Houston Chronicle's Andrew Dansby, San Francisco Chronicle's Mick La Salle, James Vanderbilt and the Webb/Rather Comparison

HOUSTON CHRONICLE’S ANDREW DANSBY and JAMES VANDERBILT ON GARY WEBB AND DAN RATHER

 

"Rather is a goddamn liar, but he gave us in his 2015 CNN interview a simple slip up that shows us the continuity between the White House in 2000, the Clinton White House, that did not stop the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and the 2000 Supreme Court appointment of Bush...'The Boston Globe did this story in 2000, long before we got this story, but the White House," ....and that was the Clinton White in 2000....'and the Bush operation managed to contain it,'  the 'White House power' was the Clinton White House'!  Thank you Rather for admitting the obvious.  It was the 2000 planned copulative assembly....a giant managed cluster xxxx opening the flood gates for the rape of the nation and release of the war profiteers." -Winsip Custer

for the exact quote in the Rather CNN interview see 4:14 following of
http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/11/01/dan-rather-says-the-truth-movie-is-true.cnn

 

Truth Avoiding Texas Theaters. Not Even at Redford's Sundance Theaters, Houston in October or November. Why?*
 

     By Olson D. Lisez for CPW News Service

Andrew Dansby of the Houston Chronicle:

 

Q: Watching this, I was reminded of "Kill the Messenger," about San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb's story on alleged connections among the CIA, the crack trade and Nicaraguan Contras. His career was destroyed because of a bad source. A margin for error didn't exist.

 

James Vanderbilt, Director, Truth based on Mary Mapes' book Truth and Duty

A: It's something Bob and I talked about, and something I had in mind. And obviously, "All the Presidents Men" was a touchstone, too. Once I got Bob in the movie, that connection became even more distinct. (Laughs.) "Oh, hey, there's Woodward!" But he reminded me, "Look, 'All the President's Men' has the reporters screwing up." They messed up the (H.R.) Haldeman story (about Nixon's chief of staff) and got sent back out. So they had a second chance that reporters don't always get. That movie, like my movie, was about two reporters working on a story about a sitting president. But they have very different endings. And in the case of Gary Webb, it haunted him until his death.

      The 2015 movie by James Vanderbilt and Robert Redford that covers the botch-job of the 2004 Bush Ellington Field memo stories, Truth,  has now subtly attempted to kill two canaries in the mine shaft with one stone. One of the canaries was Gary Webb whose work on Dark Alliance has been wholly vindicated.  Mr. Dansby, like Jeff Leen of the Washington Post, is no Clark Kent and did not consider the source of the discrediting of Webb's research, specifically, the former LA cop who did not come forward with his CIA-link revelation until he did so in the role of "damage controller", Michael Ruppert.  The other was Marian Carr Knox who was sacrificed by Rather and Mapes by not asking her about the memos before they had to admit they were copies, something she could have told them long before 2004.
       There was much happening in the fall of 2004 besides the Rather/Mapes handling of Marian Carr Knox's testimony about the Ellington Field memos.   There followed the November Presidential election....then, on December 10, the death of Gary Webb on the same day as his resignation from the San Jose Mercury News in 1997.   Then came December 20, 2004.   The whistleblower on the Promis Software related P-Tech case, Indira Singh, a risk manager for Chase Bank in New York and witness to 911 and a ground zero volunteer in the aftermath, had already contacted the father of a Texas man who had died on December 10, 2000 near Ellington Field, Houston.  The son had worked in the Austin company of Dan Rather's niece, Rebecca Rather, and his uncle was the fishing partner of  the Houston attorney, William E. King,  the lawyer for GWB's Texas Air National Guard roommate, James Reynolds Bath. 
     Indira Singh had written on November 3,  2005 to a Denver radio talk show host named Michael Corbin about her concerns on December 10, 2004 remembering her earlier conversations by phone and email with the deceased man's father.   She sent a copy of her letter to Corbin and to the man's father.  It included the following:

 

11/03/05 at 10:42 PM

To

mcorbin@filomax.net

 

     Exactly one month after this was posted, on Ruppert's site was Dec 10, 2004, a day of significance - the day of Gary Webb's suicide/murder was the exact day 4 years prior that Will Carr's son was murdered.   For me, Dec 10, 2004 was the day the lug nuts on my car were loosened and I had a "come to Jesus" moment on the highway. That was not an accident.
     Anyway this was posted close to one year ago.

      Did Singh question Ruppert's intentions?  Perhaps, but it is difficult to know.  Gary Webb had done an interview with Michael Corbin who was increasingly characterized as a conspiracy theory alternate media personality.  Indira Singh had first made contact with the father on November 18, 2003  two years before the letter to Corbin and three yeas after the death of Patrick Carr, the same name as the son of the key witness in what would in 2004 become Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' CBS 60 Minutes memo story.  That was just after Indira Singh had read an online letter from Patrick Carr's father to the family of Theodora Cohen who had died on Pan Am 103, a plane on which was the son-in-law of  the CIA Middle East Bureau Chief, Thomas Tweeton, Matthew Gannon, also a CIA agent.  Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.  Gannon did not get his questions answered as eyes turned to Libya and an eventual multi-billion-dollar reparation from Gadhafi whose nation would be viewed for a forward U.S. military base in the Middle East.  
     In his investigation the father of Pat Carr had learned that the son of one his parishioners was also scheduled to fly on Pan Am 103, but changed his flight plans.  This man, an FBI agent, his father who was also FBI was in charge of the FBI's anti-terrorism program.  His grandson in Dallas would die in a mysterious suicide the night after Pat Carr in Houston. It was later learned that Gannon was headed to Langley, Virginia to press the CIA for answers to exactly why the rank and file CIA agents had so little information on an Islamic group that had evolved in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, the hard-core Islamic group protected by Hosni Mubarak and expelled by the centrist Egyptians during the "Arab Spring" .
     That group migrated first to Syria and then to Saudi Arabia where their initial alliance with the U.S. in Afghanistan had come unraveled....an unraveling that seems to have been exacerbated by the 1988 death of the oldest brother of their leader, Osama Bin Laden, Salem Bin Laden.  Salem died in an inexplicable ultra-light airplane crash in Cibolo, Texas where Salem attended the wedding of the son of the Saudi Royal family's pilot, an American.  Salem also owned a Texas airport near Ellington Field in Houston, Houston Gulf Manor Airport, which had been purchased with the help of the Saudi royal family's banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, with the help of James R. Bath, GWB's Texas Air National Guard roommate while the two were at Ellington Field together a few miles away from Houston Gulf Manor Airport.  Salem Bin Laden's brother had been supplied munitions, including Stinger missiles, from the CIA via Texas Representative Charlie Wilson and Joanne King Herring, the subject of the book, Charlie Wilson's War, with many of the Texas financial supporters, like those developed by Carl R. "Spitz" Channell, the Reagan-Bush Contra money man in the U.S.,  had supported the Contra cause.   The Contras had, of course, become in 1992 and again in 1996 the focus of journalists Gary Webb in California and Peter Brewton in Houston, a connection that the former Miami Herald investigative reporter and then with the Washington Post, Jeff Leen, was not happy to hear Webb make in their 1997 debate orchestrated by IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors) also in Washington D.C..  Leen was sullied by the what he called "all of this conspiracy theory stuff"....which the Congress and the Kerry Committee had clearly proven that Iran-Contra debacle was.
     James R. Bath and his Saudi colleagues had been in the crosshairs of the FinCEN Investigation into Saudi influence peddling in the U.S. which received a stand down order in the 1992 Presidential election year, the same year that Peter Brewton's well-documented book, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush  which was initially signed by Simon & Schuster with All the President's Men editor, Alice Mayhew, as editor was being managed like the Rather and Mapes memo investigation in both 2000 and 2004.
      The father of Pat Carr had tracked parties from a boat that his son had been on the night of his death to homes along the tarmac of Salem Bin Laden's Houston Gulf Manor airport....the favorite airport of many of NASA's leading astronauts.  The boat had been owned by the son-in-law of a Halliburton executive, William R. Breland.  The son-in-law, Thomas Hajecate, had also owned the boat which was sold or confiscated during Operation Lone Star that included money laundering and capital flight charges, murders, crooked Houston D.A.'s and the revelation that Carlos Lehder and Robert Vesco's work crossed into the U.S. from Colombia to the Bahamas, Florida, Georgia and Texas and that Vesco had been in business with former Security and Exchange Commission head, William Casey, who became the head of the CIA.  They were in a hydroponics business together in Louisiana.
       It was this side of their research that Gary Webb and Peter Brewton had to connect to create a firm three-legged stool that proved beyond a shadow of doubt that elements of the U.S. government are a criminal enterprise which has triggered the exodus of good patriots from the ranks of the CIA since what was known as the Church Commission that exposed the "family jewels" that were clearly well-tarnished.  In the aftermath came the evolution of cooked intelligence and runaway manufacture of consent for war in various regions.  It was also this side of their research that had the Miami Herald's reporter, now at the Washington Post, Jeff Leen, coming unglued when in their 1997 debate at the IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors) Webb mentioned his conversation with Brewton in Houston (IRE debate at 42:30, see below).

       In truth, speaking of the obvious, Gary Webb's canary is not dead as much as Jeff Leen or Steve Coll or Mr. Dansby or his editor at the Houston Chronicle wishes it was with Jeff Leen writing after the release of the film Kill the Messenger an article for the Washington Post titled "Gary Webb Was No Journalistic Hero". 
     Neither is the other canary dead, though the attempt to kill them both is a well choreographed national reminder that the Bush family survives scandal, but how?  The memo story that Mapes and Rather presented in 2004 was, according to Mapes in her own book, available in 1999, therefore in time for the 2000 Presidential election.   Why not go with it then when it could really have changed things that are now an albatross around GWB's younger brother's neck....2000-2008....Enron, the World Trade center that if not an inside job was at least an inside botch-job with the stand down on the FinCEN investigation that could have netted the 911 hijackers at U.S. flight schools, yellow cake uranium, WMD's,  the invasion of Iraq based on cooked evidence, the lack of a military exit strategy, but an endless symphony of music to the ears of the war racketeers....endless warfare.....the Greenspan "put" that was prepped by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and the 2008 bamboozle that matched, only larger, the bamboozle of the 1980's that Peter Brewton had meticulously connected to the same criminals running the Iran-Contra fiasco?

       Mapes on page 84-85 of Truth and Duty explains that she had the testimony of GWB's Air National Guard Brigadier General who retired in 1986 who in 2000 had called the GWB actions within the Guard and not the Boston Globe report from 2000 the "fraud".  The Boston Globe had, as Rather will later confirm, had it right.
     The Boston Globe's 2000 coverage of the Ellington Field story was acknowledge by Dan Rather in an October 2015 CNN interview, but without his acknowledgement that Mapes had the story in 1999.  That was a convenient omission in as much as combined with what Mapes knew through the Texas Brigadier General, CBS had in 2000 what the 2001 yellow cake uranium story lacked.   A slam dunk.
     Complicating the matter is the fact that the Boston Globe is from the hometown of the Joseph P. Kennedy clan, which while the Kennedy patriarch was supportive of the right-wing business plotters of the 1930's, an alignment that alienated him from egalitarian insider, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his counterpart in England, Winston Churchill, Kennedy was not part of the predominantly Puritan Protestant New England Brahmin class that essentially controls the factors of military industrialized production of which Yale and the other Ivy League power elites are additionally the controllers of the U.S. intelligence apparatus since long before 1947.  As Robin Winks, author of Cloak and Gown: Scholars In the Secret War 1939-1961, has recorded and which his friendship with the New Haven Seminary Professor, Dr. Robert S. Paul,  who supported civil rights advocate, William Barnett Benton in the 1950 Senate race against Prescott Bush, both men members of Yale's Bonesmen, there is a power struggle even within the core of the power elites' elites under whose tutelage evolved the American "arsenal of freedom" including the Manhattan Project.  This fact helps to explain the migration of the Bush family members from the more representative and flatter Presbyterian churches to the pyramidal, oligarchical Anglican church.  It may also help to explain why Dresser Industries supplied the water pumps for the Manhattan Project, the difficulty of connecting Vannevar Bush to the Walker/Bush clan and Neil Mallon's leadership at Dresser for whom Neil Mallon Bush, brother of GWB and JEB, is named.
     While Mapes claims that the General in charge of the Texas National Guard when GWB was there would not go on record in 2000 by giving a 60 Minutes interview  for fear that he would have to move out of his San Antonio apartment complex because he was surrounded by Bush supporters and that he was remarrying, Mapes appears to have no sense of urgency in telling the story between the summer and November of 2000.  The General was no "Deep Throat" who had anonymously supported the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate story by the Washington Post.  Mapes had the living, breathing, high-ranking and clearly identified witness in tow.  Brigadier General Belisarios Flores was remarried on November 4, 2000 in San Antonio (Bexar County Marriage License #149275) after the 2000 election and while this put him out of the crossfire through the fall of 2000,  the election issue was now ratcheted up to a fever pitch in Florida making it dangerous for Marian Carr Knox and her family and anyone bearing, as an accident of birth, the name of the son who defended her, Patrick Carr.   Mape's excuse that she dropped the story in 2000 because her mother had died (Truth and Duty, p. 84-85), not to be insensitive to issues of normal human grief and loss, was not legitimate given the gravity of the issues.  More troubling is that she signed off on the 2015 script for Truth a script that doesn't mention Flores at all, but shows in one scene his name on the bottom of a list of sources that would not come forward so is crossed off.  According to Mapes book on page eighty four and five he had already come forward.  This discrepancy makes Mapes out to be a seriously compromised media prostitute like Rather. "The powerful Marian Carr Knox interview with Rather is not even mentioned in the movie making it a clear piece of 2015 political propaganda and Rather, like Steve Coll, Jeff Leen or Vernon Loeb a pimp of the media's improper properline," said Winsip Custer.
     No doubt General Flores' Hispanic background in Texas, being the first Hispanic U.S. General, also complicated the issue when considering that the predominantly Roman Catholic Hispanics in Texas were religiously linked to the New England Irish Catholics, whom the Puritan Protestant power brokers distrusted, but without whom the state of Texas may have never existed without a concordat with Texas Protestants who together resisted the Mexican army.  Having this testimony from Flores, were the Rather and Mapes memos even necessary? No! A resounding "NO"!  So where was journalism's outrage?  Like GWB it was AWOL!

       Second, there is no comparison between the powerful Dan Rather who could have and should have judiciously asked Marian Carr Knox about the authenticity of the memos before he aired the story in 2004 as the nation headed into a Presidential election?  Unlike Rather, Gary Webb had been working for the small regional newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, not CBS News and 60 Minutes.  Still, Rather could have gone with the Bush memo story, but with Knox's and others' personal accounts of the real events as evidence.  Gary Webb?  Sorry Mr. Dansby, he had none of Rather's power resources nor Rather's slipshod journalistic mind-farting that looks from history to have been contrived in a Madison Avenue back office of Young & Rubicam. 
     This is doubly apparent when you consider that Mapes and Rather received a Peabody Award for "breaking" the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 when, in fact, Amnesty International broke the story in 2003.   In addition, Rather co-owned a 9000 acre ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico, the Tecolote Ranch, with Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  Blazing, fire engine red flag!
     Instead, what we get in the Rather/Mapes debacle is a replay of the Paul Newman film The Verdict....a totally believable witness whose testimony is twisted by the defense attorney over a copied document, in The Verdict.....James Mason as attorney Concannon... has the witness' testimony thrown out on a technicality.  Sorry Dansby and Vanderbilt, but the memo story stands in spite of Rather's and Mape's botch job.  Concannon's character was in Rather's "Memo-gate" the former U.S. Attorney under GHWB, Dick Thornburgh, and side kick from the Associated Press, Louis Boccardi and Marian Carr Knox?  She was the totally believable witness like nurse Kaitlin Costello Price in The Verdict, an analogy previously drawn by reporter Fabian Colbachi.
     Colbachi went one further.  He laid out the methodology used to take a film like Truth and to flip it as tool of applied sociology and psychology by public relation mind benders, in this case, Newsbuster.com, the Brent Bozell, III website for the promotion of right winged media manipulation.
     Colbachi's reporting on aspects of the 2004 election that Memo-gate was designed to confuse was covered in his October 2011 article not on the 2004 election, but on the 2000 election which was infinitely more critical to the future of the nation.

     What these factors make of Robert Redford as a perceived scion of liberal causes is anyones' guess.   The same goes for Rather, according to Colbachi and Custer.  James Vanderbilt?  "In the 1850's Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Walker were warring in Central America for the control of the overland route from the Pacific to the Atlantic.  I suggest that the U.S. power elites, like those of other nations,  war among themselves, but meanwhile protect their exclusive battle by keeping other challengers out of the ring," said Colbachi who believes that William Walker, the mercenary filibusterer who tried to annex for personal gain Baja, California and Honduras, is a direct ancestor of George Herbert Walker and therefore the Bush clan.  "Iran-Contra was a replay of a longstanding land grab under the guise of left-right political agendas," said Colbachi.  "At the heart of Memo-gate is something much more sinister."
      Gary Webb not only survived his grueling trial before Professor Emeritus of the University of Missouri's Journalism School, Steve Weinberg, who at every turn piles onto Webb with Jeff Leen, Webb drilled it.   We know when Webb mentions Peter Brewton that it does not take a psychologist to unravel Leen's response (listen for yourself at 42:30 of the 1997 IRE debate). Leen's body language stumbles through the IRE's (Investigative Reporters and Editors) recording of the event like a cornered boxer going down on one knee and taking off his gloves in a last ditched effort to deck Webb's case.

       Winsip Custer has made a point of laying out the improbability of a straight-forward handling of the Mapes and Rather "Memo-gate" debacle as if the whole episode was managed and manipulated from the get-go.  "It's more twisted than a pretzel," said Custer. Why all of this is being revisited in 2015 a year before the 2016 election and why it now finds the Houston Chronicle's Andre Dansby commenting when the film was not initially, nor yet, released in Rather's home town and state is well beyond curious.  
     The Houston Chronicles' Managing Editor, formerly at the Washington Post where Sundance and Ratso played Woodward and Bernstein, was Vernon Loeb.  "Loeb, who botched the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories in what appeared to be a means of building consent for war in the Middle East, a charge leveled by Jessica Lynch and the Tillman family, makes this conversation between Andrew Dansby and James Vanderbilt suspect from the start, too," said Winsip Custer who suggested that readers revisit the previous accounts of Truth in this publication.    Also, those on the credibility of the Gary Webb investigation in Dark Alliance and its parallel investigation from 1992 by the Houston Post's reporter, Peter Brewton, author of the 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush.  Brewton, an attorney is also a professor of journalism at Texas Tech University. 
     "I'd suggest that Dansby and Vanderbilt and who ever is following the film Truth read No Truth In Texas by Lowell P. Wigglesworth and Truth In Search of a Unicorn by Buckley Wright Bragg," said Custer.

*Truth was released in select Texas cinemas the first week of November more than fifteen days after its announced national release.