THE BITTER HERBS OF POLITICS AND RELIGION

A CANDID TALK ABOUT RELIGION AND POLITICS

By Winsip Custer, CPW News Service

     In the wake of Dr. Ben Carson’s assertion that Muslims should never be President of the U.S.A., there has been a wrangling in America's public square of the place of religion in politics and of politics in religion.   I have contacted the father of a young man who grew up in a Christian household in Texas, but who found his young life cut short in what his father says was a murder that was made to look like a suicide.  Patrick Carr was his son who was found in his burning Ford Bronco on the night of December 10, 2000 near Houston's Ellington Field and not far from the Bin Laden owned Houston Gulf Manor Airport.

WC:   You have not been politically active.   Do you see a place for political action for people of faith?

WC:  Texan, John Robert Stockwell, was the son of an industrial missionary to East Africa.  John saw first hand the value of political involvement in the lives of people of differing faiths.   John joined the CIA and led three secret wars including the one in Angola that he came to loathe as the racket of war that feeds an insatiable appetite of war profiteers for money at the expense of people.  John was fond of a French saying….. "Those who do not voluntarily involve themselves in politics will be forced do so.”  Life will teach the same in time.  Ben Carson and Vivien Thomas are two outstanding men whose family roots come out of Africa and without whom the field of medicine would have missed out on two landmark life saving procedures.  Yet, they were trained at Yale and John Hopkins that have an admitted historic bias against inclusion of non-Anglo cultures as well as an antithetical position relative to the hallmark of Western Judeo-Christian theology that informs Western politics…..the place of the individual over and against the socialist or fascist collective….and those are both false alternatives in the Western paradigm.  War profiteers depend on these false poles to fuel the racket of war.  I think that is what Stockwell learned the hard way, but he was born in Angleton, Texas which sits on top of the one of the world's largest sulfur domes that was monetized by Bernard Baruch, the Jewish Wall Street financial guru who funded the Frasch extraction process long after George Luther Stearns was one of abolitionist John Brown’s “secret six” backers in stoking the bloody American Civil War as the leading provider of lead for bullets.  Sulfur propels bullets. Wars are still predominantly fueled by lead and sulfur.

WC:  You have said that your son died along the I-45 Houston to Galveston corridor that is a historic smuggling route in this fueling of warfare.

WC:   Right.   Stockwell’s home  county domiciles Freeport-McMoran that sits atop this massive sulfur dome, uses the Frasch process, has on its board Henry Kissinger and L. Paul Bremer.   You see where this is going?  Kissinger received the Nobel (Peace) Prize as did Robert Merton who invented the Black Scholes credit default formulas that exploded in 2008.   Bitter herbs?  Yea.  From Galveston the renegade soldier of fortune and mercenary and filibusterer, William Walker, trained as he was in William Wundt’s region of Germany, not unlike many who informed the Yale and Johns Hopkins inner circle, recruited not unlike Teddy Roosevelt would later do at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio for the Spanish American War, men to take over Honduras for an early route from the Pacific to the Atlantic that predated the Panama Canal.  This Houston to Galveston highway is the most dangerous stretch of highway in the U.S..  There are others like the one that Cormac McCarthy tells about in West Texas and where they pretended to shoot the film based on his book, No Country for Old Men in Del Rio, Texas and points west.  The Del Rio Hotel in that film was actually a hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, the town where Dan Rather and Don Rumsfeld co-owned the Tecolote Ranch, a 9000 acre game ranch.   If you have seen the film Last Man Standing, you have a fairly good idea of the area.   That film has the Anglo establishment controlling a battle between the Irish and Italian mafia along the Texas/Mexico border, but the elements are even more diverse.   Gary Cartwright, author of the book, Galveston, also wrote Dirty Dealing.  In Dirty Dealing Cartwright discusses the death of Judge John Wood by Woody Harrelson’s father and the Chagra brothers of El Paso who were convicted of paying Charles Harrelson, a close friend of the Victoria, Texas socialite, Hampton Robinson, to kill Judge Wood.   That story is significant with many elements covered by Cartwright, but suffice it to say the Chagra brothers were not Mexicans.  They are Lebanese and border drug and weapons runners from an era that turned John Stockwell’s stomach for the perversity of U.S. secret wars in various corners.  In this milieu we see why issues like the government’s “Operation Fast and Furious”  become the norm of cross-purposed political ambitions.  Religion and politics are indissoluble, but how?   Do our religious convictions inform our political ambitions to “beat swords into plowshares?” Certainly when Benjamin Holt decided that he could make more money on his patented agricultural tank tracks rolled out of his Stockton, California factory by adding a sulfur breathing canon pumping out the likes of George Luther Stearn’s lead  to receive royalties from both sides of the conflicts, then we have to argue that religion based on “blessed are the peacemakers” could be reconfigured to support plowshares into swords.  To everything there is a season and in the racket of war that season of war profits never ends.  Some contortions are needed which lead religionists to conclude that their founder’s injunctions have never really been tried while the political philosophers insist it was naïve to try it, anyway.

WC:  John F. Kennedy was killed in Texas.  His father was known to have made his fortunes in bootlegging.   He was a backer of Hitler during the 1930’s when a “business plot” was opposed by Smedley Darlington Butler the two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner who was approached to lead a coup against FDR.  Do you think that the Kennedy’s were politically connected in Texas?

WC:  Gary Cartwight inadvertently says so.   He has a great story in Dirty Dealing of the Chagra’s taking a drug laden ship to Massachusetts and unloading it from a makeshift pier that hung from a cliff just north of Boston.  It couldn’t be seen from shore.  If Joseph P. Kennedy was the Irish political Don in Massachusetts and a bootlegger, he likely would have known well the comings and goings in his back yard.  Also, in Texas we have more than one journalist noting that Joseph P. Kennedy was in the oil drilling business with John H. "Jack" Modesett, Sr..  Modesett was the number two intelligence officer in charge of Guantanamo Bay Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion while the New York Times reporter who wrote prior to the invasion in both The Nation and the New York Times about a secret U.S.-led training base in Guatamala.   That was Paul P. Kennedy who essentially blew the cover on the invasion.  His wife, a Mexican culinary expert known as the "Julia Child of Mexico," is a gastronomical figure in Austin, Texas mainly for her close association with Fonda San Miguel Restaurant where George Bush is said to have proposed marriage to Laura Welch.  Chummy, huh? wood Kennedy.  Paul P. Kennedy's wife's name was Diana Southwood Kennedy.   In Peter Brewton's 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, we have Brewton pulling out of Houston the fact that John H. "Jack" Modesett, Jr. was up to his shirt collar in the yogurt of CIA clandestine enterprises like Guantanamo and Iran-Contra along with the West Texas airport that hauled shipments of contraband into Terlingua near Big Bend.

It's critical to your question that you remember that in Texas there was Paul P. Kennedy the New York Times and The Nation reporter who blew the CIA’s cover on the secret training base for the Bay of Pigs at Retalhuleu, Guatemala.  His wife, Diana Southwood Kennedy, for whatever reason, befriended my son, Patrick.  He made a trip to her hometown in Mexico in January 1998 with friends from Austin and Corpus and she signed for him a copy of her book, My Mexico.

When Joseph P. Kennedy backed Hitler in the 1930’s he was, perhaps….even likely….supporting the American “business plotters” who were fascists.  We know he supported Germany to Churchill's and FDR's justified disapproval. When you look at Duval County, Texas where Willam F. Buckley’s father was the sheriff and south to McAllen, Texas where Jason Chilton Matthews had published after he had taken it over from H.L. Menken, The American Mercury Magazine, changed 180 degrees its political agenda incorporating the likes of Billy Graham while William F. Buckley moved on to support Senator Joseph McCarthy along with Brent Bozell, Jr. in the book Joseph McCarthy and His Enemies, and you see that the US southern border is a borderland of mixed motives and dark alliances.  In this context you can well understand why in that famous confrontation between Buckley and Gore Vidal, Buckley nearly decks Vidal when he calls Buckley a “neo-Nazi”.   On the other hand, you can't forget that Vidal like Henry Sloane Coffin or William Barnett Benton, were U.S. power elite insiders living in the liberal side of the elite's dialectic.  They fight with each other and sometimes, I think often, innocent bystanders get caught in their crossfire.
     When I was in Seminary in Austin I was the student assistant of Dr. Robert S. Paul who was on a pulpit swap with a Church of Christ pastor from New Haven, Connecticut when William Barnett Benton, a civil rights advocated, was fighting Prescott Bush for the Connecticut Senate seat.   Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a brutal character assault against Benton.   Dr. Paul took up for Benton and Benton credited Paul with providing the key element to his victory.  I didn't know that when I was in seminary working with Dr. Paul, but neither did I know that Peter Brewton's father was a Presbyterian minister until I was investigating Patrick death in Houston on December 10, 2000 which would be the same day as the resignation of Gary Webb from the San Jose Mercury News as well as his death in California in 2004 just after the Rather and Mapes story broke at CBS with the Texas Air National Guard memos.   Marian Carr Knox who typed those memos was defended by her son, Patrick Carr, who came to her aide against the assault of the former U.S. Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh,  and Louis Boccardi of the Associate Press.
     So, anyway, you had Vidal calling William F. Buckley a Neo-Nazi.

WC:  A "Crypto-Nazi."

WC:  Yes, a Crypto-Nazi.  Not surprisingly this region also produced C. Wright Mills whose book The Power Elite some say got him an injection of cyanide.  He died young of a heart attack.

     Remember that Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, Blood Meridian, was based on the life of John Joel Glanton, the renegade Texas Ranger who died fighting the Yuma Indians in Arizona, but not before his brutal and animalistic killings of Indians, Mexicans and other brown skinned people along the way.   McCarthy will canonize war in this celebrated book.  “War IS God,” he tells his readers and his Judge Holden punctuates the point by running the preacher out of town in the opening pages in the same way that Glanton literally did to Rev. John McCullough in San Antonio before McCullough departed for Galveston, the city where William Walker had been recruiting his filibusterers for his post-Baja excursion in Honduras.

     Today, McCarthy’s papers are at my alma mater, Texas State, in the Bill Witliff Collection, but McCarthy’s view of politics and religion serves up a Book of Common Prayer for war racketeers.  It validates their presuppositions, though someone like Yale’s Harold Bloom who knows all so well the role of the Jewish prophet in Israel’s national life warning against making the weapons of war your deity.   Consider that Israeli weapons makers joined with the Bush’s fellow Yale Skull & Bones brothers, Neal and Linden Blue, in creating the Predator and Reaper drones that their business partner in the Nicaragua banana business, Anatosio Samoza, would like to have used against CBS reporter, Bill Stewart, instead of Samoza’s national guardsman who was caught on film in 1980 costing Samoza his dictatorship.

WC:  Your son died near Ellington Field on December 10, 2000.   That was, as you said, the same day that Gary Webb resigned from his position at the San Jose Mercury News in 1997 and the day that he would commit suicide in 2004.

WC:  Webb killed himself? Did he?   Two shots to the head?  I find it impossible to believe that Webb killed himself.  You want to water board someone?  Water board Webb’s medical examiner.   There are nights when I would have done that to the Harris County M.E. calling it “baptism”, but when it all bubbled to the surface with the crumbling of Johnny B. Holmes’ lab and the importation of Michael Bromwich to investigate the abuses there….the fire-waller in the Iran-Contra case along with Dick Thornburgh.... and what’s the point in proving the self-evident with disgusting methods that aren’t reliable, anyway?  I have been told that John Holmes is related by marriage to John H. “Jack” Modesett.  So,  I find Webb’s suicide as unbelievable as the death of Theodore “Ted” Westhusing.

WC:  You think that there was a history at Ellington Field that predated the GWB memos of the Rather and Mapes story that surfaced in 2004 with the help of Marian Carr Knox?

WC:   Yes.  That story was known to Knox when she first typed Col. Jerry Killian’s memos as GWB avoided to the best of his abilities his service there.  The story was known in the 70’s when it happened and in 1980.   In 1988 when GHWB defeated Michael Dukakis.  In 1992 when he faced Clinton and Perot.  Perot, by the way, took a very close look into much of this and more.  It was available in 2000 when anyone named Patrick Carr, the name of Marian Carr Knox’s son who surely would have defended her against the kind of attack she received from Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, would have been in incredible danger if these dark alliance operatives feared a breach of secrecy.   That would be especially true from the airport where General Claire Chennault took the lead in defending the Nationalist Chinese from the Japanese and where Chennault’s flying ace was son of the First Presbyterian Church, San Antonio’s pastor Pierre B. Hill.  Are we told that Claire Chennault was supported by the Chinese Green Gang that had helped as they had the Brits in bringing David Sassoon’s opioids up the Yangtze’s from Basra, then Smyrna and then Bombay, now Mumbai, something we promised the Chinese we would not do in Caleb Cushing's negotiation of the Wanghia Treaty?  The effects of that treaty breach caused Pearl S. Buck to write This Good Earth and to remove herself from the Presbyterian fellowship when she could not get support for her humanitarian efforts.  It caused U.S. merchant marine, Richard McKenna, to write The Sand Pebbles.  Many of Chennault's close associates did not support decorating him, including Hap Arnold.

WC:  Chennault's ace?  That would be David “Tex” Hill who was also for some time the head of the Texas Air National Guard?

WC:  Exactly, and from the San Antonio church where John Joel Glanton had tried to kill Rev. John McCullough.  Remember, though, that in the 1980’s we saw the rise of Arab influence in America like no other time.  I just heard that this year there has been a 95% spike in Arab immigrants to the U.S., but this after 15 of the 19 September 11^th hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and we invaded Iraq?  Should Ben Carson be nervous?  Not just because they are Saudi, but because of the power elite’s clear entanglements with them in a world that MUST ween itself from fossil fuels.   These are dangerous times for people whose work threatens the old order as it should and must, but what a great time to be alive!

I will never forget that I was at a seminar at First Presbyterian Church, San Antonio in 1994 just after CNN had run a video of the female circumcision of a ten year old girl in Egypt.  Due to public outcry Egypt’s Minister of Health proclaimed that the procedure would be performed only one day a week in government facilities by trained medical personnel.  That was when Hosni Mubarak was in power.   Mubarak rescinded the order citing a backlash against the “medicalization” of this practice and jailed those who objected.

So I asked the presenter on Christian/Muslim relations if he had seen the video.  He said “Did you copy that? We are trying desperately to get a copy of it, but CNN jerked it under pressure from the Egyptian and Saudi embassies and we can’t find it.”   The Presbyterian pastor from Pierre B. Hill’s parish jumped in to plead cultural differences and religious tolerance.  The presenter looked at me in total disbelief.  But you have to understand that this was the parish of Paul Adams Rush the understudy of Texas Attorney General Dan Morales and Iraq Recovery head, Stuart Bowen, whose staff complained that he lost $50 billion in the Green Zone…..something that Theodore “Ted” Westhusing, the ethics professor at West Point and PhD grad from the University of Texas would have fully understood.

WC:  Allan Dulles was a Presbyterian. 

WC:  Yes.  So was Dwight D. Eisenhower who warned against the U.S. Military Industrialist Complex.  But since Patrick’s death I have taken a whole new look at religion and politics and see them both as bitter herbs that cannot easily be sweetened.  Consider that I had been approached in 1989 to apply for the chaplaincy position at Trinity University in San Antonio by my friend Dr. Robert Buxbaum.  Sitting on the board of Trinity was Pierre B. Hill’s successor and George Herbert Walker Bush.

When I arrived as the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Corpus Christi, I was asked by Dr. Jack Stotts to raise money for the tuition of Rev. Carlos Emilio Ham, the head of the Reformed Church in Cuba.  Mind you, the history of my church had been written by Peggy Lasater Clark whose nephew from Houston, Albert Lasater Maher, had taken a group of U.S. college students to Cuba in violation of U.S. travel sanctions against Cuba in 1963.  Albert Lasater Maher was the son of John F. Maher and Lois Lasater Maher of Houston (Dale Lasater, Falfurias: Ed C. Lasater and the Development of South Texas, Texas A&M University Press, 1998, pp. v and xi).  John F. Maher being founder of Great Western Financial and a major stock holder in Zapata Petroleum, the Bush family company often identified with Operation Zapata or the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.  Peter Brewton's book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush would identify a number of Corpus Christi businessmen with Great Western Petroleum who controlled the CIA linked West Texas Airport reported by Brewton and confirmed well-documented elsewhere....John H. "Jack" Modesett, Charles Thomasson and Harvie Branscomb.  Did I know that at the time?  No.  Not at all.  Neither did I know that the number one and two at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Harold “Hal” Fenney and John Heyne “Jack” Modesett, were from Corpus Christi, Modesett teaching a Sunday School class in Senator Lloyd Benson’s church in Houston, First Presbyterian Church.   Also in my church was an attorney who cried like a baby at Patrick’s funeral and whose own son was a U-2 pilot.  Now these are folks that would have taken to the idea of Albert Lasater Maher going to Cuba or perhaps funding Carlos Ham, like Jack Welch or General Robert Wood, or William F. Buckley or Senator Joseph McCarthy liking Obama's friend and former Weather Underground bomber from Chicago, William Ayers....fortunate sons who went off the deep end.  Nobody likes a totalitarian government except those who create it and when they create one they invite dissent.   That's true whether you are talking about leftists or right-winged pedagogues.   Thomas Jefferson told us this would be the norm echoing Jesus' words "I came not to bring peace, but a sword,"  but I think Jesus meant the sword of truth and not an enriched uranium sabo round or a drone fired bunker buster bomb.

Before they died I called Dr. Jack Stotts in Austin and Dr. Jack Lancaster in Montreat, North Carolina.  Lancaster was the retired pastor of Modesett's church in Houston.  This was after Patrick's death. I wanted to know if Stotts knew the danger that he put my family in by his request to fund Cuban clergyman, Rev. Carlos Ham,  at Austin Seminary given the fact that Albert Lasater Maher had paid the bail on William Leo "Bill" Epton, better known as "Harlem Red" who had accompanied Maher on his trip to Cuba for which Maher was called before Congress.  Stotts said he didn't know, but how would I know?  I wanted to know from Lancaster if he knew about Modesett's history.  He only claimed that Modesett had been problematic for some of  his church members.  I went into greater detail with Rev. Asa Hunt, Lancaster's associate pastor.   Hunt knew some of the story, but said "Hey, I'm holding on until I retire soon."

Patrick dated a girl who lived on Denver Street catty-corner from Harold Fenney’s house on Aransas Street while Modesett’s name was prominently displayed above the Boy Scout building at the nearby St. John’s Methodist Church around the corner from Fenney's St. Bartholomew's Church on Airline Drive.     You see how politics and religion is mixed into a bowl of bitter herbs?

WC:  Bitter herbs?   That’s a Biblical image if there ever was one.

WC:  From the Passover. 

WC:  Yes, the Passover feast.

WC:  Chow down on this bowl of bitter herbs.  Peter Brewton wrote in 1992 the book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush.  It was planned to go to press in the summer of ‘92 and to be released as a widely read book in the fall.  Simon and Schuster had contracted with this award winning Houston Post author and son of a Texas Presbyterian minister.  Brewton, an attorney and professor of journalism at Texas Tech, told me that he was all excited that Alice Mayhew had been assigned the editing task.  She was Woodward and Bernstein’s editor for All the President’s Men.   That book was made into a film that had Robert Redford  playing Woodward not unlike he is doing in the October 16, 2015 release of the film about the 2004 Ellington Field memos, Truth.  Brewton’s book was stalled.   He got it published with great difficulty.  It is an eye-opening account of the S&L scandal and its ties to organized crime in Texas.   Gary Webb would refer to Peter Brewton in his debate with Jeff Leen of the Washington Post in 1997 after the mainline media savagely attacked Webb’s book, Dark Alliance, about the Iran-Contra cocaine nexus in the U.S..   The two men were telling the truth, something people don’t want to hear.

Brewton makes an amazing connection in his book between a secret CIA airstrip in West Texas that was as much a Contra base as Mena, Arkansas.  He told me that his only regret was that he didn’t self-publish sooner and that he would have taken pictures and soil samples from the 4700’ airstrip.   The story involves Houston developer Walter Mischer and his son-in-law, Robert Corson, who like so many connected to CIA and Contra operations end up dying.  Corson was on his way to a court hearing in Houston when Corson died supposedly at his own hand.  Brewton argued that Corson was upbeat on his way believing that he had some leverage in his case, as Barry Seal believed about the Mena operation that came unraveled with the downing of the Eugene Hasenfus plane in Nicaragua.   Brewton doesn’t mention it, I had to dig it out, but Corson was on his way to the court of Judge David Hittner.

WC:  Judge David Hittner who had taken up the cause of Michael Lloyd Self?   Self was the young man that many believe was framed to take the heat off of a self-professed “program killer” named Edward Harold Bell.   If I recall correctly, Bell was from Galveston where he owned a surf shop and oil supply boat business not unlike Bay of Pigs paymaster, Paul Helliwell, who owned an insurance and supply boat business in Galveston?  Didn’t Ed Bell confess to the killings for which Self was blamed?

WC:  Framed by crooked Webster, Texas cops now jailed for bank robbery.   Houston Chronicle writer Lise Olsen, was working on the Ed Bell story when Vernon Loeb, the former Metro Editor at the Washington Post and purveyor of the embellished Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories as well as co-author with Paula Broadwell of the book All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, arrived as the Houston Chronicle’s Managing Editor and took her off the story.  I was concerned because many of the names of people killed by Bell were last names that were easily recognized.  Then his bail was set low for the brutal cold-blooded murder of Larry Dickens whom Bell shot as his mother cradled him in her arms and Bell skipped the country to hide out in Panama where Manuel Noriega was a known CIA asset as Gary Webb will repeatedly tell Jeff Leen in their 1997 debate moderated by University of Missouri journalism professor, Steve Weinberg.  Weinberg of the Washington D.C. based IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors.  Judge David Hittner took up the cause of getting Michael Lloyd Self out of prison, but did he?   Sadly, and conveniently, Michael Lloyd Self died in prison in 2000, the same year as Patrick's death and, not surprisingly, of Mark Lombardi who had charted the entire Iran-Contra network in Houston from his job at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum near Houston's First Presbyterian Church.  Some of those other inexplicable 2000 deaths, after Patrick’s death, had me scratching my head as to where our journalism professionals had gone.  I am mindful of John Stockwell’s statement in his CSPAN lecture on “Secret Wars of the CIA” that had there not been pressure on these guys we would have invaded Nicaragua. 
     In 1988 I was in a car in Houston with Rev. Gary Demarest from La Canada Presbyterian Church in California, a friend of Don Moomaw, the pastor of Bellaire Presbyterian and Ronald Reagan’s pastor who had asked Demarest to go to Nicaragua on a fact finding trip with a group to meet with the Sandanistas.  Demarest, an ex-Marine, told me that the Sandinistas were not a threat to the West or the U.S., but that when he and the others told Reagan this “Reagan's eyes glazed over.”   That proved to be correct as the fall of the Berlin Wall proved.  Communism without free market incentives is dead, but the post-Glass-Steagall era of capitalism gone wild doesn’t work either except for the criminals.  Alan Greenspan’s ‘Put” went “Kaput” and with it the deification of Milton Friedman.

 

WC:  Petraeus appeared in public in Washington this week to update the Congress on the war.

 

WC:  Yes, and he didn't take a Smedley Butler, "War Is A Racket" stance, but then the guy has been totally traumatized.   First by that stray bullet that nearly killed him at Fort Campbell and which Senator William Frist plugged and then by the Paula Broadwell affair and his job loss at CIA.  If you recall the last time he was in front of Congress he fainted.  Who wouldn't?

WC:   Patrick had worked for Ellas, Ranch 616 and Rather Sweet in Austin.  Isn’t that the firm of Rebecca Rather in Austin, Dan Rather’s niece?  I have read elsewhere that she has mineral rights on the historic Nassau-Waldec Plantation in Round Top, Texas.  That was where the first Buffalo Soldiers were domiciled after the Civil War under Morgan Lewis and Giles Alexander Smith, Union Generals and brothers.   Reconstruction in Texas was initially enforced by the Buffalo Soldiers....an interesting side board.  It raises the question for me as to just why Don Rumsfeld bought the Misery Plantation in Maryland where Frederick Douglass was "renditioned," but.....

WC:   Yes.  The Buffalo Soldiers were black Union troops used to enforce Reconstruction in Texas, but I find it fascinating that they were also in charge of the camels that Jefferson Davis had envisioned as pack animals for Westward expansion through Texas in the late 1850's and that vision of using the camels did not die until 1866.  Davis had purchased the camels in Smyna, the key shipping point of David Sassoons's opium bound for China.  China.  Ellington Field. Claire Chennault.  The defense of the Silk Road?  Oh, an you cannot forget that many know aspects of this history, but it's not common knowledge.  Sterling Seagraves who graduated from Ray High School in Corpus Christi, has written books on our relationship to China that are a must read for all Americans.
     Patrick’s uncle is the fishing buddy of William E. King, the business partner of GWB’s Texas Air National Guard roommate, James R. Bath.  He had spent the week prior to his death in Houston with a young man whose family’s business was adjacent to the Cibolo, Texas airport where Salem Bin Laden had inexplicably died in 1988.  That young man’s father was married to an heir of the Benjamin Holt, Caterpillar and tank track inventor, and he called Patrick less than an hour before his death.  After his death the young man suddenly moved to San Diego, California.  His mother was the secretary of the Methodist Superintendent, overseer of the local church where John H. “Jack” Modesett’s name was on the scout building.  The Superintendent, a local pastor then, had preached Patrick's funeral service at Parkway Presbyterian since I had left First Presbyterian by then.   Patrick had been with his uncle on a 60 Hatteras named The Sea Note, bought by his uncle and a business partner, from Thomas Hajecate, the son-in-law of a Halliburton executive.   The boat had been sold after Hajecate was convicted in Operation Lone Star a money laundering scheme during the early Iran-Contra era.  I knew none of this at the time, nor do I believe did Patrick who had just moved to Houston. The key witness in the Operation Lone Star case like Barry Seal, Robert Corson and Michael Lloyd Self, a woman named Sibley Riggs, never saw the resolution of her case either.   I had tracked parties from the boat that Patrick had been on with his uncle the night he had died to a house on the tarmac of the Houston Gulf Manor Airport before I knew what the Houston Gulf Manor Airport was.

WC:   And what was it?  

WC:  It was the airport bought by James R. Bath and the Saudi royal banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, for Salem Bin Laden before Bath became the focus of FinCEN the Financial Crime Enforcement Network that was following Saudi influence peddling in the U.S. and could have led to the capture of the 911 hijackers had our eye been on the ball.  FinCEN received a stand down order in 1992 and we essentially lost track of so much related to Saudi financial connection in the U.S. in the years before September 11^th.  This was the favorite airport of the NASA astronauts and their private planes.  After 911 the Bin Ladens were quickly ushered out of the U.S. and the airport was razed.

WC:  More bitter herbs?
 

WC:  Consider that each year Houston's Judge David Hittner, a Jew, has hosted an annual Passover Seder in Houston that mixed religion and politics.  When I saw that William E. King, Jim Bath's business partner and former law partner at Bracewell & Giuliani, the former Mayor of Kemah and Patrick's uncle's fishing partner, was at the last one I sent a message that read “Marvelous reminder of just how Judaism came together to survive God’s indiscriminate slaughter of some one else’s first borns.”  Arguing with the Scriptures is a marvelous mental exercise that takes a degree of theological and philosophical maturity....or, at least, boldness.

I didn’t hear back, but that’s what it was.  We have endorsed in the U.S. preemptive strikes against potential enemies in a way that Noam Chomsky, Smedley Butler, Westhusting, Tillman, Stockwell and countless others of conscience and faith have decried as the racket of war.  Religion is a source of strength and commitment to all kinds of human aspirations, it’s also quaint and often, as we see in female circumcision and an unexamined acceptance of the Passover’s inequalities, misguided.

Where I embrace Judaism the most is in its rejection of totalitarianism and that is where Dr. Ben Carson missed a marvelous opportunity recently.   A Muslim can be President of the U.S. if they embrace its precepts which reject monarchial religious beliefs…  Primogeniture values of first-born domination that Thomas Jefferson was assigned by the first Continental Congress to write out of U.S. law.    If Carson started with that it’s easy to slide toward his “first do no harm” of the Hippocratic Oath and toward universal humanitarianism that rejects spoken and unspoken radicalism, left and right. Joseph P. Kennedy practiced this rejected value as has George Herbert Walker Bush and the Bush dynasty.  The nineteen year old who zinged Jeb Bush with “your brother created ISIS” is dead on!   Bitter herbs?    It was our first –born son who was killed like he was one of the guilty Egyptian kids who may have had nothing to do with Ramses’ program of oppression and slavery.  So now we collectively embrace what Robert Lovett called the pacification of societies?   On the backs of the innocent in a world that is quickly choking on the fumes of its growing greenhouse gasses on a planet booby trapped with nuclear devices or shooting enriched uranium from the Blue’s brothers Predator and Reaper drones while Rand Paul wonders if our President will kill us without due process?   Biter herbs?   Bitter herbs?   Yes.  You might say that.  Meanwhile, the Jesuit Pope, whose order was most responsible for the Spanish Inquisition and the shackling of Copernicus and Galileo, has arrived preaching ecology, but not birth control on a planet that we have been told by scientists is rigged with a population bomb.  I think that today Pope Francis is in Pennsylvania where just before the Jerry Sandusky scandal in the summer of 2011 thirty-seven  Roman Catholic priests were indicted for child abuse….where Dick Thornburgh who tore apart the testimony of Marian Carr Knox whose son, Patrick Carr, defended her testimony lives and where Thornburgh  tried to tear apart the investigation of retired FBI Director Louis Freeh’s of the Penn State debacle, home of  Frank Carlucci and Tom Ridge.  Bitter herbs, indeed!

WC:  You are anxious to see the Robert Redford and James Vanderbilt film that comes out on October 16^th.  Why?

WC:  You surely know.   You published a TRUTH scorecard that asks all the pertinent questions of the film, but you’ve got to wonder especially why we would want to revisit that episode now in the run up to the 2016 election.


Note: Following the publication of this interview the interviewee called to say that he had wanted to add a comment.  It had to do with the place that Hosni Mubarak played in providing the appearance of stability and Western-style democracy in Egypt without the substance:
       "For that he was thrown out not by the fundamentalists whose torturous religious practices against women Mubarak had defended as did the pastor at FPC San Antonio, but by the true reformers in Egypt.   It seems that they don't like Ramses any more than Moses did.  The son-in-law of CIA Middle-East bureau chief Thomas Tweeton, Matt Gannon, also CIA, was returning to the U.S. because he realized that rank and file CIA agents in the Middle East knew nothing about Al Qaeda which had been spawned inside of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood for the express purpose of fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.  This is where Osama Bin Laden connects with Al Qaeda which tried to migrate to Syria, was expelled by Assad, then went to Saudi Arabia which produced the bulk of the 911 hijackers beneath the protective umbrella of the Saudi royals.  None being from Iraq.  The overthrow of Mubarak and the outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood should tell Dr. Ben Carson and any informed American that there is a progressive element of the Muslim world that does not want to be hog tied to the 12th Century any more than Christians want to live in a world before Copernicus and Galileo, the Magna Carta or the U.S. Constitution that is now being seriously threatened.  Like Dan Rather and Mary Mapes receiving a Peabody Award for their breaking of the Abu Ghraib story in 2004 which Amnesty International broke in 2003 or the awarding of Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright Pulitizers for their coverage of 911, in books that left out so much that is questionable about the sequence of events and major players, we should be screaming for a stronger Fourth Estate.  Returning with Matt Gannon to press his case at the CIA was FBI agent and son of FBI Associate Deputy Director under William Sessions (Sessions, the successor of Judge John Howland Wood in San Antonio, Bexar County where Salem Bin Laden died in 1988 and moving to San Antonio from El Paso, home of the Chagra brothers), Oliver "Buck" Revell, the Bureau's highest unappointed agent and head of the anti-terrorism program.  Revell's son changed his flight plans.   Tweeton's son-in-law wasn't so fortunate.  He didn't make it home.   He was on Pan Am 103 that blew up over Lockerbie Scotland.   Patrick Carr, our son, knew Mr. Revell, a strong supporter of JINSA the Jewish Institute on National Security Affairs,  from our church in Plano, Texas, as did I.   When I called to ask for help with Patrick's investigation Buck said 'I can't believe you are telling me this.  Our grandson died the next night on December 11, 2000.'  Ruled a suicide no one saw it coming. His car was parked down the street. The car door was open and he was found in his father's closet."