As he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” — Luke 19:41-42

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(A couple of glitches in this entry were corrected on 7-12-20.)

As previewed, HERE, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, and Berkshire Eagle executive editor Kevin Moran, met virtually last night in an online chat. Today’s Eagle reported that the event’s host, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, estimated that it netted more than 900 viewers, presumably including people like me who listened by phone.

Many more can view the whole Zoom conversation, titled “The Enemy of the People: One Impeachment, and One Pandemic Later,” via the local OLLI’s Facebook page, HERE. (Click “Videos” and then select the leftmost square in the top row.)

At the beginning, Acosta and Moran were introduced by Lisa Sharkey, senior vice president at HarperCollins, which published his 2019 book, Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America, and is publishing the new paperback version with an afterword on President Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives.

Eagle subscribers may read the newspaper’s coverage of the event HERE. On page 1 today it is headed “Acosta talks Trump, virus, journalism.”

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Notes, 7-11-20

* See Wednesday’s New York Times HERE and HERE for prominent and massive attention given to Mary Trump’s Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, news and analysis beginning over the fold on page 1 and a page and a half inside. Repetitive but highly readable for this certain best-seller-to-be published by Simon & Schuster.

* Much less prominent but still helpful , the AP story “Pete Buttigieg has a new book set for fall release,” in the Berkshire Eagle’s “People” roundup on Thursday.

The former South Bend, Ind., mayor and former 2020 Democratic hopeful: had this to say in a statement on the book, Trust: America’s Best Chance, to be published by W.W. Norton/Liveright:

“In order for our country to move forward in the years ahead, it will be more important than ever to build trust—trust in our institutions and leaders, trust in each other, and trust around the world in America itself. Now is the time to consider the foundational role trust plays in our democracy, and what it will take to build the trust we’ll need to recover and to advance as a country.”

In short, don’t question authority. Trust is sure to be another best-seller as was Buttegieg’s 2019 Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, and will be I Have Something to Tell You, by his husband, Chaten Buttegieg, when published by Simon & Schuster in late summer.

* Try this out:

”This is our country, right or wrong. When America goes wrong, we do wrong, not the government, nor uncontrollable forces, but we the people. It is dangerous to think that because our personal intentions are right, we are therefore not involved.”

This quote is taken out of context. It is part of Shannon MacVen-Brown’s reflection, HERE, on the passage up top from Luke. The bishop of Vermont’s Diocese of the Episcopal Church, she is talking about her fellow Christians and their roles in the world.

What I often think about is how “the things that make for peace” are hidden from our eyes.

— Mark Channing Miller

HERE’s some overdue credit given to the working stiffs of some of the mainstream media.

An Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth news release is headed “New Analysis of 9/11 Footage Finds the Dominant Hypothesis Among Reporters Was that Explosions Brought Down the Twin Towers.”

The analysis is in a long paper by Ted Walter of AE911Truth and Graeme MacQueen, author and co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies. It includes portions of videos of numerous reports by correspondents, each portion accompanied by a transcript.

(On some computers—including the one used to write entries of this blog—Walter and MacQueen’s paper does not appear owing to technical problems. On other computers including certain cellphones the paper and its audio/video components may show up fine, at least for a time. I had monitored a dozen or so of the news clips in the paper’s appendix when a message appeared saying “A problem repeatedly occurred on ‘https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/technical-articles/articles-by-ae911truth/696-how-36-reporters-brought-us-the-twin-towers-explosive-demolition’.”

The paper is titled “How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.” Click on the title to access it and see how successful you are and for how long.

A follow-up paper by the two researchers will “[examine] how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis,” according to the news release.

From page 405 of The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA, by Douglas Valentine (Walterville, OR: Trine Day LLC, 2009):

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“Under George H.W. Bush,* the [Drug Enforcement Agency] became an adjunct of the counter-terror network that defines American foreign policy along ideological lines: investigating [Chile’s deceased president Salvador] Allende’s** associates in Chile was required, as was ‘looking away’ so [the next Chilean president Augusto] Pinochet’s associates could deal drugs with impunity.

”Today the DEA is a top-heavy bureaucracy ruled by ideologues unsullied by street work, strained through a sieve of security clearances, oblivious to their mandate and beholden only to political power brokers. They are successful because they can lie, cheat and steal from the public and Congress. This pack of PR experts preaches the party line, but is unable to manage the metaphorical ‘war on drugs.’ Thus the war goes on and on, and the same problems loom larger than ever.

”At the core of America’s drug problem is the ingrained corruption in our system: the lying, cheating and stealing epitomized by the Iran-Contra affair. The drug aspect of this corruption scandal erupted in 1996, when reporter Gary Webb published a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury [News] about CIA-supported Contra drug traffickers in Los Angeles. The ‘Dark Alliance’ exposé forced CIA Director John Deutsch to crisscross the country trying to convince the African-American community that the CIA did not cause the crack cocaine epidemic. He failed, but the mainstream media pilloried Webb and his supporters for unveiling the central role the Establishment plays in perpetuating the phony war on drugs. Establishment is defined as that ‘exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.’”

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The above is from the epilogue of Douglas Valentine’s authoritative 2009 book on the Drug Enforcement Agency—not to be confused with his authoritative The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (Verso, 2004).

A Massachusetts-based journalist, poet, novelist and private investigator, Valentine has had published eight or ten books, most of them overlooked by newspapers and magazines that carry book reviews.

His nonfiction ones are encyclopedic in depth, relying on interviews with key individuals involved as well as on other extensive research. They are generally highly readable. The parts that are less so are that way because he wants to be sure that the views of sources who are obscure to even people knowledgeable about his topics get their due attention, possibly because he knows they are not going to get it anywhere else.

This entry is a follow-up to yesterday’s, headed “Mission Creep,” the Pittsfield police chief’s term for his department’s being saddled with additional responsibilities piled on from time to time because of actions by the federal government. Dozens of examples from Valentine’s works alone could illustrate how this works for many police departments, and other departments of local and state governments.

For other info on his books, see https://www.douglasvalentine.com.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Bush was appointed director of the CIA in 1976 by President Gerald Ford and  became vice president of the United States in 1981 and president in 1989.

** Allende was Chile’s president from 1970 until 1973 when he died in a U.S.-backed military coup d’etat on Sept. 11, 1973, after which General Augusto Pinochet became president of the military junta and then president and dictator until March 11, 1990.

 

 

 

 

Two news stories in yesterday’s and today’s editions of the Berkshire Eagle show that police reform appears to be on the march in Massachusetts.

* Today, the new statehouse reporter, Danny Jin, reports, HERE,* on a proposed law that would “strengthen use-of-force limits, end qualified immunity and reinvest correctional spending toward job creation. It is headed “State Senate bill would reform policing in Massachusetts.”*

* In yesterday’s story, Pittsfield Police Chief Michael Wynn “questioned the foundations of current policing, saying in the Q&A portion of a Zoom meeting, “The system is broken, and it’s been getting more and more broken for my entire career.” The story is headed “Chief targets barriers on road to reform: Head of Pittsfield police highlights ‘broken’ system, ‘mission creep.’”*

Both stories open up large areas of discussion about what’s going on these days and has been for years and years—but can’t be reported properly in our newspapers and on TV and radio news programs. Both pertain to local police forces smaller than this city’s and to metropolitan police forces.

Here are two quotes from Chief Wynn:

“On Sept. 11, 2001, overnight, we became homeland security specialists and counterterrorism people. And then it stayed that way until the explosion in fenantyl, and then we all became anti-drug, anti-drug-smuggling experts. Every time there’s an incident of national significance, we get retained and reoriented.”

”I’m not familiar with another profession that’s experienced so much mission creep in the last 25 years, to the point where even our officers don’t know what’s expected of them.”

Police violence against blacks is the now-international topic in the spotlight (along with broadly systemic racism), rivaling the coronavirus pandemic, since George Floyd’s killing at the hands of four white Minneapolis police officers on May 25. It was not a big part of yesterday’s Eagle story. In part, this was because police violence against blacks has been less evident in Pittsfield than elsewhere. This, in turn, may be because Wynn, a Pittsfield native and Williams College graduate, is black himself. It may also be because the city boasts an active NAACP chapter, which which has good relations with city government

To hear Wynn tell it, to some extent police departments are handcuffed by expectations that they tackle the local results of the international drug trade and illegal immigration on top of their more traditional responsibilities. This is particularly galling and unfair when the news media don’t delve into the roots of much of international drug trafficking and terrorist networks.

Seldom do the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, come up in such a discussion, but in practically the wink of an eye the Department of Homeland Security was up and running with the quick enactment on Oct. 26, 2001, of the USA PATRIOT Act, spurred by the “9/11” attacks and the anthrax attacks that began a week later.

Tomorrow or the next day this blog will explore some of the context of the above.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Eagle stories can be accessed online only by people who have paid subscriptions.

Our daily in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, The Berkshire Eagle, keeps chugging along in the midst of coronavirus setbacks which worsened revenue challenges already bad enough. Judged by its peers as “The New England Newspaper & Press Association’s General Excellence Award Winner & Newspaper of the Year for Sunday Editions,” it sets a standard. Every day the Eagle has a number of things worth reading carefully.

Yesterday’s edition carried at least several of possible interest to readers of this blog. One is a New York Times News Service news story headed “White House denies reports of bounties.” It was a follow-up to a previous Times story on the bounties allegation, which the Eagle had also carried. The Times story is linked HERE, but a search will turn up numerous news stories about the alleged bounties matter.

Millions of Americans have heard, read or seen one or another of the news accounts about ‘’intelligence reports” that the Russian government paid bounties to Talliban-allied forces in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers there. And that President Trump and others around him were less than clear or forthcoming about whether he knew about the reports. And how credible they are.

But there’s another side to this story, related HERE and HERE by Ray McGovern and HERE by Caitlin Johnstone. McGovern’s views are headlined by Consortium News “Russiagate’s Last Gasp” (June 29) and “New York Times Deploys Heavy Gun to Back ‘Intel’ on Russian Bounties” (July 1). Johnstone’s are more broad-brush, as the headline, “Seriously, Get the Hell Out of Afghanistan,” indicates.

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Today’s Eagle reports that Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, will be interviewed online Thursday, July 9, by the Eagle’s executive editor, Kevin Moran. The event is hosted by Berkshire Community College’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), and anyone may attend, virtually, for free by pre-registering HERE.

Acosta’s name rang a bell, so I looked him up online with “9/11” in the same flat rectangle as his name and came up with THIS, which is a brief encounter between him and Karl Golovin, a knowledgeable attendee at a forum who prefaced his question this way:

“I’ve previously addressed a question to Jeff Zucker, John King, Wolf Blitzer and Jake Zucker [all of CNN], provided documentation to each of them from AE911Truth.org that the official story of 9/11 is not true.”

Here’s his question:

”If the official story is not true, isn’t this the biggest story there is? And if CNN will not report the biggest story there is, isn’t everything else they’re reporting just nonsense, and fake news?”

Here’s Jim Acosta’s response:

”I would just say that … I would just say that you are putting out the story that, uh, terrorists did not hijack airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center on 9/11. [When the questioner tries, unsuccessfully, to interrupt, Jim Acosta drowns him out.] You, sir, are … you, sir, are … you, sir, are bringing us the biggest fake news of all, okay?” [Hand clapping for the CNN correspondent is heard from the audience.]

The questioner retorts: “Mr. Acosta, you are a liar!”

My assessment: Unless the YouTube video was somehow doctored to take out relevant parts of the exchange, the questioner said no such thing. Rather, he asserted that the documents from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth showed, at least for him, that the official government 9/11 narrative is not true. But that was the end of the exchange, and they were on to the next question for panelists. Acosta prevailed, at least in the short term, because, slightly raising his voice and speaking as if authoritatively into his microphone, he reframed and reworded the question—and viewers, including those present in the live audience, would remember his response rather than the question itself.

— Mark Channing Miller

A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, returned a second superseding indictment against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange last week charging him with “offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States,” according to a Department of Justice statement released Wednesday.

What does it mean?

A search will turn up several news accounts of the action. THIS ONE dismissive of the worth of the indictment was sent out Thursday by Caitlin Johntone. It contains a wealth of links, including one to the Justice Department’s release and another to the indictment itself.

At this pivotal moment in American history, we have to make a fundamental decision. Do we want to spend billions more on endless wars in the Middle East, or do we want to provide decent jobs to millions of unemployed Americans here at home? Do we want to spend more money on nuclear weapons or do we want to invest in decent jobs and childcare and healthcare for the American people most in need? …

Now at this moment of unprecedented national crises—a growing pandemic, an economic meltdown, the demand to end systemic racism, and police brutality, and an unstable president—it is time to truly focus on what we value as a society and to fundamentally transform our national priorities. …

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Who said the above? When? Where? Why? In what context?

Cick HERE to listen to the full statement being delivered and to read a news account about it.

 

Today, just three songs.

The first is “That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly. HERE are the lyrics, and HERE and HERE are a couple of bios of Holly.

THIS is “How Great Thou Art,” sung by Kathrine Jenkins with some backup. HERE are the lyrics, and HERE is some information about the song.

Here is “I Wear a Face Mask in My Car.” Perhaps there will be more information about it another time.

The dawn from on high will visit us, to give light to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death. — Luke 1: 78b-79a *

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The sun appears to be slowly setting on the United States as a country that can be taken seriously in the world except as a military power.

Under the headline “As E.U. Opens, It Aims to Keep Americans Out: Repudiation of Trump’s Pandemic Blunders,” the New York Times this morning carried a report by Matina  Stevis-Gridneff that opened:

“BRUSSELS — European Union countries rushing to revive their economies and reopen their borders after months of coronavirus restrictions are prepared to block Americans from entering because the United States has failed to control the scourge, according to draft lists of acceptable travelers reviewed by The New York Times.

“The prospect, which would lump American visitors in with Russians and Brazilians as unwelcome, is a stinging blow to American prestige in the world and a repudiation of President Trump’s handling of the virus in the United States, which has more than 2.3 million cases and upward of 120,000 deaths, more than any other country.”

Near the end, the report tells of European Center for Disease Prevention and Control officials “warn[ing] negotiators that the case numbers were so dependent on the level of truthfulness and testing in each country, that it was hard to vouch for them ….”

The phrase “the level of truthfulness and testing” jumped out. In this country, scientific and other truthfulness has fallen by the wayside in matters related to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The executive and judicial branches of the U.S. government have downgraded the importance of truth when it comes to the facts on the ground of 9/11. And the news media (including the New York Times) have followed suit after some great reporting initially, apparently accepting as valid what might be called “government science.”

It’s not just Trump.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* From Luke 1: 57-80, a reading for today celebrating the nativity of St. John the Baptist, in The Revised New Jerusalem Bible

 

Geoffrey Berman’s firing as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York got lots of coverage. Readers can go to a search engine to find stories and editorials on it.

There is nothing in all the summaries of Berman’s tenure about his apparent refusal to present to a Federal Grand Jury stacks of evidence of a list of federal crimes committed in the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001–evidence at variance with the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report.

It was provided in 2018 by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, but readers will have to go to their website to find it, as the “free press” of this country won’t touch it.