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March 25, 2007

Another 'Who killed JFK?' answer; War on Terror diminishes us; Onion to launch video channel

AP
E. Howard Hunt speaks during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, Sept. 24, 1973. Hunt served nearly three years in prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Rolling Stone: The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt. Who killed JFK? The Watergate burglar and ex-CIA man, before he died in January, made a diagram for his son that began with "LBJ," says Saint John Hunt. Or was this yet another spook's diversion?

Push back:

Paranoia runs deep
Into your heart it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step outta line, the Man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
-- For What It's Worth (1967 video); Buffalo Springfield, written by Stephen Stills

-- Terrorized by 'War on Terror': How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America by Zbigniew Brzezinski. WaPo:

The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.

--Robert Fisk: The crushing fear that stalks America: The country is not at war. It is the US military that is engaged in an Iraqi conflict. At The Independent, U.K.,

...And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll's seminar isn't spouting this stuff about "jihadists" travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the "terror" warnings, the supposed "jihadists" threats, the red "terror" alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden's job for him: he has crushed this young woman's spirit and courage.

But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta's warm green campus, with its Spanish style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or "jihadists" stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America's social fabric...

If you spend your life afraid of dying, you aren't really living: you're a wimp. Because death is inevitable, but not, for most of us, right now.

More fake news: WSJ: On Tuesday, the satirical newspaper The Onion plans to launch a video Web site... Called Onion News Network, the site will parody the visual style and breathless reporting of 24-hour cable news networks like CNN. In a promotional video currently available on the site, ONN promises TV news that's "faster," "harder," "scarier" and "all-knowing."

Escalation: Reader Bill Marsland emailed, "Thanks for the new Tom Paxton. I'd like to find the original to listen to."

Here it is: "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" written and performed by Tom Paxton (1965). Paxton has updated its lyrics for "George W. Told The Nation")

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:21 AM | Permalink