Jimmy Breslin on Kennedy’s death

His two classic columns. I believe he won the Pulitzer for these.

Please take note that in the first one, the emergency room doctor who worked to revive the president describes an exit wound at the back of his head — yet the PTB insist he was shot from the back. That bullet to the front of the head, the red cloud of blood and brain that explodes — we’re supposed to believe that came from behind. Because communists!

And why do I bring this up, 50 years later? Because there was a coup, and a coverup, and the intelligence apparatus responsible still runs this country. This event taints everything that follows. And I refuse to go along with the official version.

http://youtu.be/eqzJQE8LYrQ

Gaza crisis worsens

I’ve avoided writing about this because it’s so upsetting and our government is so seemingly indifferent.

Gaza is becoming uninhabitable as humanitarian conditions deteriorate rapidly following Egypt’s destruction of smuggling tunnels and Israel’s renewed ban on the import of construction materials, the United Nations and aid agencies have said.

A year after the end of the eight-day war between Gaza and Israel last November, the UN said the situation in the tiny coastal strip was worse than before the conflict. “Initial hopes for a significant improvement on the ground have not been realised,” said James Rawley, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinian territories.

Gaza is facing a power crisis as a result of a shortage of fuel, with blackouts lasting 12-16 hours a day, according to Oxfam. Raw sewage has flooded streets in some areas of Gaza City following the closure of Gaza’s only power plant on 1 November, which made pump stations inoperative. Factories have been forced to cut production, leading to layoffs, and hospitals are running on emergency reserves.

Oxfam said only 40% of Gaza’s fuel needs were being met and consumer prices for petrol and diesel had doubled. Less than 400,000 litres of fuel a day enter Gaza through official crossings, compared with 1m litres a day that were smuggled through the tunnels.

Egypt’s closure of the tunnels has exacerbated an already precarious situation. “Ordinary people in Gaza are struggling to find work and feed their families while the blockade remains in place,” said Nishant Pandey, of Oxfam. More than 80% of Gaza’s 1.7 million inhabitants are in need of humanitarian aid and 65% of families are expected to be food insecure by the end of the year, according to the charity.

Since the tunnel closures in June, the prices of many basic foodstuffs have risen. Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said the cost of rice was up 26%, sugar 14% and sunflower oil 13%.

‘Reporters never followed up’

Gary Hart on the John F. Kennedy assassination:

WASHINGTON — As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death nears, former presidential candidate Gary Hart, a member of the Senate committee that investigated JFK’s assassination, said that the press had failed in its responsibility to investigate the truth behind his killing.

Hart served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Agencies, known as the Church committee, after chairman Frank Church. He recalled that while the committee was investigating the connection between the assassination, the Mafia and plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro, two of the three main figures involved were also killed.

“It’s amazing to me that American journalism never followed up on that story very much, because if you found out who killed those two guys, you might have some really interesting information on your hands,” Hart, who served as a Democratic senator from Colorado for two terms, told HuffPost in a recent interview.

There were “all kinds of leads” — had reporters followed them, he said. “I went down to Miami when [Johnny] Roselli was killed and talked to this Dade County sheriff from the Miami Police Department, and they showed me pictures of him being fished out of the water in the barrel and how he’d been killed — nightmarish stuff. And [Momo Salvatore] Giancana was killed in his own basement with six bullet holes in his throat with a Chicago police car and an FBI car outside his house,” he recounted.

According to CIA documents released in 2007, the agency hired Johnny Roselli, a high-ranking mobster, to eliminate Fidel Castro, offering to pay him $150,000. Roselli reportedly declined the money and worked with former FBI agent Robert A. Maheu; Giancana, Al Capone’s Chicago mob successor; and Santo Trafficante Jr., a mobster involved in Cuban operations, to unsuccessfully poison Castro with pills. Roselli disappeared soon after testifying before the Church committee, and his body was found inside an oil drum near North Miami Beach. Giancana was found dead at his Chicago home before he could testify to the Church committee.

While alive, Giancana and Roselli also reportedly communicated with Kennedy. In a 1988 interview with People Magazine, Judith Campbell Exner claimed she had an affair with the president, and that during that relationship she served as a courier between the president and Roselli and Giancana. The president’s brother, Robert Kennedy — then-attorney general — called for an investigation on Giancana.

The deaths of Roselli and Giancana in 1975 and 1976 occurred amid the Church committee’s ongoing investigations surrounding Kennedy’s assassination. That coincidence, Hart said, was suspicious enough to warrant press attention, and he was surprised that the press didn’t jump on the story.

“I was always amazed in that particular instance of the CIA-Mafia connection and the Cuban connection 12 years — coming up 12 years — after Kennedy was killed that somebody didn’t go after that story,” he said. “New York Times, Washington Post; anybody. And they didn’t. They reported the deaths and that was it, and the strange quirky coincidence, you know, but nothing more.”

Pentagon doctored ledgers to conceal waste

Isn’t it nice that we have one government agency that still gets to spend at will, depriving other agencies of greatly needed funds? I’m sure all those fat contributions to congressmen have nothing to do with it:

At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found. And plugging isn’t confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.

A review of multiple reports from oversight agencies in recent years shows that the Pentagon also has systematically ignored warnings about its accounting practices. “These types of adjustments, made without supporting documentation … can mask much larger problems in the original accounting data,” the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a December 2011 report.

Plugs also are symptomatic of one very large problem: the Pentagon’s chronic failure to keep track of its money – how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen.
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New Iran sanctions would risk war, White House warns

New Iran sanctions would risk war, White House warns (via AFP)

The White House warned US lawmakers Tuesday that tightening sanctions on Iran could box America into a “march to war” and derail a diplomatic push to limit Tehran’s atomic program. The warning marked a significant toughening of President Barack Obama…

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Big Brother’s loyal sister

Feinstein is a complete handmaiden to the defense industry. It’s made her a very wealthy woman:

Big Brother’s Loyal Sister: How Dianne Feinstein Is Betraying Civil Liberties (via LA Progressive)

Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel…

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US Government’s other spying authority

Three Leaks, Three Weeks, and What We’ve Learned About the US Government’s Other Spying Authority: Executive Order 12333 (via EFF)

A Washington Post article reveals that the National Security Agency has been siphoning off data from the links between Yahoo and Google data centers, which include the fiber optic connections between company servers at various points around the world…

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Venezuela slams new US spying claims

Does it never even occur to the U.S. that other countries are just tired of our shit?

Venezuela slams new US spying claims (via AFP)

Venezuela Monday denounced a new report that the United States made Caracas a spying priority, and warned that bilateral ties would remain frozen. “It is unacceptable that they’re spying on us,” Foreign Minister Elias Jaua told a news conference in…

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