The Missing 18 (& Other Evidentiary Gaps)

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The Missing 18 (& Other Evidentiary Gaps)

Postby zuestorz » Tue Feb 17, 2009 2:42 pm

I couldn't see this linked anywhere on the board or posted about elsewhere so here it is - a nice compendia of cases where evidence goes absent. Jim Marrs essay from Russ Kick's book.

What’s Missing from This Picture?
Category: News and Politics
The following is an essay from renowned conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs titled "What’s Missing from This Picture?" available in the newly released Disinformation anthology You Are STILL Being Lied To edited by Russ Kick. Look for more essays from this great read to be posted here on MySpace in the weeks to come:


Through the years, controversies have continually raged over some of the most painful and traumatic events in United States history.

There have been ongoing arguments over who was behind the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, as well as the truth of what really happened in Waco and Oklahoma City and many more recent events.

The poor public has been buffeted by a barrage of neatly-packaged government pronouncements and by ever-broadening conspiracy theories.

What’s missing from this picture?

Only the proof, the hard evidence.

Yes, the information which could prove the truth behind these events has gone missing, and the corporate-controlled news media do not seem overly interested. They appear strangely unable or unwilling to dig into these issues or report them with any clarity. So the public has been left at the mercy of private researchers, many diligent and objective, others less so.


Lincoln

Take the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, for example. It is an historical fact that Lincoln’s death was the result of a large conspiracy involving actor John Wilkes Booth, Confederate agents, a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle, and, according to a credible mass of evidence, even persons within Lincoln’s own administration.

The facts of this conspiracy may never be fully known since much of the vital evidence in the case went missing. This included the body of the man—identified as Booth—killed in a Virginia barn, as well as eighteen critical pages of Booth’s diary.

The body of the man thought to be Booth was hustled to Washington and quickly buried after a physician who had briefly lanced a boil on Booth’s neck more than a year earlier first denied the body was Booth but later tentatively made an identification. The body was quickly buried in a prison yard and later sunk in the Potomac River to prevent any possible review.

Booth’s diary was taken by Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, and later released as evidence.

But eighteen pages were missing!

Years later, the missing pages, which incriminated not only Northern Radical Republicans and speculator Jay Gould but Stanton himself, were discovered among Stanton’s possessions.

Unfortunately, though, most missing evidence is never found.


Nixon

During the Watergate scandal, it was not eighteen pages but eighteen minutes of recording tape that proved the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon.

“Tricky Dick,” as he was being called by his enemies, told a national TV audience, “I am not a crook!” But, after his Oval Office tapes were released, the swear words, racial epithets, and political scheming proved unacceptable to his mainstream supporters. One critical conversation dealing with his foreknowledge of the Watergate break-in was of particular interest to the special prosecutor assigned to this case.

But eighteen minutes on the tape are missing!

Nixon, under threat of impeachment, resigned in disgrace.


Johnson

Missing evidence has become a hallmark of American politics. Apparently the idea is that, circumstances notwithstanding, if there’s no proof then there can be no guilt.

An example of this tactic came early in the career of Lyndon B. Johnson, whose entire political life was surrounded by controversy and allegations of criminal behavior.

From the infamous stolen election of 1948 to the murder-for-hire death of a golf pro despised by Johnson for courting his sister, Johnson had come under investigation by several Texas authorities including Frank L. Scofield, then Austin District Collector for the IRS.

Scofield was accused of forcing political contributions from his employees (a minor infraction of the law) just as he had amassed a quantity of evidence against Johnson. Scofield was eventually cleared of this charge, but in the meantime, his replacement placed all of Johnson’s files in a Quonset hut in South Austin. Within days, the prefab structure mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground.

The incriminating evidence became missing!

Johnson, of course, went on to become President upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy.


JFK

The Kennedy assassination, too, is replete with missing data. Not just a few government or intelligence files, but even some of the most vital evidence, including a critical part of Kennedy, is gone.

Although Naval Technician Paul O’Connor said Kennedy’s cranial cavity was empty when the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, autopsy records indicate his brain was routinely sectioned and fixed in formaldehyde. Today, any competent forensic pathologist would be able to determine how many shots penetrated the brain and from which direction they came.

But Kennedy’s brain is missing!

Tissue samples from Kennedy’s body and color slides of his autopsy, all evidence vital to determining the number and trajectory of the bullets, are also missing. Many files on accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and his connection to US intelligence, as well his Civil Air Patrol youth leader and Mafia/CIA pilot David Ferrie, turned up missing. Even a half-dozen frames from the famed Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination are missing, thus altering the time frame of the film, making it useless as a true timetable of the shooting.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, nearly his entire Cabinet was high over the Pacific on a flight to Japan. When word came of the Dallas shooting, the powerful passengers onboard dithered for more than an hour while searching for the code book which would have allowed them encrypted communication with Washington.

But the code book was missing!

The Cabinet members finally radioed in using standard open frequencies and were told the situation was under control in Washington.

Newly released documents from the National Archives, missed by researchers for years, have given the public even further revelations about Kennedy’s death.

One of the revelations involved missing words which may have changed the verdict of history. The initial Warren Commission Report stated, “A bullet entered his back at a point slightly below the shoulder to the right of the spine.” This statement conformed to both the medical and eyewitness evidence. However, then-Representative Gerald Ford, the only US President appointed to office, directed that the wording be changed to, “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” This subtle change of wording has allowed champions of the government version of the assassination to argue that a single bullet caused all of Kennedy’s body wounds and thus supports the idea that all shots were fired by a lone assassin. This conclusion is untenable when the basic facts behind the report are studied.

In 1999 the National Archives released documents that showed the expensive bronze casket used to transport Kennedy’s body from Dallas to Bethesda was unceremoniously and secretly dumped in the Atlantic Ocean in 9,000 feet of water off the Maryland-Delaware coast in early 1966.

The casket had been missing since 1964, and General Services Administration (GSA) officials claimed as late as 1998 that they didn’t know what happened to it.

This destruction of evidence reportedly was at the request of the President’s brother, Robert. However, the dumping was authorized by then-Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, the same person mentioned in an FBI memo from Director J. Edgar Hoover issued just two days after JFK’s assassination. The memo read, “The thing I am most concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” Never mind about a true investigation.

Katzenbach, in a February 11, 1966, letter to the GSA ordering the casket’s disposal, stated, “I am unable to conceive of any manner in which the casket could have an evidentiary value nor can I conceive of any reason why the national interest would require its preservation.”

One reason might have been that the documents stated the bronze coffin was replaced by a mahogany one because it was damaged.

Damaged? This was a brand-new casket ordered from the Vernon O’Neal Funeral Home in Dallas upon Kennedy’s death. After placing the President’s body in it at Parkland Hospital, it was loaded into an O’Neal ambulance and taken to Dallas Love Field, where it was carefully loaded onto Air Force One. Upon landing at Dulles Airport, it was lowered to a waiting ambulance by a mechanical lift. When did it become damaged and why?

Another most pertinent reason becomes clear in considering the arguments by many assassination researchers who point to glaring discrepancies in the accounts of JFK’s wounds and the disposition of the body between Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the naval hospital where his autopsy was performed by inexperienced military doctors under the close direction of senior military officers.

Parkland witnesses said Kennedy’s nude body was wrapped in a sheet and carefully placed in the bronze casket. Several medical technicians at Bethesda said JFK’s body arrived there wrapped in a rubber body bag inside a slate-gray military shipping casket.

Through the years, a strong argument has been made for the alteration of Kennedy’s wounds while in transit, and the casket could possibly have settled the issue.

But by 1966, the casket, as well as any public discourse on this matter, was missing!

Such missing evidence allowed Ford to state repeatedly, “We could find no evidence of conspiracy.” It has also allowed various authors, untroubled by this obvious destruction and suppression of evidence, to present a reasonable argument that Oswald acted alone and that any idea to the contrary is simply “conspiracy theory.”


RFK

The same pattern of missing evidence was seen in the June 4, 1968, assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, gunned down in the kitchen of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel minutes after he had received the California Democratic Primary presidential nomination, which most pundits declared would have cinched his place on the national ticket.

Unlike his brother’s assassination, in which no one actually saw Oswald firing a gun, RFK’s death was immediately attributed to a nondescript Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan was in the kitchen firing a .22-caliber pistol and was quickly wrestled to the floor by bystanders including pro football players.

It appeared to be an open and shut case. But then Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, the world-class county coroner who autopsied RFK, testified under oath that the fatal shot, which entered behind his right ear at a steep upward angle, came from a distance of less than one inch. Sirhan was never closer than about six feet in front of the senator.

However, a private security guard named Thane Cesar was walking by Kennedy’s right side. Cesar also was carrying a .22-caliber pistol and according to witness Don Schulman, drew his weapon during the shooting. Cesar’s clip-on black necktie apparently was pulled from his shirt as Kennedy fell to the floor and can be seen lying beside the stricken senator in photos.

Cesar, who has admitted drawing his pistol that night but denied shooting RFK, initially said he had sold the .22 pistol shortly before the assassination but later decided he had sold it after the assassination. When the weapon was traced to its new owner, the Arkansas man said it had been stolen in a burglary shortly after Cesar was finally questioned by authorities.

This key piece of evidence is missing!

Other evidence indicated that more than one gunman was involved in the RFK shooting. Sirhan carried an eight-shot revolver. Two slugs were recovered from Kennedy’s body, and another five from other victims. An eighth slug passed through ceiling panels. Two additional shots were found in the kitchen’s door frame and were actually identified as bullet holes in official LAPD and FBI photos. But LAPD officials, after some foot-dragging, finally admitted they destroyed the door and ceiling panels, and no one could locate records of tests conducted on these extraneous bullet holes.

The evidence is missing!

One news photographer who was in the kitchen had his photos, which might have clarified the matter, confiscated by the LAPD. He fought in court for years to have them returned, fearing they might join an estimated 2,500 RFK-assassination photographs unaccountably destroyed just three months after the event. But when a court ordered his pictures returned, a courier was sent to the state capitol at Sacramento to retrieve them from state archives. They were stolen from his car.

These photos are now missing!

In 1988 Professor Philip H. Melanson surveyed released LAPD files on RFK’s assassination and concluded that much of the material, especially that suggesting a conspiracy, had disappeared.


Vietnam

Soon after the assassination of RFK and Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam conflict, the anti-war movement began to gain strength. Its youthful leaders made many attempts to discover from government documents which persons were responsible for the debacle in Vietnam. But, to their chagrin, they found many of the government files detailing our involvement in Southeast Asia, as well as the killing of students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State, were not available.

They’re missing!

Only after Daniel Ellsberg made the Pentagon Papers public did some of the historical holes begin to be filled.


Military Scandals

One stumbling block to investigating military-related issues and scandals was a fire which in 1973 swept through a portion of the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, destroying many personnel records. This one fire impeded investigations for years for, while it only affected certain Air Force records, it permitted the federal authorities to plead ignorance of several military whistleblowers.

Their records are missing!


MK-ULTRA

The tactic of disappearing evidence has proved even better than foot-dragging during investigations into government wrongdoing. Former CIA Director William Colby explained that during inquiries into assassination plots during the 1970s, CIA officers warned him that “…Congress could not be trusted with intelligence secrets, that release to it was the equivalent to release to the world at large. And still others…asserted that each item that the investigators requested should be fought over tenaciously and turned over only when there was no alternative.”

This “defend the bunker” mentality continued during investigations into the CIA’s fatal experiments with mind control.

Carrying forward the work of Nazi psychologists in concentration camps, the CIA’s mind control experiments, collectively coded MK-ULTRA, began as far back as 1953. According to author Walter H. Bowart, its purpose was “to devise operational techniques to disturb the memory, to discredit people through aberrant behavior, to alter sex patterns, to elicit information and to create emotional dependence.”

Many researchers contend that Sirhan Sirhan is an assassin created by mind control, since he has repeatedly said he cannot remember what happened in the Ambassador Hotel and wrote strange words, including mention of the “Illuminati,” in a repetitive manner in his personal notebook. When a horrified public finally learned of the mind-control experiments, some of them fatal to people involved, standard government methodology came into play. Memories faded and filing cabinets were emptied.

Former CIA Director Richard Helms, who admitted not revealing CIA assassination plots to the Warren Commission because he was not asked the right questions, also suffered a lapse of memory regarding mind control. He did recall, however, that a majority of MK-ULTRA documents were destroyed on his orders in an effort to solve a “burgeoning paper problem.”

So the crucial documents are missing!

With little paper trail and faulty memories, no one was ever jailed over these criminally harmful experiments.


Pan Am 103

Space does not permit the detailed enumeration of evidence and documentation missing from federal government filing cabinets, safes, and archives.

But one further example would have to be the materials, including a briefcase, recovered by CIA agents following the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 near Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. The agents reportedly were on the crash scene before many rescue workers and firefighters.

Barron’s, the mainstream business publication, ran a story in 1990 stating that the flight carried CIA officers and that terrorists had substituted a suitcase-bomb for an identical suitcase containing a CIA-approved heroin shipment. By several reports, as many as eight CIA agents, some of whom reportedly were making an unauthorized return to the United States to blow the whistle on the drug smuggling, were killed in the crash. The story remains in controversy due to lack of evidence.

Of course, the briefcase, reportedly containing proof of the plot, was missing!


TWA 800

In another plane disaster—the crash of TWA Flight 800, which killed 230 people when the Boeing 747 crashed off Long Island on July 17, 1996—missing evidence again became the rule rather than the exception.

Many witnesses said they saw strange lights in the sky and a fiery trail reaching upward from the ground to the plane just prior to the crash. Within 24 hours, Congressman Michael P. Forbes of New York told CNN that the craft’s flight data recorder, popularly known as the black box, had been recovered. Federal authorities quickly denied this.

So, during the first critical days, the black box was missing!

Six days later, federal officials acknowledged obtaining the box. But even then, there were signs that data on the device had been altered, according to Kelly O’Meara, a former congressional chief of staff turned journalist.

O’Meara also doggedly sought radar logs for the time of the TWA 800 crash.

Officials of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the radar data were unavailable—missing!

When the missing data finally turned up, they showed a large number of ships concentrated in the area of the crash, a fact totally contrary to initial government pronouncements that only two military vessels were in the area at the time.

Other evidence went missing when FBI agents took pieces of the plane’s wreckage to Washington rather than to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which was charged with investigating the crash. The families of French passengers killed in the crash hired a lawyer, who argued their belief that US government officials lied about significant facts of the case and were withholding critical documents. Senior NTSB Investigator Henry F. Hughes testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1999 that federal agents and officials tampered with the wreckage, destroyed and altered evidence, mishandled forensic evidence, and failed to establish a chain of evidence in connection with passenger autopsies.

The transcripts containing his statements are missing!

The Senate committee was still withholding transcripts of their hearings as of mid-2000, prompting charges of a cover-up. Even Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for a new investigation, stating, “It absolutely deserves more investigation—a lot more. This time, I wouldn’t let the FBI do it. I’d have the NTSB do it. I think Congress certainly should get more answers from the FBI.”


Space Photos

Even issues not involving deaths include missing evidence. In May 1963, US astronaut Gordon Cooper became the first human to orbit the Earth an astounding 22 times. In a recent book, he detailed how these early spacecraft carried cameras with telephoto lenses of such high resolution they were capable of taking “some unbelievable close-ups of car license plates.” Yet today the low-resolution photos of the notorious “Face on Mars” and anomalies on the moon presented to the public by NASA were made by cameras which cannot seem to focus on anything smaller than the size of a football stadium.

The high-resolution photos are missing!


**********


Two events of the 1990s most traumatic to the American public were the 1993 deaths at the Branch Davidian home in Waco and the 1995 deaths caused by the explosion of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

In both instances, the primary evidence should have been the remaining structures, which could have been studied for years by both official and unofficial investigators to determine the truth of those tragedies. But both structures were bulldozed and covered with earth by federal government personnel before any independent probe could be launched. And within hours of the Oklahoma City explosion, work crews were filling in the bomb crater.

The primary evidence became missing!


Waco

The tragically fatal events in Waco began with the February 28, 1993, assault by federal agents on the church home of the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas, and ended with the deaths of 84 persons, including four agents and about 21 children.

The fiery end of a 51-day siege on April 19 followed a full-scale attack, complete with special forces snipers, helicopters, and tanks. Despite repeated claims by the government that the Davidians, under the charismatic leadership of David Koresh, committed suicide and torched their own home, troubling questions continued to be raised for years afterward.

For example, someone—no one seems to know exactly who—ordered the refrigeration unit shut off on the truck containing the burnt corpses of the Davidians. The Texas heat quickly caused such decomposition that it was difficult, if not impossible, for autopsy doctors to determine if bullets, rather than the fire, caused their deaths.

Once again, the best evidence is missing!

The Davidians adamantly charged the federal officers with firing the first shots, while the feds claimed just the opposite. If the feds fired first, then any action taken by the Davidians to protect themselves was permissible under existing law. If the Davidians fired first, then they are guilty of firing on law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties and arguably brought ruin on themselves. The debate continues to this day, despite the year 2000 seeing a civil court decision and a Justice Department special counsel report absolving the federal government of any responsibility in the deaths.

One item of evidence might have brought out the truth of this issue—one of the bullet-riddled front doors to the Davidian home and church.

But the door is missing!

According to the testimony of a Texas state trooper, the door may have been taken by federal agents. Testifying in the wrongful death civil suit brought against the US government by surviving Davidians, Sergeant David Keys testified that he saw an object the size of a door being loaded into a U-Haul truck by federal agents just prior to the crime scene being turned over for security to the Texas Department of Public Safety. The seventeen-year law enforcement veteran also said he saw what appeared to be a body spirited away in a government vehicle and overheard FBI agents telling of a “firefight” at the rear of the home at the time of the fatal fire.

Federal agents have always claimed that no shots were fired at the Davidians after the initial February 28 assault. But then they also claimed that no incendiary devices were used at the time of the fiery destruction of the building. However, after Texas authorities in 1999 announced the presence of pyrotechnic devices in the Waco evidence they were holding for the federal government, the FBI finally acknowledged that “a limited number” of military M651 incendiary rounds were fired during the final assault.

Furthermore, a Texas Rangers report released in 1999 stated that three-dozen spent rifle shell casings were found in an outpost used by federal agents during the siege. Although a government spokesman claimed the casings were left over from the initial assault, others saw the late arrival of this report as suppression of evidence.

Lead Davidian attorney Michael Caddell argued that photographs, some taken by Texas troopers and turned over the FBI, as well as others, could have established who started the fatal fire in the Davidian home.

But the photographs are missing!

“The pattern of the photographs produced [in the civil trial] by the FBI suggests only one thing,” said Caddell: “The FBI has turned over only those photographs to the court and the press that the FBI wants the court and the public to see.”

Two experts in infrared photography who might have settled the question of whether or not federal agents caused the deaths of the Davidians by pinning them inside the burning home with gunfire were missing from the civil court trial—one stricken by a stroke and the other found dead.

Dr. Edward Allard, who, as a holder of three patents on FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) technology, had been considered one of the world’s leading experts on infrared imaging systems, nearly died from a stroke before he could testify in the Waco civil suit. Allard had analyzed FLIR tapes made by the British Special Air Service (SAS), who taped the final assault while working for the FBI during the 1993 siege. He concluded that the video clearly showed persons firing into the Davidian home/church. He was quoted as saying, “This type of behavior, men running up and down the building, firing automatic weapons into a church is disgusting.”

With Dr. Allard out of the picture, the Davidians turned to Carlos Ghigliotti, another infrared expert who had been retained by the US House Government Reform Committee investigating the Waco case.

According to friend and attorney David T. Hardy, Ghigliotti owned Infrared Technologies Corporation and had spent months studying the infrared tapes made by the SAS. Hardy said Ghigliotti had verified nearly 200 gunshots from federal agents on the tape and had said the Waco FLIR would probably be the next Zapruder film.

But before the Waco civil case began, Ghigliotti turned up missing!

Not for long, though. A building manager, concerned that Ghigliotti had not been seen in weeks, notified police in Laurel, Maryland, who discovered Ghigliotti’s badly decomposed body in his home, which doubled as his office.

Laurel Police spokesman Jim Collins initially said, “We’re investigating it as a homicide.” But later, with no signs of a break-in or a struggle, investigators concluded that no foul play had been involved.

There was no apparent foul play either in the sudden death of longtime Waco Sheriff Jack Harwell, one of the only authorities involved in the Davidian siege who offered any sympathy for the religious group. Even while the siege was underway, Harwell consistently stated that he had experienced no problems with David Koresh and his followers in the past. He said whenever he wanted to speak with Koresh, he would call him on the phone and Koresh would come to his office.

According to Clive Doyle, the last Davidian to escape the blazing home, Harwell had called him just prior to the civil trial and said that the death of the Davidian children was starting to weigh on him and asked for a meeting with Doyle to talk about the case and “some other things.”

There was no meeting, and the sheriff never testified at the trial. Harwell died of a sudden heart attack.

Whatever he, Ghigliotti, and Allard had to say is now missing!

Washington Times columnist Michelle Malkin summed up the federal government’s actions in this case by writing, “They lodged bogus charges of child abuse against Branch Davidians. They denied using incendiary devices during the raid—only to acknowledge having fired at least two flammable tear-gas canisters into the compound. They ‘misplaced’ audio recordings from infrared footage that demonstrated official government orders to use pyrotechnics. They confiscated—then ‘lost’—vital autopsy evidence from the Tarrant County, Texas, coroner’s office.

“And now they want us to believe that what Mr. Ghigliotti and Mr. Allard separately concluded were gunshots were merely flashes of sunlight and reflections of broken window glass.” The major news media dutifully reported the government’s version, not realizing that infrared technology measures heat, not light, and that reflected light gives off little heat.

Needless to say, with witnesses dead and hospitalized, as well as documents and some photos and audio recordings missing, it came as no surprise when Federal District Judge Walter Smith in mid-2000 found that while “there may be some indication of mishandling and/or mislabeling by the FBI, there is nothing to indicate that this was the result of anything more than mere negligence.”

Judge Smith, after hearing testimony from FBI agents in charge of the infrared taping that clearly indicated tampering with the tapes, decided that an expert hired by the government who disputed this account “was more persuasive.”

He also declined to punish the Bureau for failing to hand over documents and other evidence in a timely manner and generally absolved the government of any responsibility in the deaths.

This opinion was echoed about a week later with the release of a preliminary report from John Danforth, who was appointed as a special counsel by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the Waco tragedy. While critical of a 1993 Justice Department review of the case stating investigators “went into the project with the assumption that the FBI had done nothing wrong,” Danforth nevertheless “fully exonerated” his boss Reno of any wrongdoing in the matter.

Unreported to the public was the fact that Danforth’s investigation suffered from the same problem as the others. For example, when a ballistics expert returned to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office to retrieve subpoenaed ballistic records on the Davidians for the Danforth probe, the computer has been emptied.
This crucial evidence is missing!

Nevertheless, at a news conference announcing his preliminary report, Danforth said, “I hope that it lays these questions, the darkest questions relating to Waco, to rest.”

But undoubtedly, the many questions raised in this and other cases will not be put to rest by further pronouncements from a government consistently caught in lies and unwilling to take notice of the missing evidence and witnesses.


Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995, shortly after 9:00 AM a tremendous blast ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including many children in the building’s day care center, and demolishing one whole side of the structure.

Just 34 days later, over the objections of many people, including Oklahoma Representative Charles Key, Senator James Inhofe, and explosives experts who were already voicing disagreement with the federal government’s version of the explosion, the Murrah building was demolished and the rubble hauled away to a guarded, barbwire-enclosed landfill. According to federal officials, it was a “health hazard.”

Questions over the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City have never been satisfactorily answered.

This is because the best evidence, the building, is missing!

Also missing are the additional bombs reportedly removed from the building just after the initial explosions. In the minutes following the first reports from Oklahoma City, KFOR reported, “The FBI has confirmed there is another bomb in the Federal Building. It’s in the east side of the building. They’ve moved everybody back several blocks, obviously to, uh, unplug it so it won’t go off. They’re moving everybody back.” KWTV also reported another bomb was found in the building and added that a bomb disposal unit had moved into the building. Even Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating told newsmen, “The reports I have is that one device was deactivated and there’s another device, and obviously whatever did the damage to the Murrah Building was a tremendous, very sophisticated explosive device.”

Keating later would reverse himself, supporting the federal government’s contention that one man, Timothy McVeigh, destroyed the building with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and characterizing those who questioned this version as “howling at the moon.”

Oklahoma City FBI chief Bob Ricks, who spearheaded the official publicity effort at Waco and was later named head of the Oklahoma State Police by Governor Keating, told the media, “We never did find another device…we confirmed that no other device existed.”

Several witnesses, including firemen at the scene, reported two military ambulances were loaded with stretchers containing boxes during the time that spectators and rescue workers were pulled back because, they were told, additional bombs had been found.

Once again, the chief evidence of conspiracy is missing!

Early on, media members talked about the possibility that the bomber or bombers may have been caught on tape by surveillance cameras in the parking lot of a Southwestern Bell office across the street from the Murrah Building. David Hall, manager of TV station KPOC, reported that two Bell employees stated that the tapes showed the Murrah Building shaking before the truck bomb exploded, strong evidence that more than one explosion took place.

The Bell surveillance tapes have never been made available to the public, so are missing from public debate!

The idea that more than one explosion occurred was voiced by several survivors and corroborated by a tape recording made during a conference of the Water Resources Board across from the Murrah Building and by a seismograph at the Oklahoma Geological Survey at the University of Oklahoma. Both recordings indicated large explosions ten seconds apart.

But today this evidence is missing!
The United States Geological Survey released a report stating USGS geologist Dr. Thomas Holzer concluded that the second spike on the seismograph was simply the building’s side collapsing. However, Professor Raymond Brown, senior geophysicist at the University of California who studied the seismograph data as well as interviewing victims, argued against the one-bomb theory, saying, “[T]his was a demolition job. Somebody who went in there with equipment tried to take that building down.”

Like so many other cases in recent history, foot-dragging and obstructionism on the part of federal authorities prevented any truthful investigation. Representative Key reported that a subsequent federal grand jury was prevented from hearing even one of more than 20 witnesses who saw persons other than McVeigh at the scene of the bombing. “Indeed, the best witnesses who can positively place McVeigh in downtown Oklahoma City that morning, saw him with one or more individuals and are able to describe to some degree what that person or persons looked like. These witnesses were not even allowed to testify at McVeigh’s trial,” said Key, who added, “…the Federal Grand Jury wanted to interview both the eyewitnesses and the sketch artist who drew John Doe [unknown accomplices] composites but were flatly refused by the federal ‘authorities.’ Clearly, they were blatantly deprived of their basic constitutional rights as grand jurors. Why?”

The congressman answered his own rhetorical question by stating, “[S]ome in our federal law enforcement agencies (i.e. ATF and FBI) had prior knowledge that certain individuals were planning to bomb the Murrah Federal Building!”

In 1999 Republican Key was defeated by another Republican, and his voice advocating a truthful investigation is now missing.


Danny Casolaro

In the early 1990s one intrepid investigator was on the trail of the conspirators behind many of this nation’s recent scandals.

A 44-year-old freelance journalist named Danny Casolaro had been digging into the interlocking nexus of intelligence agencies, arms and drug dealers of the Iran-Contra scandal, the financial criminals of the BCCI bank, Justice Department officials involved in the PROMIS software theft, and connected issues like the October Surprise scandal, covert biological warfare testing, and Area 51. He called this sprawling conspiracy “The Octopus.” He told friends that he was close to identifying an international cabal of just a handful of men who were the masterminds behind “The Octopus.”

According to close friends, Casolaro kept his “Octopus” files in a large accordion-style file case, which he carried with him at all times. He began growing anxious about his safety, telling his physician brother, “I have been getting some very threatening phone calls. If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was accidental.”

On the afternoon of August 10, 1991, a cleaning woman found Casolaro’s nude body in the bathtub of his Martinsburg, West Virginia, motel room. His wrists had been slashed more than a dozen times. Nearby a scrawled note stated, “Please forgive me for the worst possible thing I could have done.”

His death was quickly ruled a suicide, and his body was released to a local mortician, who promptly embalmed the body before contacting the next of kin, an action not only hasty but illegal.

Casolaro’s file box, which he took with him to his motel, remains missing!


Vince Foster

On July 20, 1993, the body of President Clinton’s friend and attorney Vincent Foster was discovered in Fort Macy Park near Washington, DC. His body was stretched out in a serene posture on a gentle slope. A pistol was still gripped in one hand. He had been shot in the head. Most thought it was a classic suicide pose, although veteran investigators knew that a suicide’s muscles flinch with gunshot trauma, and the gun never remains in the victim’s hands. However, within days his death was ruled a suicide. But serious questions began to surface until the controversy over Foster’s death reached national proportions.

Although his death was attributed to a gunshot wound to the head, an official crime-scene Polaroid seemed to show a small bullet wound in his neck. This was corroborated by Fairfax County EMT Richard Arthur, who worked on Foster’s body and claimed to have seen such a hole. Obviously, X-rays of Foster’s body would have cleared up this issue.
But X-rays of the body are missing!

Then, perhaps a careful examination of the fatal bullet might shed some light on this case. Investigators and park police conducted an exhaustive search of the park but failed to find any trace of the fatal projectile at the scene or elsewhere.

The bullet is missing!

Investigators turned to the official crime scene photographs, which originally reportedly numbered 30 Polaroids and one roll of 35mm film. Police later listed only thirteen Polaroid photos, only one of which—a close-up of Foster’s hand—was later leaked to the public.

The photos are missing!

Park police searched Foster’s body and clothing, but his car keys were missing. But in a later search in the morgue, his keys turned up in his pants pocket. In another peculiar circumstance, six days after the death, Associate White House Counsel Stephen Neuwirth discovered a shredded, handwritten “suicide” note in Foster’s office briefcase. (His briefcase had already been checked twice before, but no note had been found during those searches.) The FBI lab found no fingerprints on the note despite the fact that it was torn into 27 pieces. Toward the bottom right-hand corner, where one would expect to find a signature, there was a gap.

The critical piece was missing!

Although the FBI concluded the note was genuine, three separate first-class forensic handwriting experts—Reginald E. Alton, Vincent Scalice, and Ronald Rice—all reported that it was a clever forgery.

Scalice, formerly a veteran NYPD homicide detective, stated, “Freak things can happen in any violent death. But the laws of nature cannot be suspended and inconsistencies don’t range into the dozens, as in this case.”

Foster’s death was only the beginning of the scandals and improprieties of the Clinton Administration.


Ron Brown

On April 3, 1996, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 other passengers onboard a T-43 military transport plane died when the craft crashed into the rocky hills of Croatia. With Brown were other government officials, twelve corporate chiefs, a CIA analyst, and a New York Times bureau chief.

The major media reported that Brown’s plane went down in the Adriatic Sea during “the worst storm in a decade.” Yet the Dubrounik Airport, less than two miles from the actual inland crash site, reported only light scattered rain with five miles visibility. Several other planes landed safely immediately before and after Brown’s plane crashed.

Brown, at the time of his death, was the object of an investigation by an independent counsel appointed by a three-judge panel in the wake of a lawsuit by Judicial Watch. This case had already uncovered the illegal campaign contributions of John Huang, prompting a minor scandal. According to Judicial Watch head Larry Klayman, “…Brown had told President Clinton days before he was asked unexpectedly to travel to Croatia that he would negotiate a plea agreement with the independent counsel, which would entail telling the independent counsel what he knew about alleged illegalities in the Clinton-Gore administration.”

The suspicions over the crash could have been ended by studying the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, the black box. When Prime Minister Zlatko Matesa of Croatia said a voice recorder had been recovered from the tail of Brown’s plane and offered to turn it over to US officials, Air Force officials declined, saying that the converted training plane had not carried such equipment.

The black box remains missing!

The White House and the mass media reported that Brown died in the plane crash, but two members of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology reported that he had a large hole in his head. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Steve Cogswell and Army Lieutenant Colonel David Hause both said the hole was consistent with a bullet wound. Their conclusion was supported by veteran pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht. This question of homicide could be resolved by simply checking the photos and X-rays of the body.

But they’re all missing!


White House Email

Illegal campaign finances, Whitewater, Travelgate, Chinagate, Filegate…the list of Clinton Administration scandals goes on and on. How could the investigators of the various ongoing probes get to the truth?

One such probe, the Justice Department’s campaign-finance task force, decided to look at White House email for clues and evidence. Congress also wanted the emails. Imagine their surprise when they found that a mysterious malfunction of a critical White House Office email server caused some emails not be to archived.

Robert Haas, a computer contractor from Northrop Grumman assigned to audit the missing email, was among the technicians who discovered that the White House automated archiving system had failed to scan and store email sent to the server by the Executive Office.

Almost a million West Wing emails are missing!

These missing emails, initially reported to number only about 100,000, include messages to prominent White House officials, including President Clinton himself, according to reporter Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily. Other missing messages came from the Democratic National Committee. Recipients of the lost email include Clinton’s secretary Betty Currie, whose email reportedly included 400 to 500 messages from Monica Lewinsky in just one file.

“When I heard the number, I couldn’t believe they talked that much,” said one of the computer contractors involved. “They must have been busy typing all day long. I don’t know if they did any work.”

Other investigators were more concerned about serious scandals. Sheryl Hall, a former manager in the White House’s Information Systems and Technology Division, said she learned that within the missing email were “smoking guns” to many contentious issues. Hall told WorldNetDaily that “different people…would go to jail. And that there was a lot of stuff out there.” This “stuff” involved illegal campaign finances, as well as the involvement of Vice President Al Gore in some of the controversies.

“Every White House aide whose name has popped up during the parade of scandals was on that server,” noted one investigator. “And those that helped them do their jobs.”

Technicians learned that of the 526 persons whose email went missing, 464 of them worked in the White House Office. Someone suggested that perhaps a study of Gore’s email might provide a clue as to why so much information had been lost.

But all of Gore’s office email from that period is missing!


The Final Missing Piece

There is enough information available today regarding missing information and evidence to fill an entire book, a sad commentary on justice in America.

The public must summon the will to demand truth and honesty from their elected leaders and from federal authorities who seem to feel they are above the laws and ethics imposed on the rest of us.

But that will seems to be missing!


http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=39244032&blogID=469056283
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Postby Penguin » Tue Feb 17, 2009 6:27 pm

If you cant goose it,
lose it.
(yeah I just made that up)

http://boingboing.net/2008/12/20/man-wh ... alter.html
Man who set up alternate email for White House dies in plane crash

“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.”

Graham writes: "Unfortunately, he won’t get to talk. He died in a plane crash yesterday."

UPDATE: A curious press release: "Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation" (Thanks, Adam!)

The email? MISSING
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Postby josey wales » Tue Feb 17, 2009 6:52 pm

Absolutely devastating! The most concise but powerful piece I have seen anywhere on these topics. Reading this list of shameful deeds took me from anger to a sickening nausea in the realization of who or what is in charge of this country and in no small part, our collective fates.

This should give pause to anyone who believes the answer to our problems is more of the same and bigger more powerful Government. It is clear that our Government is not and has not been ‘by and for the people’ in a very, very long time. It is simply another arm of Corporatism and a ruling elite that hold to ‘divine right’ as strongly as the kings of the past.

It has been stated that to the contrary, ‘Money does not change people, it unmasks them’, I would add that power does not change these criminals, it unmasks them.
Dying ain't much of a living, boy
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Postby MinM » Fri Mar 06, 2009 11:36 am

Five-minute gap fuels conspiracy theory over Lahore terror attack
Image
An unexplained five-minute delay in the Pakistani cricket team schedule has fuelled speculation that the gunmen who launched a terror attack against the Sri Lankan Test team this week were acting on inside information.

After a furious tirade by the English match referee, Chris Broad, yesterday, both an Australian umpire and Sri Lanka's star spin bowler fed the conspiracy theory today, questioning the level of security and the timing of events.

"You tell me why supposedly 20 armed commandos were in our convoy and when the team bus got going again, we were left on our own?" Simon Taufel, the umpire, angrily told reporters as he arrived at Sydney airport. "I don't have any answers to these questions ... We were left on our own in our time of need."

Mr Taufel told The Times that while the two teams had travelled to the stadium together on the first two days of the match, on Tuesday they made the journey separately.

"One thing I have been impressed about in Pakistan as that logistically they are usually very well organised. They normally depart on time," he said. "We knew we were departing at 8.30 am on the third morning. As to why the Pakistani team left at a different time, I don't know."

He was backed by Muttiah Muralitharan, the most successful bowler in Test history, who questioned whether the terrorists had inside information.

"Somehow in this incident there were no police with guns on the bus," the Sri Lankan spinner told the radio station FIVEaa in Adelaide. "If someone was there with a gun we would have had a chance of defending ourselves.

"Normally all the buses go and we have four or five escorts. We left at 8.30am and Younus Khan [with the Pakistan team bus] at 8.35am. We divided into two - maybe they knew the information for the right time."

Mr Taufel and his fellow Australian umpire, Steve Davis, were with Mr Broad on a bus carrying officials following the Sri Lankan team coach when at least 12 gunmen staged an ambush at a roundabout near the Gaddafi stadium. The attack left eight people dead including their driver and six police officers. Eight Sri Lankan players were wounded.

Yesterday Mr Broad said that the attack could have been part of a wider conspiracy and accused Pakistani security forces of leaving the vehicles like "sitting ducks".

"We were promised high-level security, and in our hour of need that security vanished," he told reporters on his return to Britain. He also questioned the Pakistani team delay...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 850290.ece
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Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Mar 08, 2009 8:04 am

I saw an interview with taufel or Davis the other night. He basically said they were left on their own during the attack. That all the protection, and the sri lankan bus disappeared.

Like someone said, cricket is the only thing that actually unites the subcontinent. THis has some very serious implications.
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Re: The Missing 18 (& Other Evidentiary Gaps)

Postby MinM » Tue Jan 26, 2010 1:54 pm

Dave Emory has an excellent show on the subject of the 18 1/2-minute gap:

Black Op Radio - Archived Shows - 2010
# Show #457
Original airdate: Jan 14th, 2010
Guests: Jim DiEugenio / Peter Philips
Topic: Assassination Research /Project Censored

Play Part One Interview - Jim DiEugenio

# Listeners' questions answered
# Gordon Novel calls into the Dave Emory radio show (#253 @27:00) to try to restore his reputation
# Gordon Novel Google Video Interview...

Request for Len - Novel interview
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