It is very possible that Richard Nixon, despite the Post stories and the FBI discoveries, would never have been impeached, nor his entire administration ruined and half of them imprisoned, had it not been for the letter.

The letter, penned by James McCord and addressed to Watergate trial judge John Sirica, said that “pressure” had been applied to silence the defendants and that perjury had been committed during the trial. As you might imagine, this really pissed off Sirica.

Nixon, sworn-in for a second term following his landslide re-election, had probably felt secure. Payoff money had kept Howard Hunt quiet, and the plane crash which fortuitously killed Hunt’s wife on December 8th of 1972 seemed to have ended further blackmail demands. And although it had been revealed that the sequentially-numbered bills in the burglars’ pockets had begun life in the finance arm of the Committee to Re-Elect, and although the FBI had concluded – and Woodward and Bernstein, in the Post, had reported – that Mitchell, while Attorney General, had controlled a secret fund used for spying and sabotage against the Democrats, nobody much cared what The Post was printing and, for reasons which will appear, Nixon felt confident that he could dodge the FBI.

McCord’s letter, however, was alarming. It galvanized the Senate, which created the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, and the Committee’s investigators started poking around. And although in the early stages of the Senate inquiry virtually no one expected it to lead inside the Oval Office, Nixon decided that he might have to toss someone overboard.

The designated goat would be White House Counsel John Dean, who could be linked both to Hunt and his ‘Plumbers’ and to the payment of money to Donald Segretti, the low-level point-man for general campaign dirty tricks.

Hugh Sloan, deputy to Finance Director Maurice Stans, told the FBI about the wads of cash going to Hunt and many others, hundreds of thousands of dollars pulled from the safe by very senior Nixon aides. Even when John Dean, White House Counsel, decided to start blabbing to the Senate Committee’s investigators, it was believed that he could be discredited. Neither Congress nor the public knew what Hugh Sloan had told the FBI. And although Dean’s testimony would be an embarrassment, he couldn’t prove any of it.

Inside the Oval Office, the hidden microphones continued to feed the wiring which ran, elsewhere, to reels of tape. What Dean was saying to the Committee’s lawyers could be substantiated if anyone got hold of them. But Dean didn’t know about the taping system. And Nixon did not order the tapes destroyed or the system removed.

The Senate Committee began televised hearings on May 18th. Two weeks later, John Dean testified that he had discussed Watergate with the President more than thirty-five times. But other administration officials contradicted him, and denied any knowledge of or participation in either the burglary or cover-up, and a popular majority continued to support Nixon.

One guy who did know about the taping system inside the Oval Office was White House Aide Alexander Butterfield. Unlike the FBI, Butterfield did not keep this information strictly to himself.

As it was later described, Butterfield responded to one of the first, almost random questions by asking why the Committee didn’t simply listen to the tapes. Gosh, he then said, I hope I didn’t make a mistake in telling you this.

One can easily imagine Nixon smashing the White House furniture. Still, he did not destroy the tapes. He did not do so even after his special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, as well as the Senate Committee, went after them. He would refuse to turn them over, he said, and fired Cox. In what seemed at the time an odd turn of events, he also found time to stage-manage the public disgrace of his own hand-picked Vice President, Spiro Agnew.

Since the U.S. Congress in the 1970s was anything but the compliant bunch of fools it would become over the next forty years, the President’s refusal to turn over the tapes did not stop the investigations; it accelerated them. And the Supreme Court at that time, even with Nixon’s own appointees, was not the ideological, partisan bunch we’ve got today.

With Butterfield’s slip-of-the-tongue, and knowing he had little chance to evade its consequences, Nixon continued to fight. The tapes were protected, he said, by executive privilege. He might consider releasing transcripts, redacted where necessary to protect national security, but not the tapes themselves.

Congress was not appeased. It forced the appointment of a new Special Prosecutor and extracted a pledge that this one could not be fired without congressional approval. And it took one look at the limited transcripts Nixon turned over and declared itself unamused.

One by one, Nixon’s big guns perjured themselves. their memories failed them, but the testimony they did give was perjury anyhow. Mitchell, Maurice Stans, Kalmbach, Jeb Magruder, John Mitchell, Ehrlichman and Haldeman, all of them lied to the best of their abilities but it would not be enough. Nothing would save Nixon now.

Okay, you may be thinking: that’s four posts on Watergate and apart from a few interesting little details, it sounds a lot like what we already know. Yup. But not any longer.

Look for the next installment, “Watergate, part 5: What’s a Little Blackmail Among Friends?” coming soon.

Eugenio Martinez was a veteran operative, a Cuban exile who participated in, by his own estimate, more than two hundred burglaries as an employee of the CIA. So when Howard Hunt recruited him, along with his friends Virgilio Gonzalez, the lock-picker, and Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis, to carry out a few breaking-and-enterings, he figured he knew what he was letting himself in for. In a story for Harper’s Magazine, October, 1974, Martinez recounted his experiences. It is a remarkable narrative.

Hunt had been their boss in the Bay of Pigs invasion; now, he was inside the White House, assistant to Charles Colson. But when Martinez informed his CIA case officer that “Eduardo” was working at the White House and was in Miami recruiting people, his C.O. said that he knew nothing of Hunt’s activities except that he was not working at the White House.

“Well, imagine!” Martinez wrote. “I knew Eduardo was in the White House. What it meant to me was that Eduardo was above them and either they weren’t supposed to know what he was doing or they didn’t want me to talk about him anymore. Knowing how these people act, I knew I had to be careful.”

The group’s first target was the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The burglars were to take Ellsberg’s records, and scatter the place to suggest thieves looking for drugs. But Martinez was uneasy. The operation was unlike anything he was used to. Ordinarily, he would later write, “you have a briefing and then you train for the operation. You try to find a place that looks similar and you train in disguise and with the codes you are going to use. You try out the plan many times so that later you have the elasticity to abort the operation if the conditions are not ideal.” But “Eduardo’s (Hunt’s) briefing was not like this. There wasn’t a written plan, not even any mention of what to do if something went wrong. There was just the man talking about the thing.”

The Fielding break-in was a failure, Martinez later wrote. They’d found nothing. But when they reported back to Hunt at the hotel, their chief seemed happy. “This is a celebration,” he said, popping open some champagne, “you deserve it.” The episode seemed odd to Martinez because “no one invites you to have champagne and is happy when you fail.”

If the Fielding break-in puzzled him, the utter lack of planning around the DNC Watergate project was alarming, and he expressed this sentiment to Barker. “I told him I resented the way Hunt was treating Gonzalez... I said there wasn’t adequate operational preparation. There was no floor plan of the building. No one knew the disposition of the elevators, how many guards there were, or even what time the guards checked the building. Gonzalez did not know what kind of door he was supposed to open. There weren’t even any contingency plans. Barker came back with a message from Eduardo: ‘You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions.’”

This warning, and a similar one from his CIA case officer, may have shut him up, but Martinez had to be sweating bullets when the break-in crew arrived in the basement at the Watergate office complex to find the tape missing and the door to the inside stairway locked.
The idea had been for James McCord to take the elevator to the tenth floor, then tape open all of the inside doors so that the burglars could walk up eight flights to the DNC. McCord had placed this tape across the lock horizontally, and thus it had been seen – and removed – by security guard Frank Wills.

Now they would have to abort the operation, Martinez believed; they’d been discovered. It would be lunacy to proceed. Sturgis, Barker, and Gonzalez were in agreement. But McCord would not make that decision. He left them waiting as he went to consult with Hunt in a room at the hotel. Hunt and McCord decided to go ahead. Gonzalez again picked the lock. At this point McCord retaped the door, explaining that he would join them shortly.

The new tape on the door, again placed so that it would be seen, was found by Wills, who this time phoned the D.C. police

It was by now past midnight. A D.C. plainclothes unit led by one Carl Shoffler was close to the Watergate and responded first.

Inside the Democratic offices, McCord and the others went through files and replaced the malfunctioning tap on Larry O’Brien’s phone. Across the street at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn, Alfred Baldwin, acting as lookout, saw Shoffler’s men going from room to room on the eighth floor but could not warn the burglars because McCord had ordered the walkie-talkie turned off.

The burglars were not carrying any identification, but they did have their room keys at the Watergate Hotel and $5,300.00 in sequentially-numbered hundred dollar bills. The room keys presented police with their I.D.s, and the personal phone books of Barker and Sturgis, each with Hunt’s name and his phone number at the White House.

There were cursory investigations at the FBI and by the D.C. police. A grand jury indicted the seven lone nuts. Nixon was swept to an electoral landslide over George McGovern, one of the most decent men ever nominated for president.

The long trail of Nixon’s undoing would not really begin until 1973, but before we get there, it would be helpful to briefly describe the indicted conspirators:

E. Howard Hunt, along with McCord, ran the operation. Hunt, whose wife Dorothy, had long worked for the Agency, had served the CIA for twenty-one years, a master spy who had been Station Chief in several Central American countries. He was the liaison between the Cuban exile groups and the CIA before and after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. After JFK’s murder, he’d been named Chief of Domestic Operations.

James McCord was a career intelligence officer, first with the FBI, then with CIA. At the CIA he had been Chief of Security for the physical plant at Langley, Virginia. His boss, the Director of CIA during Watergate, was Richard Helms. Helms would later testify, before the Church Committee investigating the CIA in the mid-seventies, that he did not know McCord, despite the fact that they were close friends and had been guests at each other’s homes.

Martinez and Virgilio Gonzalez had been used by the CIA in hundreds of burglaries. Gonzalez was an expert locksman. Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis were CIA foot soldiers, fanatically anti-Castro exiles. Barker had been a member of Batista’s secret police before Castro, and had informed against Castro for the FBI from inside Cuba. Sturgis had been a member of Alpha 66, an elite CIA assassination team.

I recognize that this is all still prelude, but it’s necessary to have background for these keystone cops – if that’s what they were – who got nailed at the Watergate.

Here are some questions which come to mind in that context:

* Why would long-time veterans of CIA burglaries carry fifty-three sequentially-numbered hundred dollar bills on their person inside the target building?

* Why would the former Chief of Security for the CIA itself tape open a lock horizontally, and do it twice?

* Why would Hunt take charge of the burglars’ IDs, put them inside their rooms, then instruct them to take their room keys with them?

Oh, and by the way: What kind of coincidence do we think it is that plainclothes cop Shoffler and his crew had never worked beyond their 4-12 shift until the night of June 17th, and happend to be in the vicinity to make the arrests, when it turns out that Shoffler was a good friend of James McCord’s?

Look for the next installment, “Watergate, part 4: Judge Sirica Opens His Mail.”

We all know that in the spy business intelligence operations use “cover stories.” We know this because we’ve seen the movies and also because it makes sense. Some of these stories are fairly simple and straightforward. For example, the CIA uses a large number of “dummy front” businesses to provide cover for money-washing and various kinds of international commerce. This is not exactly news, nor scandalous. It’s the sort of thing spy organizations would do; it helps them do their jobs.

Sometimes, though, one layer is not enough. As we also know from film and common sense, American spies are expected to survive rather intense interrogation. Given that we’ve learned something recently about the interrogation protocols of the CIA and the military in hellholes like Guantanamo, we might logically predict that America’s foreign enemies, of whom there are plenty, would not be shy about practicing this shit on us.

And so there are more layers. There is often more than a single cover story. There’s the one for the public, maybe it’ll work. If it doesn’t, there’s another one for the interrogators, or the congressional committees. If that doesn’t work, there are packets of disinformation, false clues, faked documents. I know, I know. This is all obvious but where the devil am I going with it?

Looking at Watergate, there are layers of stories, and it will be necessary to peel them back one at a time until there ain’t no more peelin’ to do or we can’t do it.

This post is about the first layer, the one the public heard about, what we knew, or thought we knew, at first. Now, of course, it sounds pretty ridiculous. I mean, who in the world would think these seven guys were doing this on their own? Seven lone nuts.

That was the White House’s story. Nixon’s flack, Ron Ziegler, called it a “third-rate burglary,” and the phrase stuck. In fact, the phrase itself turned out to have enormous power in the media and in the public mind. Only a crackpot would associate the President with this. It made no sense. After all, even if you hated Nixon, and many of us did, you had to admit that the chance of any Democratic candidate beating him, let alone George McGovern who, by the time of the Watergate break-in, was assured of the nomination, was essentially zero.

In retrospect, we know differently. But at the time, my fellow Americans, the vast majority of you bought the cover story. The congress didn’t even blink. The media diligently reported on the budget or something. Only a couple of writers at the Washington Post thought there might be something else. They were assisted in this enterprise by a mystery figure known only to Bob Woodward, who would meet him in parking garages.

Through the summer of 1972 and into the fall, beyond Nixon’s landslide re-election, the cover story held. Regardless of Woodward and Bernstein (and a few others), the country did not believe that Richard Nixon had known or approved of the clownish antics of these incompetent crooks.

Principal features of the story were these:

* Five men – Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzales, Frank Sturgis, and James McCord – had been caught inside the DNC. Two others – Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt – had been directing them.

* The burglars were independents, working for no one but themselves. They were anti-Castro extremists who didn’t trust the Democrats and wanted to get the goods on them.

* The burglars were also completely hapless. Although they had a lookout, Alfred Baldwin, posted across the street at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn, they would get no warning because they’d turned off their walkie-talkies. Although they had given their identification to Hunt for safekeeping, they retained their room keys at the Watergate Hotel, making it a cinch for the cops to I.D. them and find Hunt’s name in their personal phone books.

It must not be supposed that the first cover story, Nixon’s, would have combusted all by itself, even over time. Historically, the populations of great nations have nearly always bought their leaders’ propaganda. Even the persistence of Woodward and Bernstein might have faltered without Deep Throat, and Deep Throat by himself, whatever his motives, would not have been enough.

But in 1973, and thereafter, a chain of events, fortuitous disclosures, accidental slips of the tongue did break this story, and once they had run their course and all the President’s men had been indicted and Nixon himself driven from office under the virtual certainty of conviction in a Senate impeachment trial, the American people were left with a comfortable alternative: truth and justice had won, the nation had been saved.

I will argue that this alternative was also a cover story, more interesting and far more palatable than the first but a cover story nonetheless. This is so because that chain of events, when examined dispassionately, was neither accidental nor fortuitous. In the next post, we’ll look at these events, and behind them at the men who drove them.

(Note to readers: please bear with me. This is complicated stuff and I’ve got to root around in old files. The third post in this series will be available soon.)

On the night of June 17, 1972, police caught five burglars inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. By the following day, two others were being sought as accessories.

The public reaction of the Nixon Administration was a big yawn. This was a “third-rate burglary,” sneered press secretary Ron Ziegler. Privately, Nixon scrambled to cover-up his connection with the crime.

Over the next six months, despite a series of disclosures in the Washington Post, the harm seemed to have been contained. A grand jury indicted the five burglars, plus Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide. In early 1973, a trial convicted the seven defendants.

Then things began to happen. The trial judge, John Sirica, received a letter from one of the defendants, James McCord. Perjury had been committed in the trial, McCord wrote. This disclosure interested Sirica. It also interested a hastily-convened Senate committee headed by Carolina Senator Sam Ervin.

Within two years, pretty much everybody in the Nixon high command was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison, including his Attorney General, his campaign treasurer, his Chief of Staff, his head of domestic policy, and his personal lawyer. Nixon himself was impeached, resigning before the Senate could bring him to trial.

The history most people know about the Watergate scandal centers around the attempt by Nixon to cover-up the origin of the ‘Plumbers’ and its unravelling. The myth is that the President, vindictive and paranoid, had authorized a series of break-ins and other crimes in order to spy on and punish his enemies.

Of course, Nixon had done precisely that. He was a paranoid. He was vindictive. He tried to cover it up. So, how come I’m telling you that the public history is a myth?

In this and subsequent postings, I’m suggesting a re-examinination of the Watergate story. I’m offering details you may not remember or may not have heard of. And these details, all of them documented, if examined with an open mind and a neutral disposition, ought to be enough to thoroughly explode the comforting, fairytale beliefs which are taken to be historical truth in America.

I realize that some readers will react strongly to this series of articles. Anything which a reader might offer in the way of intelligent criticism or questioning is welcome. If someone wants to inquire where I got my information about, for example, Nixon’s attempts to blackmail the CIA, I’ll be happy to respond – this story is much too long and involved to try footnoting the text. However, I will continue my practice on this webLog of deleting snarky comments. If a reader/writer wants to charge me with membership in the tinfoil hat brigade, that’ll be erased. To paraphrase the great Scoop Nisker, if you don’t like what’s in my blog, go out and write one yourself.

So much for the preamble.

A close examination of the events surrounding Watergate and their chronological sequence inevitably raises a shitload of questions, significant questions, and these have never been answered, not in the congressional investigations, not in the media, and not in the sanctified version written by Woodward and Bernstein and turned into a great movie.

One of these questions, recently ‘answered’ in public via the deathbed statements of one Mark Felt, a former high-ranking FBI agent, was: Who was the source the Post reporters named “Deep Throat”? Perhaps, as the press seems to believe, this ties-up the most important loose end. That Felt was “Deep Throat” must be taken as presumptively true. Only Bob Woodward knows, and Woodward confirms it. But the real question here was not exactly “who” but “why,” and that question remains.

Other unanswered questions include these:

* What were the ‘Gemstone Files’ and what happened to them?

* What’s the story with the White House taping system? Who installed it? Who, if anyone, got direct feeds? Why didn’t Nixon simply destroy the tapes?

* Why had the burglars installed a bug on the phone of Spencer Oliver, a relatively minor DNC functionary?

* Why did James McCord tape open the basement lock at the Watergate horizontally, and why did he do it twice?

* What did Nixon mean when he said, “Hunt, you pick that scab and the whole Bay of Pigs thing will come out”?

* Why did Nixon believe that he could use an obscure reference to the “Bay of Pigs” to blackmail the CIA?

* Why and by whom was Vice President Agnew exposed for graft and forced to resign?

* Why was Yeoman First Class Charles E. Radford assigned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to operate as a spy inside Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council, and why did Radford steal documents from Kissinger’s briefcase? Why was he not prosecuted?

* Why did Nixon create the “Defense Investigative Service” and what was its function?

* Why did no CIA Director, neither Richard Helms or William Colby, ever meet with the President in the absence of Kissinger?

I think I can answer these questions. I also think that using this ‘new’ information to provide depth and substance to the bare-boned history of this national crisis may expose certain truths which are uncomfortable. God knows, I’m not especially confortable writing this stuff. All it does is invite people to tell me how nuts I must certainly be, and if you think that’s fun you should try it sometime.

But, uncomfortable or not, Americans are living in a political culture whose toxic features have infected every area of our national life. We cannot hope to fix it unless we understand it. We cannot hope to understand it unless we expose ourselves, with the fewest preconceptions we can manage, to the festering, obvious, unanswered questions which poison us.

The state of Georgia decided not to murder an innocent man today, well sort of. They decided not to murder him for at least a month.

The decision by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a last-day break, albeit temporary, to Troy Davis, convicted solely on eyewitness testimony for the killing, in August of 1989, of a police officer, one Mark MacPhail of the Savannah P.D. There had been no physical evidence. The prosecution had instead put nine people on the stand to identify or otherwise incriminate Davis. By the way, if you had any doubt about it, Davis is not white.

It looks as though the system isn’t perfect. Seven of the nine witnesses have now come forward to say that their testimony had been false, coerced by investigators to lie under oath. Other witnesses have now named a different killer.

Davis’ innocence is now so clearly established that William Sessions, a retired federal judge and former Director of the FBI, has written an editorial for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution demanding his release. “It would be intolerable to execute an innocent man,” Sessions wrote.

Turns out, however, that what one former FBI chief thinks is intolerable is easily tolerated by some. This would include Judge Penny Haas Freesemann of Chatham County Superior Court, who denied the defense motion for a new trial – a proceeding which would absolutely result in Davis’ release.

Davis’ lawyers won their client a month more to live, yet a month more in captivity for a crime he didn’t commit. They will appeal Freesemann’s decision to the State Supreme Court. We’ll see.

The problem is, a 1996 Federal law designed “to streamline the process” in death penalty cases – translation: execute them faster – holds that Davis’ case was now legally too far along to introduce new evidence. That’s what I said, and that’s what Freesemann said in rejecting the appeal, “legally too far along to introduce new evidence,” according to the New York Times.

An innocent man has been on death row since 1991, his conviction the direct product of suborning perjury and intimidation of witnesses. In anything resembling a democratic system Davis would be out of prison NOW, and the clowns still alive who rigged the trial would be on their way to lives behind bars.

So, we’ll see. In a system so transparently broken that a patently innocent man might still be executed because it’s too fucking late for the law to respect the truth, anything can happen. We are through the looking glass, people.

You’ve heard about this, the Louisiana Senator whose name turned up on the client list of a Washington, D.C. brothel. He has now, according to the Associated Press, “emerg(ed) from a week in seclusion.”

I suspect Senator Vitter was not entirely alone in his “seclusion.” I suspect he’s spent the past week with a few aides and p.r. flacks trying to figure out what the fuck to say in order to save his political career.

He appeared at a press conference, his wife Wendy grimacing at his side, although I concede she may have thought she was smiling. He denied charges that he also had a time of it with the local girls in New Orleans.

He said he’d committed “a very serious sin in my past,” presumably hoping everyone will view it as old news, as quickly as possible, while suggesting it was a lone indiscretion, “sin” singular. The phone records of the Washington operation show five calls to Vitter. We haven’t seen Vitter’s own records. Some singular sin, apparently.

The Senator also said, “I received forgiveness,” from whom it was not disclosed.

By the way, why in the world is it always some right-wing, Republican moralist getting nailed with hookers? Bet we know why. Uggghhhh.

And there’s a formula for dealing with this. You’ve sinned, but it was an abberration; you’ve found Jesus; you’ve asked God (and usually your wife) for forgiveness. You will forever more lead an exemplary life, the very life you’ve been preaching about from your first day on the first campaign trail. Even the guy in Nevada, or wherever it was, got away with it and in his case his proclivities had included homosexuality and illicit drugs.

But they are all liars, aren’t they? Because if they weren’t, if any of these hypocritical pricks actually had an epiphany, he would’ve come back to the world a bit less doctrinaire about sin. Maybe he’d find his heart opened a little bit to the differences, the “mistakes” in others.

I’m afraid, Senator, that this makes at least two sins.

When I was in high school, back when America was still young, a teacher wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper purporting to take a racist viewpoint but so dripping with satire that no one, he thought, could mistake his intentions. He was amazed, he later told me, when a Marin County resident phoned him with urgent advice that he keep quiet. “I agree with you, Al,” he said, “but we can’t say those things in public.”

That was more than forty years ago. Today those things, and worse, are said in public, in fact in syndicated newspaper columns and radio programs. People who speak approvingly of murder are lionized (Time Magazine ran Coulter on its cover). Hatred, pure, sick hatred, is now mainstream.

There was recently a public fast in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza by supporters of immigration reform, many of them, I’m happy to say, students. The demonstrators support the legislation, originally introduced in Congress in 2001 and now a part of the stalled immigration bill, which would make available several paths to citizenship – including pursuit of higher education or military service – for illegal residents.

This student action was greeted by nationally-syndicated radio hack Michael Savage (a Marin County resident, God help us) with this statement:

“I say let them fast until they starve to death... because then we won’t have a problem about giving them green cards...”

Savage then compared the students to terrorists, called them thieves for “stealing” education from the United States, and suggested that they “go make a bomb where you came from.”

The San Francisco Chronicle ran this story on the same page as the story of the Roa family. No doubt these are the sort of people Savage is talking about.

17-month-old Hazelle Roa underwent a two-hour surgical procedure at UCSF to try to correct a rare genetic abnormaility which threatens her life. She will need continuing care at UC, and doctors there note that she could probably not receive such care were she forced to leave the country. According to Dr. Stephen Wilson, medical director of inpatient pediatrics at UC, says, “Hazelle actually needs a team of doctors, as her condition affacts everything in her life, the way she eats, drinks, and sleeps.”

Hazelle is an American citizen, but her parents are not. Seventeen years ago, Victor and Maria Roa crossed the border and sought political asylum. They were ultimately turned down and ordered to leave the country in November, 2004, but the Roas stayed. Now, as Hazelle underwent surgery, her parents sat inside UCSF’s Children’s Hospital, under an order from Immigration authorities to surrender within two weeks for deportation to Mexico.

Their attorney, David Lumas, has been able to raise enough of a stink about all of this that the deportation order has, at the last minute, been suspended for a year. But the order remains, and the strain this has placed on Hazelle’s parents, on top of their hopes and fears for their daughter, is clearly terrible.

There is a seventeen-month-old girl. She is an American citizen. If she is forced to leave the country she will probably die because the care she needs would probably not be available anywhere else. The government has told her parents that in order for her life to be saved they must abandon her. She has no other relatives in the United States.

Maybe it was Lumas’ relentless advocacy which bought them some time. Maybe there were people somewhere in I.C.E. – Jesus, what an apt abbreviation – whose hearts were forced open, or who simply gagged on the sheer fucking horror being visited upon this family. Don’t know. Maybe the powers-that-be are only waiting for a little time to pass, for Hazelle to reach two-and-one-half before they kick her parents out.

I understand the argument, of course, because, cold as it is it is based on ineluctable fact. We’re sorry, they say, but it’s the parents’ fault. They chose to live here illegally. They chose to have their daughter here after their pleas for asylum had been turned down. It’s too bad about the daughter, but why should the rest of us pay for the medical care she’s getting? The law’s the law. These people are criminals.

Yup, criminals. And how come? Because although they are otherwise law-abiding, otherwise hard-working, tax-paying human beings, the United States was only joking about that “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We don’t want them.

Oh, sure, we want them, but only to the point of picking the crops, doing our laundry, taking care of our kids, cleaning our houses. But we don’t want the extras. We don’t want their families, their social groups, their culture. The political difficulty is, of course, how to make sure white people, mainly rich, can continue to make use of the services of “illegals” while keeping them in fear of deportation.

Hazelle Roa and her parents are actual people. Human beings. You know, who have hopes for themselves and their child, who have dreams, who want to make a better life. And it seems to me impossible for anyone who understands this simple fact to want to harm them.

California once belonged to native American tribes. Then came the Spanish, as conquerors. Eventually, along came whitey. There is a border between Mexico and the United States. This was established after a lot of shooting and bloodshed and stupidity little more than a century ago. It is an artificial boundary of course, because we are no longer living in the industrial age, because it’s one planet. Kids intuitively recognize this because they’re born into a world suddenly wired; they hear music and experience other aspects of cultures everywhere. Some of them fast for the rights of immigrants, to summon us to pay attention to the human cost of racism and hypocrisy.

Hatred is on the ascendency these days. There are times like that. We’ve got to make a conscious effort to move the winds a little bit in the other direction. And try, even in the face of daily provocation and the stories about families like the Roas, to be patient, because hatred always loses.

Okay, now I'm really stunned. The Google ads (which I've raged about before) do provide me with free space for this Log, I understand that, but one of the links attached to my last piece offers the reader a chance to get the words of Ann Fucking Coulter delivered to his or her email in-basket every week! Actually, "Fucking" is not her middle name. Her middle name is Bunny.

In the event you've missed the rise of this steaming heap of shit with earrings, Coulter's schtick is to advocate murder. Not just any murder. She's selective. She only wants to kill "liberals," whom she considers "traitors," as a "lesson" to anyone who may want to dissent from war and its perpetrators. She would also like to kill the President of Venezuela and former Senator John Edwards.

Ann Coulter, former cover girl for Time Magazine, the morals of Hitler and the face of the horse which won the Belmont Stakes this year. Thanks, Google! Next: a chance to sign up for a free facial abrasion and multiple contusions.

I’ve been engaging in a heated email exchange with an old friend lately. This fellow, an otherwise intelligent and ordinarly articulate academic back East, has expressed a point of view about the political assassinations of the ‘60s which pissed me off, and we’ve been lobbing ordnance at each other via email.

It’s fun, in a distracting sort of way, but difficult for me to maintain interest. To begin with, I finally finished a book I’ve been writing for at least ten years, a novel, in which the facts of Dallas, Memphis, and L.A. are laid out as well as I can manage them, without unnecessary detail and without footnotes, and I am now officially tired of writing about it. Plus, so much has been revealed over the years that not too many sentient beings still retain the weird religious belief that the Official Stories of these murders bear the slightest resemblance to reality.

Likewise, those among us who have lived long enough to compare recollections of America forty years ago are unanimous in understanding that control of the country has been passed not, as JFK once declared, to a new generation, but from a rich amalgam of competing economic and social forces to a darker, interconnected gang of the obscenely-wealthy and the obscenely powerful.

How we got here is a sensational tragedy, historically worthy of comparison to the beginning-of-the-end struggles in Rome. Writers have found in the collapse of that empire material enough for thousands of books. Future writers will paw through the rubble of this one, trying to figure it out. Well, cultures evolve but political states unravel, and there are moments, places in time, in which balances shift and the ground falls sharply away.

Those who trace the political struggle for control of America’s empire will fix on at least three places in time for its fall. The first was the coup in Dallas. The second, in 1968, saved the coup and removed significant opposition. The third, ah, the third stroke of political violence – this time without the bullets – was the removal of Richard Nixon from the presidency.

I understand that you are asking what the fuck I could possibly mean by this. We all know about Nixon, right? Invading Cambodia. Kent State. Breaking-and-entering. Spying on everybody. Nixon was no left-winger, no threat to the status quo, no danger to the boys in the back room. So how in the world can I suggest that there might be a connection between Watergate and the assassinations of the 1960s?

I can suggest it because there are a few things you might not know about Watergate. And though it’s true that the mass media operate principally as carnival barker, plenty of really interesting things have been lying, as one might say, in plain view.

People don’t argue much about Dallas anymore. It’s not only obvious, it’s also hard to imagine doing anything about it. Probably nobody can do anything about Watergate, either. Nixon’s dead. Helms is dead. Hoover’s dead, thank God. But Watergate turns out to be anything but obvious, and maybe we can have an interesting argument about it. Stay tuned.

Good news on the legal front: the federal government’s secret police, those agencies who protect our rights by removing them with dull knives, cleansing them of all utility, then re-inserting them rectally, now have judicial permission to “monitor” our computer use and determine the email addresses and Web pages we are contacting, according to the happy harlots seated as judges in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

They do not need a warrant for these intrusions because, says the Court, they are not actually “searches” under the meaning of the Constitution.

Let’s see: prying open your email is not actually a “search” because email is already out there in public. If you hang your laundry out on a line to dry, it’s fair game. Coming soon: a high court ruling that your pants are subject to a little ‘look-see’ by the cops because your pants are worn in public. Likewise: your nose. Few things are as public as your nose, even if you aren’t Michael Jackson. New technology will enable the feds to snip off a few stray hairs inside a nostril, you won’t even notice, which may then be checked against the almost limitless database for matching DNA and traces of illicit pharmaceuticals.

McLuhan predicted that in the electric age the computer would be an extension of our central nervous system in the same way that the road was an extension of our feet in the industrial, post-agrarian age way back when. It is therefore, according to the gang in the black robes, publicly available.

Don’t worry, Americans. Your thoughts – at least until the chip implants – are your private affair; it’s only if you utter them that they may be used against you. The Fourth Amendment, and the Fifth, gone in one easy step. See? You didn’t even feel it.

If you want a webLog, you have a choice. You can pay a monthly fee, or not. I've chosen not. When you choose not, you get a bunch of Google ads evidently selected based on either keywords or recent postings. The good news is that, on the evidence thusfar available, no human is involved in the process.

I say this because – and here's the bad news – my most recent entry was trailed by the following Google links.

One reads: "CIA Career Training. Earn a degree in criminal justice and become a CIA Agent."

A glance at my writings ought to alert even the most casual reader to my disinclination to regard the CIA as anything other than a police operation which, perpetually violating its own charter, has done great harm to the country. I would not recommend that any actual human enlist in it.

It's also interesting to examine the peculiar logic here. The CIA may not act as a domestic police force. It is against federal law, even under the clever maneuver in terrorism-obsessed America of combining existing agencies into Homeland Security. Of course, in a land so paralyzed with fear and constantly urged to feel better through rabid consumption and a vast array of wonder drugs, nobody thinks too much about things like this, especially the cowards in the Congress.

And, there is a second link, this one to a tale of a man who "says he killed JFK," and his name turns out to be: Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Is that perfect, or what?

There's a felt need these days, on account of several new books, video on the web, and the still dim but growing recognition that the present national mess has had its antecedents in murders forty years ago, to counteract Kennedy-related disclosures. There's also the simple fact that the public needs reinforcement for its hatred of Muslims and arabs.

Looks as though the CIA's notorious mind-control experiments, first exposed to brief public view by the Church Committee in the 1970s, are coming along nicely.

So, my friends, you can either ignore these Google ad links or enjoy them as the satire they would no doubt be, were they not so crazy.

From Bill Quigley, writing in TruthOut:

“An all white jury sitting before white judge agrees with white prosecutor and all white witnesses and convicts black youth in racially charged high school criminal case.

“In a small, still mostly segregated, section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the "white tree" at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree. The white jury and white prosecutor and all white supporters of the white victim were all on one side of the courtroom. The black defendant, 17-year-old Mychal Bell, and his supporters were on the other. The jury quickly convicted Mychal Bell of two felonies - aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Bell, who was a 16-year-old sophomore football star at the time he was arrested, faces up to 22 years in prison. Five other black youths await similar trials on second-degree attempted murder and conspiracy charges.”

The 4th of July. Just another nine-day-weekend now that the marketers got hold of it. Like Presidents’ Day. Come on down and make a great deal on a new Toyota.

There was a time when the Louisiana story would’ve flashed across the country. There would’ve been marches. Students, white and black, would’ve put their asses on the line. Political leaders would’ve stood up, maybe not all of them but enough to put some heat on the crazy racist fuckers who generate these conditions and the dignified legal apparatus which ratifies them.

Not any more, I guess. Martin Luther King, Jr. would’ve been there, you know. But he’s dead. So are the Kennedys. So are we, pretty soon now.

One thing we can say about that rabid usurper in the Oval Office, when he wants to he can move fast. At 11:13, Pacific Daylight Time, TruthOut reported that Scooter Libby would have to begin his prison sentence immediately. At 3:05, Buzzflash confirmed it. At 3:32, Bush ‘commuted’ this felon’s sentence.

We’ve obviously got a President who can act when he really needs to. Of course, if it was only the Twin Towers that got hit by airplanes, he’d still be reading “My Pet Goat.”

Maybe George didn’t fully trust Scooter’s staying power. One day in the slammer and the little prick might’ve begun singing and who knows WHERE that could’ve gone? Hell, we might’ve seen Cheney get fitted for the kind of pinstripes where you are no longer in an undisclosed location.

After all, what happened was that the administration, almost certainly Bush and Cheney, decided to get even with the Wilson family by blowing the cover of Valerie Plame. Plame had been working on the matter of Saudi Arabian weaponry. The Bush-Cheney vendetta caused a major CIA program, years in the making, to crash and burn. Ordinarily, this would be treated as treason. Under federal law, these jokers were entitled to thirty years worth of busting rocks.

Justice in America. It makes my heart sing!

The Chronicle headline read: “CIA quits resisting, lets old skeletons out of the closet.”
The Washington Post declared: “CIA TO REVEAL ‘SKELETONS’”.
I said: “Are you friggin’ kidding me?”

The day that the most feared secret police organization in the world voluntarily lets its ‘skeletons’ out of the closet will be the day pigs fly.

It would be unseemly to attempt an analysis of why the CIA would release the documents it is making public, so I’ll have a whack at it.

It’s a clearly political decision, first of all, and one which is viewed internally at Langley as beneficial to the Agency and its operations. What might serve the CIA in exposing its own long-held secrets?

Here’s what’s not possible: the impetus to make a clean breast of things.

Here’s what is:

The unveiling of a mixed bag, some legitimate, some more, uh, recently manufactured. It’s been reported that some documents relate to the Nixon Administration and the “Watergate” scandal. There is extensive material regarding E. Howard Hunt, who in the typical, uninspired – or just plain lazy – media account, was merely “a former CIA agent” (in the L.A. Times piece). The juiciest morsel apparently is that Hunt is said once to have approached an Agency source asking if he might be provided with the name of a good lockpicker.

Several perhaps salient points:

1.E. Howard Hunt was not an ordinary “ex-agent.” He was almost certainly not “ex-” in practice. He had been CIA Station chief in Mexico City and, later, head of domestic intelligence (an interesting position given the fact that it was illegal for the CIA to engage in domestic operations).

2. E. Howard Hunt would not have had to approach some CIA guy to locate a lockpicker. He’d been working with these guys for twenty years. He already knew Virgilio Martinez, the eventual Watergate operations lockpicker, and had worked with him in dozens of previous operations. This particular memo is a blind.

3. There have been public statements made by Hunt’s son, who had numerous late-in-life conversations with him, concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and Hunt’s possible role in it. Hunt wrote his own book, and named a few names of CIA officials involved in Dallas. Hunt was careful, however, to exhonerate Richard Helms, who was in 1963 in a key position in domestic operations, and who had become, at the time of Watergate, CIA Director.

4. In a recent book by David Talbot, called “Brothers: the hidden history of the Kennedy years,” there is substantial documentary evidence showing that the top guys at CIA were wiretapping and otherwise bugging the conversations of President Kennedy and that the Agency was therefore privy to considerable information about Kennedy which must have deeply alarmed it.

5. At the very end of Nixon’s presidency, as he tried to fight off impeachment, he attempted to blackmail the CIA, specifically Helms, by using a reference to E. Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Helms later testified before a congressional committee that he did not know to what Nixon might have been referring when the blackmail note was verbally delivered by Lt. General Vernon Walters, Nixon’s emissary. Nixon’s attempt did not work and Helms finished the job.

What I’m getting at is this: the CIA is not exposing itself. It is covering itself. It is engaging in a form of information control which is familiar to every working politician (and everybody selling anything via a major corporation): give ‘em a couple of half truths, toss in a big lie or two, make up the history you want America to believe.