Eye-Opening Perspectives for Heroic Hearts

Eye-Opening Perspectives for Heroic Hearts

Monday, September 14, 2015

Marian Carr Knox, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and Mark Lombardi

The Name of Marian Knox Surfaces In New Context
 
by Winsip Custer, CPW News Service
 
Letter to NPR Interviewee concerning the upcoming film Truth received from father of young man who died in car fire in Houston on anniversary of Gary Webb's 1997 resignation from the San Jose Mercury News and Webb's two-shot suicide on December 10, 2004.
 
 
 
 
Dr. Robert Hobbs
Virginia Commonwealth University
 
Dear Professor Hobbs,
 
     I listened with interest to your NPR story about the Mark Lombardi art work.  There has been some speculation about the death of Mr. Lombardi in 2000 “by his own hand”.  As you well know he worked like Donald Barthelme at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum with the De Menil Collection.  I was close friends with John Domercq, an elder at the Grace Presbyterian Church in Houston, who had been the VP for Acquisitions for Schlumberger, the Dominique De Menil family company.
      Do you know if there was any connection between Donald Barthelme’s wife, Marian Knox, and Mrs. Marian Carr Knox, the key witness to the Dan Rather and Mary Mapes story that is the subject of the October 16, 2015 premier of the film TRUTH based on Mapes’ book Truth and Duty?
     There was a significant number of mysterious deaths in 2000 in the months before the Presidential election.  Have you done anything in terms of your knowledge of just what may have led Mark Lombardi who took such an interest in the intricacies of life to take his own?
     My own son died in Houston under mysterious circumstances on the anniversary of the death of Gary Webb, author of Dark Alliance who had referred to Peter Brewton's work in Houston during his debate* just after Dark Alliance was published with the Washington Post's Jeff Leen.  Brewton's work at the Houston Post and in his 1992 book, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, uncovered the undeniable relationship between the Iran-Contra network and the 1980's S&L scandal.  
     Given the close relationship between NPR and the US Information Agency with key connections like those between Pete Peterson and Henry Catto, the Texan and former Ambassador to  El Salvador, did you sense that your story on Lombardi was really welcomed on its own merits or that is was being "managed"?  Were you surprised when the Harris County Medical Examiner's office in Houston was "investigated" for corruption by Michael Bromwich the former Iran-Contra prosecutor?  We're you surprised when the Washington Post's Metro Editor became the Managing Editor of the Houston Post's competitor, the Houston Chronicle, in as much as Vernon Loeb approved the front page accounts of the altered Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories as well as co-writing the biography of General David Petraeus with Paula Broadwell, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus?
 
Sincerely,
 
William H. Carr


* The debate between Jeff Leen and Gary Webb which took place shortly after 911 was moderated and organized by University of Missouri journalism professor emeritus, Steve Weinberg, founder of the IRE Journal.  Jeff Leen had been one of Dr. Weinberg's students.  Weinberg claims to have disagreed with Leen's position on Gary Webb's story.  Indeed, he wrote in one assessment of Webb's coverage...“Even if Webb overreached in a few paragraphs — based on my careful reading, I would say his overreaching was limited, if it occurred at all — he still had a compelling, significant investigation to publish.”  Webb didn't overreach.  Leen would continue even after the release of the film Kill the Messenger to discredit Webb with an article "Gary Webb Was No Journalistic Hero," a position opposed by the NY Times, David Carr. Weinberg's IRE is a University of Missouri journalistic clearing house and support group in Washington D.C..  The NPR story normalizes the suicide of Mark Lombardi when questions remain.  It then de-legitimized his work as "six degrees of separation" as if to say...."there's nothing really here and if there is, it's easily manufactured from a vivid imagination."  Hobbs legitimized Lombardi's work and his tenacity in using art to imitate life....its dark, perhaps darkest side. Gary Webb resigned his position with the San Jose Mercury News on December 10, 1997.  Webb's alleged two-shot to the head suicide was on December 10, 2004 shortly after the 2004 Bush victory over Senator John Kerry whose work in U.S. Congress and the Senate had confirmed Gary Webb's research.  Patrick Carr, same name as the son of Mrs. Marian Carr Knox's son, Patrick Carr, who defended her testimony in the Rather/Mapes story was found in his burning Ford Bronco near Ellington Field and the Bin Laden's Houston Gulf Manor Airport on December 10, 2000 as the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding the appointment of GWB after the contested Florida election.  Mark Lombardi's art had traced the Bush/Bath/Bin Laden orbit in Houston without making the connections to the complimentary evidence from Peter Brewton's The Mafia CIA and George Bush and Gary Webb's Dark Alliance.  Brewton's father, a Presbyterian minister attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas and Princeton Presbyterian Theological Seminary, was, like Patrick Carr's father, a Texas Presbyterian Minister. After Patrick's death his father learned that Professor Robert S. Paul for whom he had been a student assistant, Paul formerly of New Haven Seminary in Connecticut, had supported civil rights activist William Burnett Benton for the U.S. Senate race.  Paul was credited by Benton's for his victory over Prescott Bush in the 1950 Connecticut Senatorial race when Paul defended Benton against a smear campaign by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
 

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