Pacific, and
General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to
fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment.

The fact of the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories [IBT]
officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs.

The fact of the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress
knowledge of medical problems relating to asbestos .

The fact of the conspiracy among US Government agencies and the
Congress to cover up the nature of our war against the people of
Nicaragua that continues in 1992 with the US Government applying
pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more
repressive force.

The fact of the conspiracy by the CIA and the US Government to
interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert
actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of
the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President
Salvador Allende in 1973.

The fact of the conspiracy in October 1975 among US officials
including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William
Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting
Angola's plans for peaceful elections, and to lie about these actions
to the Congress and the news media. And CIA Director George Bush's
subsequent cover up of this US.-sponsored terrorism.

The fact of President George HW Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to
invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the
United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S.Charter, and the Panama
Canal Treaties.

The fact of the deliberate and willful efforts of President George HW
Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S.
Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy
the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate
supported by President Bush.

The fact of the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert
Gates to head the CIA, in the face of
"unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-
Contra scandal" .

The fact of how Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's
Solidarity Movement..

The fact of how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to
ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth
control or abortion". The way the Vatican and Washington colluded to
achieve common purpose in Central America. The collaboration of
Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo, with the US
Army to design death squad programs.

The fact of the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant
administration to harass and
cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered
dangerous working conditions at the facility.

Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the
Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing
threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say,
benefits big business or big government.