You are here

Tag: CIA

CIA Finally Pulling the Plug on Biden

David Martin

According to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, the signal to Traitor Joe Biden could hardly have been clearer: Make no mistake: Ignatius’ column is more than a suggestion- it’s a marching order. When American intelligence wants to put out a hit, they feed it to David Ignatius and today, Ignatius pulled the pin on Joe Biden’s 2024 run. He’s turning Washington’s whispers into a rallying cry. The American intelligence community has to tie up their loose ends. Even the media is falling in line: admitting the Democratic party is a dishonest monolith. A mob that can’t function when it’s fractured. The Biden-Kamala ticket is being cancelled in its entirety and the intelligence community is making a calculation. He’s talking about Ignatius’…

FULL ARTICLE

Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

David Martin

Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what has become of America, It’s impossible to be all three. It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February  14, 2023.  The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation.  The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50thanniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S. military’s Vietnam War theater…

FULL ARTICLE

The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

David Martin

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand?  That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968.  One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time.  Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there.  America’s…

FULL ARTICLE

We Pulled the Plug on the Shah

David Martin

When I first wrote on this subject seven years ago, the title was in the form of a question, “Did We Pull the Plug on the Shah?”  With the help of a fairly recent but very obscure book by the American expatriate living in England, Arlene Lois Johnson, The Shah of Iran: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: Victim of His Times I have accumulated enough additional information to write the title of this brief essay as a declarative statement.  The book was published in the United Kingdom by News Source, Incorporated.  No date is provided, but Johnson tells me that it came out in 2018.  The book is apparently not available on Amazon, and I couldn’t get it to come up with…

FULL ARTICLE

American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

David Martin

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article.  It was right there on my AOL News.  Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

FULL ARTICLE

“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

David Martin

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice.  He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music.  Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more.  The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

FULL ARTICLE

The Early Thai Reports, the Press, and the Abbey on Thomas Merton’s Death

David Martin

by David Martin and Hugh Turley The Trappist monk Thomas Merton might well have been the most significant Roman Catholic thinker and writer of the 20th century.  His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold over 600,000 copies in its original hardcover edition and, in one version or another, has remained continuously in print.  Its Kindle edition as of this writing has 803 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Merton was a prolific writer.  The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, lists 106 books that he authored, 42 of which were published before his mysterious violent death on December 10, 1968, while he was attending a monastic conference near Bangkok, Thailand.…

FULL ARTICLE

Thomas Merton: Enemy of the Warfare State

James Tracy

  Recent research suggests how the bizarre and untimely death of Catholic author, mystic and outspoken anti-Vietnam War activist may in fact have been carried out by the CIA and at the direction of President Lyndon Johnson, whose Executive Branch tenure saw the political assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While there is a wealth of historical research on the deaths of the Kennedys and King, we are just beginning to understand how and why Merton had likewise become an enemy of the warfare state. Music: Gregorian Chant: Easter Sunday – Alleluia – Pascha nostrum Benedictine Monks of the Abbey Münsterschwarzach and Pater Godehard Joppich.

FULL ARTICLE

CIA Election Meddling

David Martin

In recent history, the only American president who has garnered anything resembling the bad press that Donald Trump consistently received was Jimmy Carter in the latter stages of his presidency.  Probably not coincidentally, Carter and Trump were both ushered out of the Oval Office after one term.  In the 24 years since George H.W. Bush was top dog for one term, we had three presidents in Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama who were smiled upon by the press.  Their gentle press treatment was exemplified by the conduct of their press conferences. Clinton was the best actor of the three, making it appear that he had chosen the reporter he was calling on spontaneously.  Bush wasn’t nearly as good…

FULL ARTICLE

Bought Journalists: The Case of Udo Ulfkotte

James Tracy

MHB Report German author and newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte has been among the few prestigious mainstream journalists to tell the public that it’s being lied to by a large majority journalists and news organizations, most of which manipulate readerships for bribes and professional one-upmanship. Ulfkotte’s mea culpa was titled Bought Journalists, a German best-seller translated into nine languages, the English translation of which had to overcome unusual hurdles before finally coming to fruition.

FULL ARTICLE

Letter to William Styron about Vince Foster’s Death

David Martin

The most famous former student of my alma mater, Davidson College, future President Woodrow Wilson, only spent one year there before transferring to Princeton.  Were it not for Secretary of State Dean Rusk and mystery writer Patricia Cornwell, one might well say that the college’s most famous students never graduated from the college, because NBA star Stephen Curry has yet to do so and, like Wilson, the subject of this article, Wilson’s fellow Virginia native William Styron spent only one year at Davidson before transferring away, in his case to Duke.* Styron had a curious special article in Newsweek magazine on April 18, 1994, that caught my eye.  It was about the mysterious death of the 1967 Davidson graduate, deputy…

FULL ARTICLE

Is Lt. Col. Vindman CIA?

David Martin

The title question would seem to be just about the most obvious one that a person could raise, considering Alexander Vindman’s background, his associations, and his most recent behavior. The fact that hardly anyone seems to be making it is just one more reason, I believe, that he very likely is working for the CIA and has been throughout his military career. Actually, very much to his credit, Rush Limbaugh has observed that Vindman appears to be employed by people other than those in his chain of command. He just stops short of speculating as to who, exactly, that might be, like, say, the CIA. We’re talking about the Jewish Ukrainian American military officer in the middle of the ginned-up…

FULL ARTICLE

JFK, Mass Media, and the Origins of ‘Conspiracy Theory’

James Tracy

By James F. Tracy (Originally posted at MemoryHoleBlog on November 22, 2018) Prefatory Note on Censorship in Academe This study was written in 2013-14 as part of my academic research as Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. I have had numerous papers addressing news coverage of historical events published in academic journals over the past two decades. However, this was the first attempt to offer a scholarly treatment of a research object related to a conspiracy–how the news media “framed” New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination inquiry. When I presented the paper at the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal Conference in 2014 the panel respondent congratulated me on what he deemed…

FULL ARTICLE