The RFK Assassination: You
Be the Judge (6/4/08)
Two defendants to a murder charge face
trial. Their names are Shooter A and Shooter
B. The trial produces the following facts:
1. Shooter A and Shooter B do not know one
another.
2. There is no evidence they made any
agreement to commit the crime.
3. Both Shooters were found with guns at the
scene of the crime.
4. The public coroner testifies that the
fatal shot to the victim was point-blank to
the back of his head next to the right ear.
5. The coroner also testifies that the
victim was struck with three other bullets,
also at close range from behind and to the
right.
6. Twelve eyewitnesses say that Shooter A
was at all times to the victim’s left and in
front of him and was never within two feet
of him.
7. Shooter B admits that he was immediately
to the victim’s right and behind him.
8. Shooter A was grabbed by another person
after firing two shots, after which he fired
aimlessly.
9. Including the fatal shot, there were
thirteen bullets accounted for by
investigators.
10. Shooter A had a gun that held eight
bullets.
11. Shooter B had a gun that held nine
bullets.
12. The guns were nearly alike.
13. No one has matched Shooter A’s gun
positively to the victim’s bullets.
14. No one has ever checked Shooter B’s gun
to see whether it matches the bullets.
What is your verdict?
Here is what happened in to the two shooters
regarding the real-life incident 40 years
ago:
Shooter A was actually convicted of
first-degree murder and now resides at
Corcoran State Prison in California. He has spent 39 years in prison.
Shooter B was never considered a suspect by
the authorities and now lives in the Philippines.
Who are they?
Shooter A is Sirhan Sirhan.
Shooter B is Thane Eugene Cesar, a security
guard.
The victim was Senator Robert Kennedy,
candidate for President of the United States.
Why does it matter?
It matters to Sirhan, who has now spent over
twice the average time in prison for
first-degree murderers.
It matters to those who voted for Kennedy,
who were disenfranchised.
It matters to history, regardless of whether
it changed for the worse or for the better.
It matters to our judicial system, which
should protect those falsely convicted of
crimes and pursue those for which there is
more evidence of wrongdoing.
It matters to all of us – if people in power
orchestrated a false conviction and got away
with it, they or their associates probably
still have the ability to do it again.
The United States of
Conformity (5/10/08)
The
game with authority started early for me.
Like many of us, I was taught the
importance of saying the Pledge of
Allegiance and singing patriotic songs in
kindergarten.
It’s too bad I had no idea what they
meant.
In hindsight, it was the start of a
long indoctrination which helps to explain
why our nation is in such a mess at this
time.
The push for conformity
continued in junior high and in high school.
The mantra was “communists bad,
capitalism (i.e.
United States)
good.”
The silence of teachers in their
glossing over the Viet Nam War and our
choice of allies in the Nicaraguan Contras
spoke volumes as to how even they had
authority that told them to tow the line.
And teachers who suggested that
students actually read a little Karl Marx
before criticizing him were called
communists by students who carried the party
line for their parents.
There would be even more
messages from up high, like “support the
troops,” for example.
By hiding behind sacred cows, our
leaders (namely the government) have always
managed to acquire support for policies they
could not possibly justify otherwise.
When dissent for a war hits a
critical mass, we get the message that we
cannot support the troops without supporting
the war.
And the idea that our soldiers “fight
to defend our country” further prevents any
movement against the war from stopping the
money.
Speaking of money, the
government has other sacred cows to spend it
on as well.
Talk of public safety dominates much
of local government discussion and, despite
incidents like the Rodney King beating,
authority tells us to “Back the Badge.”
What can other local government
departments do when much of the money goes
to police and firefighters?
We need not wonder why Johnny can’t
read, why there are so many potholes and why
libraries are closed.
Part of the game involves
authority telling us to be “patriotic” and
to be “good Americans.”
But these words themselves are
misleading.
Thanks to some really unpatriotic
(anti-British) people like Ben Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson, we have our own nation.
So much for the automatic value of
patriotism.
America is a name our nation has seized from two
continents full of nations like Canada and Chile, who have
just as much a right as we do to use it.
How easy it has been for our leaders
to prod people along with words they do not
understand!
It does not matter that
polls consistently show that most people in
the
United States
oppose most of the Bush Administration
policies.
Bush and his advisers have never
shown any concern for what the people want.
Our situation is no different than in
going to work and disagreeing with your
boss.
You know who wins that battle.
Being right about the
foolishness of going to war in
Iraq or any other issue makes no
difference either.
People like Bush could fight a
hundred more wars that we should not fight
but they won’t admit their errors.
Vice President Cheney recently said
when asked about the lives lost in Iraq,
“so what?”
Our collective adherence
to conformity has cost us our institutional
memory of what has happened in our nation
and in our society in general.
We won’t get our memory back by
nodding our heads when others around us say
we need more wiretapping of phones because
“desperate times call for desperate
measures.”
We might remember instead that the
German Nazis used this same justification.
Visions of how this
nation ought to be – a nation where the
government is accountable to its people,
where everyone faces equality before the law
and where we have the moral authority to
demand the same from allies – will appear
when we stop playing authority’s games and
start facing reality.
Torture Should Be History
(4/24/08)
Recently, President Bush
made an admission that he signed an order
that sanctioned the use of torture.
Why would any civilized nation allow
its use?
During the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in the Star
Chamber, witnesses and juries were punished
by the royal authorities in
England for testimony or verdicts
disagreeable to the King.
The chamber had the power to do
anything except put the offending persons to
death.
From 1560-1700, members
of the Catholic Church in Spain held almost
fifty thousand trials of people they accused
of not following Catholic orthodoxy.
Pope Sixtus IV, who originally
opposed the Inquisition, once said that many
Christians were locked up in prisons and
tortured without any tests put upon the
witnesses.
Now the United States, under the Bush
Administration, has had opportunities to
torture “terrorists,” ostensibly to get
information from them about others suspected
of terrorist activities.
Though some Bush Administration
officials say that only a handful of people
have been tortured (a point of view
contradicted by evidence of the Central
Intelligence Agency flying terrorist
suspects to nations that support torture),
other questions arise.
What if the detainees
simply say what they believe the
interrogators want to hear?
If they think they may die anyway,
they have nothing to lose by providing false
information first.
In short, we cannot be certain of the
reliability of evidence given by those who
speak under duress.
This type of logic brings
up what may be the real reason our leaders
condone and even encourage the use of
torture. If
they coerce “confessions” out of the
suspects, the suspects can have the
information dismissed from any trial, which
would probably be enough to prevent a trial.
Why prevent a trial?
After all, successful trials against
terrorists would demonstrate to the world
that the
United States
will follow the rule of law even as it
claims to protect itself from the actions of
extremists.
The reason could be because
“inconvenient truths” about
United States
activities may come out at such a trial.
Consider a case in point.
About a year ago, after being subject
to Central Intelligence Agency “waterboarding”
and other forms of torture, Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed “confessed” to several crimes,
including masterminding of the attacks of
September 11, 2001.
The Bush Administration broadcast
this statement, but it still hasn’t
prosecuted Mohammed under its own rules![1]
Two of the most notorious
examples of torture in history did not last.
An infamous case involving John
Liburne, beaten by authorities for asking
what he had been charged of, assisted in
ending the Star Chamber.
The Age of Enlightenment helped to
bring an end to the Spanish Inquisition.
Someday, historians will look back on
the Bush Administration’s advocacy of
torture and discuss it as another symbol of
its perils.
The Grand Jury Testimony of Colin Powell (4/4/08)
Place:
Washington, DC
grand jury room
Time:
October 3, 2011 at 9:00 AM
[The witness takes the oath]
Judge: What is your full name?
Witness:
Colin Luther Powell
Prosecutor (Pr):
Did you serve in the George W. Bush
Administration?
Witness (W):
Yes
Pr:
In what capacity?
W:
I was the Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005.
Pr:
Secretary Powell, did you approach the office of
the United States Attorney recently with information
about the Bush Administration?
W:
Yes
Pr:
Why did you do this?
W:
President Bush wrote several statements in his
memoirs that I knew were untrue.
I wanted to correct the record.
Pr:
Why not write your own book?
W: What I have to say about the
Administration involves accusations of criminal conduct.
Pr:
Do you mean first-hand observations?
W:
Yes
Pr:
Please tell us of your first accusation.
W:
Shortly after September 11, 2001, the President
had me go on national television to tell the public that
the Administration would soon produce evidence that
Osama bin Laden was behind the crime.
Then, in a mid-day press conference not long
after, he told the media that the evidence would not be
out any time soon.
Pr:
What did you conclude?
W:
That if the President had the proof, he would
have provided it.
He took advantage of the fact that most people
remember the first thing they hear about something, but
often forget about what else they learn.
Pr:
What else did you observe?
W:
When the President asked me to give a speech
before the United Nations about the danger presented by Iraq, I asked
him about the certainty of the evidence.
He assured me that it was solid.
But as I read through it, none of the evidence
proved that Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction.
Pr:
What did you do?
W:
I told the President, who told me not to worry
about it. I
told him I could not give the speech because I did not
believe it.
He said that he would accept my resignation.
Pr:
Why did you not give it to him?
W:
I am a soldier at heart and soldiers take orders.
So I gave the speech and looked for a way out of
the Administration.
Pr:
What did you observe about the start of the war
with
Iraq?
W:
I observed everyone around me was hawkish on
foreign policy and they were completely comfortable with
going to war even though no one seemed to know what it
was for.
Pr:
Was there any other reason you think they liked
going to war?
W:
Yes.
They planned to go to war all along.
They looked for any reason they could and,
failing that, they made up reasons.
Pr:
Why did you not come forward sooner?
W:
I became convinced that taking on these people
would be like taking on a machine.
I feared being made an example of like Joseph
Wilson and Valerie Plame.
Pr:
Who are these people?
W:
People who make huge profits when we go to war.
The people who build the weapons, make the
uniforms and hold the stocks in companies who invest
overseas.
They usually pressure politicians, but they did not have
to use any pressure on Bush, Cheney and the rest.
Pr:
Did the election of 2008 make any difference?
W:
No. I
thought it would, but it did not.
After all of my years in the military, I finally
came to accept the reality that a war machine rules us.
If the new President were to get us out of
Iraq
before the war machine was through sucking money
opportunities out of it, they would be killed or
discredited.
Pr:
What do you mean?
W:
The machine thought President Kennedy was getting
us out of
Viet Nam.
They feared a powerful young man like Robert
Kennedy would be a force against war for decades.
They got upset when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
started to talk about the immorality of war…
[Note:
The transcript ends
here. A
group of pacifists, concerned for the safety of
Secretary Powell from Bush sympathizers, entered the
grand jury room and directed Powell to a nearby plane.
He and his wife flew to an undisclosed location.]
United States Needs a Sermon (3/22/08)
Senator Barack Obama’s former
preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. has had
parts of his sermons played before the nation.
In one, he says that God should “damn
America.”
The outcry over
this excerpt and others caused many political pundits to
tell Obama to back off from Reverend Wright, which he
did recently.
But maybe the Reverend
had a point about the soul of the
United States.
It is worthwhile to review the “Seven Deadly
Sins” that, according to Pope Gregory the Great, condemn
a person’s soul to Hell.
Where is our nation going for its eternal life?
Lust – United
States leaders have
long been known to get involved in affairs.
The two most recent governors of
New York
are a part of this problem.
But the real lust extends to people who peruse
the newspapers and weekly magazines for more gossip
about political leaders’ extracurricular activities.
Gluttony – Our nation has a history of enabling the wealthy to gain
luxuries to an excess, even when others starve.
With the amount of homeless and hunger in the United States, we have not advanced
in practical terms from the days that white men had the
sole power to vote and did so to protect their material
interests.
The wealthiest among us still push for tax cuts they do
not need and then turn around and ask for government
assistance when their businesses go under.
Greed – The United States
has staked its claim for diamonds from South Africa at the expense of the
blacks there who had few rights and in favor of a regime
that happily took our money as investments.
We have also been greedy in seizing territory
through wars that need not have been fought (the U.S.
took Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and
others in the Spanish-American War).
When business interests were going to be affected
around the world, we have employed, via the CIA, covert
operations to overthrow leaders we have opposed and
install ones we favored.
Our actions in Iran (1953),
Guatemala
(1954) and
Chile
(1973) speak volumes on our greed.
Presently, our intervention in Iraq is going so poorly and for no
apparent reason that logic would tell us that someone is
making a killing off it.
Sloth – We can rant and rail all we want about the problem of
illegal immigration, but many of them would have no work
if those with the legal right to be here did not hire
them. It may
not be lazy to hire another person to do a job we do not
want to do, but failing to ask for proof of the right to
work legally certainly is.
Interestingly, some people hire illegal
immigrants because they believe they work harder than
others. Our
collective sloth causes its own set of problems.
Wrath – Pundits on television have lambasted Reverend Wright,
calling him “racist” and “unpatriotic.”
Why the anger?
If the Reverend made statements that were not
true, I could understand, but he expressed opinions
(albeit in an emotionally charged way) about how United States
policies have harmed non-whites.
He cited the atomic bombing of
Japan, our pro-Israel stance and
our lack of concern over the blacks in Africa, all of which happened.
His use of profanity incited some of this anger,
but he put his outburst in the context of decrying those
who keep saying “God bless
America,” even during
situations when we do not deserve any blessings.
Envy – Statistics frequently come out that show how poorly the United States
fares in educating children, infant mortality and
accessibility of health care.
The same studies name other nations as being far
ahead on these and other issues.
We envy them, which would be OK if were willing
to act on it.
Pride – If pride goeth before a fall, we are in real trouble!
When was the last time anyone in power owned up
to the mistakes we have made, both recently and
historically?
Humble pie may not taste good but it rids us of
the pride that gets in our way of seeing our other
mistakes.
We can complain about the Reverend
Wrights in the
United States.
But we would risk losing our own objectivity
about the role of the United States
in the world and here at home.
It is that objectivity, and not our pride, that
would serve our nation best as it confronts its
challenges.
The
Secret Obama-Clinton Talks: A Paradoxical Parody (3/8/08)
(Senators Obama and
Clinton find a hideaway to discuss the Democratic
nomination.)
Barack: Hillary, I have more delegates than you. Take the #2 slot and we can
put this mess behind us.
Hillary:
Nice try, Barack. I have the momentum to catch up to
you.
B: You’ll have to beat me by twenty percent in the states left.
H: You mean, like I did in Ohio? That won’t be hard.
B: OK, let me put it another way – what will it take to get you on my
ticket?
H: A gag for Bill! No, I’m only kidding! Listen, Barack, you’re a young
man. After eight years as my VP, you can run for
President again.
B: If you agree to be my running mate, I will let you choose half the
cabinet and any Supreme Court justices. Deal or no
deal?
H: Come on, Barack. I’m not here to make a deal. We don’t disagree much
on judicial issues anyway.
B: If there is no deal, how will we settle the ticket before McCain
overtakes both of us?
H: And you want to be the leader of the free world? I have an idea.
B: Good. For a minute, I thought you were going to say you had a dream.
H: I’m not the plagiarizing type.
B: Don’t go there. I’ll have to bring out my “New Hampshire” tears.
H: So you don’t want to hear my idea?
B: Let’s hear it, Hillary.
H: Hold out your hand in a fist, shake it twice and on the…
B: You mean Rock-Paper-Scissors? Michelle and I used to play that to
decide whose turn it was to change diapers!
H: Well…Do you have any better ideas?
B: I already told you.
H: I’m not negotiating.
B: Oh yes, never negotiate out of fear but never fear to negotiate.
H: Caught you in the act!
B: I was going to give the credit to JFK!
H: OK, Barack. I’m sure you were. I just can’t believe you won’t give
in to a game of chance!
B: You won’t swallow your pride and admit you’ll finish second.
H: How would we ever get along as running mates or as President and Vice
President, anyway? My plan leaves the winner with the
choice of whom to run with.
B: My plan makes it look like we are a team. Who’s going to vote against
a ticket with a black man and a woman on it?
H: Or at least say they won’t vote for the ticket.
B: Hey…Where are the Secret Service?
H: I don’t know. They must be having a fit!
B: If we were trapped somewhere and they could only rescue one of us, who
do you think they would choose?
H: Fascinating hypothetical question, but I’ll take a pass on answering.
B: If we took an actuarial perspective on this, we could solve the
problem. Not in terms of our worth to society, but our
worth to our party.
H: I give the party more of the Clinton legacy. Someday they’ll forget
Monica Lewinsky and remember a good economy and peace.
B: Hillary, the Clinton legacy is fading. Didn’t you say a while ago you
wanted to gag your husband?
H: I was joking!
B: Fine. I have created my own legacy of adding new voters, bringing
back people who were disgusted with the system and
getting past twenty consecutive years of people named
Bush and Clinton in the White House. Your loss would be
the end of an era, whereas mine would mean a loss of an
opportunity to fix the mess.
H: The women of this nation would lose out on a chance for a female
president.
B: Yes, I know. But can’t I say the same about the black people of the
United States? At the risk of being flippant, I’d call
it a draw on this count.
H: OK, Barack. We’ll never settle our tie this way. I know a way to
make my own legacy.
B: How’s that?
H: I will walk the plank. I’ll say I read the handwriting on the wall
and I’ll withdraw from the race in the best interests of
our party.
B: Is that really the legacy you want?
H: No, but it will show the critics I don’t just act in self-interest.
It will stun Bill speechless. And it will ensure I’ll
never hear about Whitewater anymore.
B: I’ve got to hand it to you, Hillary. Some would say you are acting as
an altruist in sacrificing your own personal ambitions
to help the party…Hillary, where are you?
(With the nomination now
his, Senator Obama realizes that it is lonely at the
top.)
