Harper Lee: On Second Thought

Atticus Finch In the Catbird Seat:   The Vichy-Ization Of American Culture

 By Tio Blanco Negro de la Valle for CPW News Service

 

     It turns out that Atticus Finch is a different bird than the one novelist, Harper Lee, a contemporary of Southern writers Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell and Truman Capote, first reported in To Kill A Mockingbird. Okay, the editors assisted her in rethinking her original version from the initial draft/s.  Still, it was her decision to release it with the saintly Atticus we all grew to know and admire.
     "Harper Lee's second novel is titled Go Set A Watchman, but it should be titled Go Set A Watchman By the Woodpile," said Dr. Cletus Codlicker, a director of The Institute for the Analysis of Scientific Anomalies and a long-time fan of Lee's original story of the beloved Atticus Finch.

     Atticus, as it turns out, was more like this reviewer's Castillian ancestors, like the Spaniards who inflicted their Claveria Laws on the poor indigenous people of their conquered provinces.  “Yes, indeed” said expert on the movie roles of actor Gregory Peck, John “Stubby” Arbuckle of Los Angeles, California.

     This was Gregory Peck’s favorite part of all the parts he played. “Gregory loved playing Atticus,” said Arbuckle.  “It gave him that great sense that he was defender of human honor.   Now that Harper Lee’s second novel uncovers a decidedly different side of Atticus, I am wondering just how Peck….if he could return from the grave….would feel about his favorite character?” asked Arbuckle.

     Arbuckle is circumspect when it comes to Harper Lee’s disappearance from the South and her move to New York where she was befriend by socialites Michael and Joy Williams Brown.  While Michael Brown promoted American industrialism through industrial musicals and his lovely wife supported the New York ballet community.  "For all I know, Michael Brown's family owned the Baltimore, Maryland Brown's Merchant Shot Tower where pre-Civil War musket ball maker, James Hamlet, played the dramatic role of the first African American to be tried under the war-fueling Fugitive Slave Laws, being returned to his job after the case to fashion George Luther Stearns' lead....a 'Secret Six' backer of abolitionist, John Brown, from Boston into bullets for the Civil War.  Baltimore was not only the manufacturing center for U.S. industrialists' China clippers, but home to Alexander Brown the progenitor of National City Bank for which Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler lamented his role as a "Goon on three continents" and which morphed into Brown and Root....Kellogg Brown and Root or KBR," said Arbuckle.  "Now with this assertion that Atticus was a goddamn typical bigot, no worse, a Nazi-like eugenicists like those uncovered by Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak and like those enraged Dixie dufusses from South Carolina, the seemingly random copulative assembly of Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, runaway killers from New York's prisons, border jumping pistol plinkers of innocent young white girls in San Francisco and escaped drug kingpins in Mexico and the stage is set for another Hitlerian era," he continued.

     “Why Harper just disappeared for all these years is as great a mystery as the work of Margaret Mitchell, the great Southern writer from Smith College, alma mater of Barbara Pierce Bush, Nancy Reagan, Julia Child, Phebe Novakovic, Shelly Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinam and Betty Friedan.    Now I knew that when Margaret Mitchell published her one hit wonder, Gone With The Wind, produced as the film by John “Jock” Hay Whitney, husband of Barbara Cushing Paley Whitney, that this sad story of Miss Scarlet and Rhett Butler was a marvelous piece of propaganda ready-made for keeping the clod hopper Southerners, ninety percent of whom had no slaves, in the dark about the real history of the Civil War, fed and watered by the likes of Caleb Cushing, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman and a host of dead Union Generals buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.  They lie there nestled next to their key oligarch and founder of the 1833 Order at Yale, home of the Connecticut-based Baltimore opium cutter-builders, the Huntingtons, Russells, Cushings, Tafts and a bevy of bodacious Boston Brahmans who fueled the U.S. Civil War under the pretext of abolitionism when it was to secure the rail route to the Pacific and the Middle Eastern opium that made them all fortunes as it was dumped for other goods along the Yangtze River in China,” said Arbuckle.  "Freed slaves in urbanized ghettos were to the U.S. what the Chinese coolies were to the British and Chinese opium wars," said  Arbuckle.

     “You can see the charade continue in the Gregory Peck movie The Big Country.  Playing the part of a sailor from a wealthy Baltimore shipping family, James McKay, he finds himself parked between two warring Hatfields and McCoy-type ranchers in the old American West.  This gentleman sailor wants peace between the feuding settlers, but nowhere in the story is the history of Baltimore  unpacked as with the 1999 book from Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic: The New England Merchants and the Opium Trade,   That book reveals that Fred Bailey, also known as Frederick Douglass, was laying hulls like that of the Frolic for another New England China Trader within the social and business circle of the Huntingtons and Russells.... the Heards,” said Arbuckle.

 

"We are essentially seeing the Vichy-ization of the U.S.." -John "Stubby" Arbuckle

     Arbuckle is quite sure that 90 percent of America’s media is about the support of a military industrialist complex's proper line that keeps the mythology moving in the direction of profits for the power elites.   “Take JEB Bush’s recent assertion that the Americans whose middle class has been decimated should now be working harder than ever to hold on to whatever jobs haven’t been exported overseas to countries that practice economic slavery.  We are essentially seeing the Vichy-ization of the U.S.” said Arbuckle.  “This is now being normalized for the average American.  It's as if Humphrey Bogart who starred in the anti-fight film The Harder They Fall is now Dana White of Ultimate Fighting Championships promoting caged gore and telling Senator John McCain that if he wants whatever war he cannot live without that he has to shut-up about his criticism of this domestic brutality since it feeds the war mentality and money mill.  A killer nation must kill its heroes to continue its downward descent.  The fact that Harper Lee has given us a time machine on the Atticus Finch story at a time when James Baldwin cannot find only a single index reference in the letters of correspondence between Walker Percy and the now famous Shelby Foote, thanks to Ken Burns and his PBS-based Civil War histories which never reports as Brian Lamb’s interview with Foote did that “I consulted no original manuscripts….it’s all been gone over before.”   That admission shows the degree to which the American mythology is a string of big bamboozles,” said Arbuckle.  

     Arbuckle holds nothing back.   “PBS is part of the U.S. Information Agency’s front line of defense on the great American myth which clearly hides the reality of its history like Uri Geller attempting to make a fortune from the CIA via the Stanford Research Institute before his bamboozle was outed by Johnny Carson and James Randi or like the Iran-Contra bamboozle was outed by Gary Webb in his 1996 book, Dark Alliance,” said Arbuckle.  “That Thomas Layton’s 1999 book, The Voyage of the Frolic was published by Stanford is an amazing development considering just how close Leland Stanford was to William Tecumseh Sherman, George Bragg, Braxton Bragg,  Thomas Bragg and the Caleb Cushing connections through the Northeast where lots of good Southern writers are quickly identified, put on ice and exported to a place where their writing can do the least harm to the prevailing myth.”

EMMA SKY UNRAVELING

HOW TO READ AN AMAZON BOOK REVIEW

 

by Simon F. Schuster for CPW News Service

 

     When it comes to reading book reviews on Amazon.com what can one make of the voting system that judges what is "helpful"?

 

     Dr. Phil Itup of the Society for the Analysis of On-line Hidden Persuaders in Dover, Delaware said "we are a nation of joiners.  Anyone who has seen The Amazing Randi's documentary An Honest Liar knows that Americans love being bamboozled.  We don't just like a good carnival freak show, but we'll tell our neighbors to like it too.  You've heard the old adage "You can't read a book by its cover?"  Well, you can read one by its index and words....the ones it uses to spin the washer and the ones that get washed out," said Itup.    "Contrast that saying with 'You have only one opportunity to make a good first impression.'   That means that just after a book is released, before the dust settles, it must make a good strong showing.  What is difficult to know is how many of the votes for and against the helpfulness of a particular review are coming from the staff of the book's publishers and from the general public.  Now we know that political polls are conducted often on less than a couple of thousand respondents and projected across the whole spectrum of society and are generally accurate.  That is probably true of a Tom Clancy novel released and reviewed by several thousand readers.  Lesser numbers are harder to judge.  That's why I like to take the reviews that have only a couple of positive responses, a vast majority of "not helpful" responses, but a good number of "comments".  The devil.....and as The Amazing Randi has so skillfully shown us.....the truth.......is in the details....less in the initial responses.  Time and unfolding evidence has a way of solving great dilemmas and this approach, for me, anyway, is Alexander's sword against the Gordian Knot of life's unexplained mysteries," said Itup.

 

     Itup noted the recent review of Emma Sky's book on the Iraq War titled The Unraveling as an example of his method of analysis of Amazon book reviews.

 

 

2 of 16 people found the following review helpful

 

 

 

2No Mention of Westhusing or Kerik? PLEASE!

ByWill Harvey "Will Harvey"on May 21, 2015

Format: Hardcover

How can a book on the unraveling of the Iraq War not make at least a passing reference to the soldier who is the focus of the first chapter in Christian T. Miller's book BLOOD MONEY, Col. Theodore "Ted" Westhusing? There is, likewise, no reference to Rudy Giuliani's New York police chief, Bernie Kerik, who was indicted and jailed for corruption and was considered for GWB's Homeland Security chief based on his work in Iraq security that surely turned the stomach of Westhusing?

General Wesley Clark has laid out the U.S. Neocon's policy coup in the Middle East...the bloody bath of war profits in an oil rich region. Now Emma Sky is working for the Jackson Institute at Yale? The problem is that Yale's place in the history of the U.S. Civil War is widely unknown by Americans so how can Yale and a Brit offer an academic launch pad for reaching the high ground? For Americans to understand our own history they must read the 1999 book VOYAGE OF THE FROLIC that links the Russells, Huntingtons, Tafts and Heards to Fred Bailey, aka Frederick Douglass, who was laying the hulls of Baltimore opium clippers before he became the spokesman for abolition of slavery that would replace one form of slavery with another.....with additional products and resources in the same Middle East where civil war is a handy policy for the racket of war . This is well covered in the 2015 book SULFUR, LEAD and POPPIES. A West Point U.S. Army Ranger recently asked the author of this one "oh, that's about the war in Afghanistan? "No," he was told...."it's about or own American Civil War. Not much changes."

What Emma Sky is, EXACTLY, cannot be clearly discerned from THE UNRAVELING, nor from her current associations.


Response From F. Hobbs:

What Emma Sky is, EXACTLY," is apparent to anyone who has read her book. She is an idealistic, liberal British Jew, who majored in the Middle East studies and spent a decade working for various NGO's mostly trying to help the Palestinians build institutions during the 1990's peace process. After her country joined what she believed to be an illegal, immoral war in Iraq, she patriotically volunteered to serve in the CPA to help fix the problems her country had created and to protect Iraqi citizens from occupation troops. While there, she discovered that the most idealistic and effective people trying to rebuild Iraq were dedicated officers in the US military struggling to provide security, who desperately needed and deeply appreciated her knowledge of the Middle East, political insights, negotiating skills and outspoken criticism. Talented and well-connected officers in the US State Department generally avoided serving in Iraq. She later volunteered to work in Afghanistan and returned to Iraq during the surge as General Odierno's political officer.

Wlll Harvey exposes himself as a conspiracy theorist, not a credible reviewer of this book. Ms. Sky's book is the candid story of her experiences: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Emma Sky probably left Iraq before Westhusing arrived in the country - and certainly long before he became disillusioned by corruption - and returned to Iraq two years after his suicide. Her first tour overlapped with Kerik's, but he worked on rebuilding the police and the Ministry of the Interior, while she spent her time in Kirkuk (whose oil both Sunnis and Kurds wished to control) and representing Kirkuk in Baghdad. About the time Sky left Iraq for the second time, Yale (an institution that makes conspiracy theorists salivate) received a $50M gift from a former pharmaceutical-exec alum to create an new International Relations Institute "to help and inspire service in our young people today and create globally engaged leaders". Read her book and it will be obvious why she was asked to join.

For the record, I know Emma Sky only through her book.

Response from W. Harvey:

It is not credible to ask why Ms. Sky did not include in a book on the unraveling of the Iraq War which even Brzezinski said "was a bamboozle based on absolutely false evidence," two significant personalities related to both the U.S. military's top leadership AND the 911 city upon which the invasion was based? Why Sky does not even mention Westhusing or Kerik? This author did not create Yale's Pavlovian peccadilloes. It created its own reality and myth quite apart from the real and imagined conspiracy theorists, but no more than Robert Merton at Harvard with Black Scholes and his credit default formulas. Why say "talented and well-connected officers in the US State Department generally avoided serving in Iraq," unless they knew damn well it was a bamboozle? That being so, then the very premise of an "unraveling" just came unraveled!


21 Days....no response from F. Hobbs......


Response to F. Hobb's silence:

Dear F. Hobbs,

Also, Emma worked closely with head of MI-6, John Sawer, who for the Downing Street Memo issued some mild resistance that Ray McGovern called little more than a "hiccup". Have you read the CIA's Ray McGovern's 2012 article "Downing Street Memo": Redux? In it he is asking if a similar cooking of the intelligence that we saw with Iraq by the Brits is being brewed up for Iran by Sawer. Does Emma envision a similar post-Iran invasion unraveling and if so, why not tell us NOW? If this is "conspiracy" theory stuff......who was conspiring when you line up the British and U.S. players in the development of the Downing Street Memo? Was Iran-Contra a "conspiracy"? British and U.S. opium policy in China that led to the Boxer Rebellion? The Gulf of Tonkin affair? Tuskegee Experiment? Hiding the fact that Big Tobacco hid the health effects of smoking for decades? That the U.S. Civil Defense lauded the use of lead-based paint (see film "The House In The Middle"....available on-line) at the same time we were developing the "MAD Theory" of mutually assured destruction and the same lead producers who made our bullets wanted to see it in gasoline or paint 50 years after its use was banned in Europe? What qualifies as a "conspiracy" and what does not? Have I nailed it, Mr. Hobbs?

W. Harvey


ADDENDUM 7/14/15

On 7/14/15 an update to the Will Harvey review of The Unraveling had been made.  It seems that after the posting of the above comments 3 of 17 readers had found the review of the book beneficial.  Harvey had apparently reread Mr. Hobbs' rebuttal and found there a reason to lay out Ms. Sky's actual timeline on her presence in Iraq to see if it countered Hobbs' assertion, proving an overlap with Col, Theodore Westhusing's tour of duty.  His update read:

Dear F. Hobbs,

From The MacMillian Report at Yale with Marilyn Wilkes interviewing Ms. Sky..... Sky states emphatically "I went to Iraq in 2003 as a senior civilian representative of the Provisional Government in Kirkuk and I stayed through the surge in 2007....." She did return, but this clearly put her there when Westhusing was there when he died in 2005, so your statement...."Emma Sky probably left Iraq before Westhusing arrived in the country - and certainly long before he became disillusioned by corruption - and returned to Iraq two years after his suicide."........well, that's flat wrong according to Ms. Sky who in the same interview said that she wrote the book to pay tribute to those who died there. How strange that the highest ranking U.S. military officer to die there is not mentioned in her book given that she sees the war as a mistake and that he had seen first hand the darker elements of the war and spoke with authority about it.....like, say, a Henry Van Ness Boyington or a Smedley Darlington Butler. Ms. Sky's interview by Marilyn Wilkes is available online for a clear and concise record of the timeline.

WH

     Henry Van Ness Boyington was a U.S. Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor recipient turned journalist who doggedly followed the military corruption of the time and General Smedley Darlington Butler was a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner who had said in his book War Is A Racket that "I had been a goon on three continents" for the "National City Bank Boys."  The place of both men in the history of the development of the U.S. military industrialist complex is explored in the 2014 book, Sulfur, Lead and Poppies.

-Simon F. Schuster

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JEB "Vichy" Bush

"


Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Shelby Foote and Walker Percy: No Longer Lost In The Cosmos

A book review of The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
by Will Harvey for CPW News Service

     What a great find! Foote and Percy open us to the world from Memphis to the Gulf of Mexico and the whole Mississippi Delta where the Percy's were/are political and literary royalty.  The Foote and Percy discussion of the place of Charles Sanders Peirce (p. 152) is amazing..."I thought last year when I finished the last that I'd write a book on the theory of language. I still think it would be important as I told you. I would even say that it is revolutionary: that 100 years from now it could be the Peirce-Percy theory (not Pierce, but Peirce and so pronounced Perce-Percy). No kidding. I'm not even being vain. It just so happens that this old fellow, Charles Peirce, a U.S. philosopher very few laymen ever heard of (by contrast say, with William James who got his idea of pragmatism from Peirce).....

     An Anglophile to the core, Charles Peirce was the "father of pragmatism," but is the American experiment first and foremost "pragmatic"? Democracies are by definition pragmatically sloppy. Anglophilia is exclusive moving increasingly toward less and less slop. There is a strange inconsistency, therefore, not so much with Percy or with Foote who told CSPAN's Brian Lamb (www.c-span.org/video/?165823-1/depth-shelby-foote) that he consulted no original material in his Civil War histories...."it's all been gone over before," but with our acceptance of their definition of American exceptionalism.   

     Equally surprising from these letters is Walker Percy's flirtation with Charles Sanders Peirce. It's as if these two died and dyed in the wool Southern princes are like Margaret Mitchell....who from the deep South was Smith College educated! In their case Peirce is going to mainline right into the Johns Hopkins order of Gilman, James and Wilhelm Wundt in the hometown of Alexander Brown, the progenitor of Brown Brother and Harriman as well as the center of the China Trader's best ship  yards.  Nor can we forget that it was Andrew Hull Foote, the New Haven, Connecticut naval office who returned from China to lead the naval assault on the South's two key river defenses at Fort Donnelson and Fort Henry the fall of which opened the South's rivers to Union gunboats.

     Their bantering about Foote's 1,300,000 word, three volume history of the Civil War that doesn't mention the letter of Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce located in Davis' original documents that Foote somehow believed had "all been gone over before" punctuates the boundaries of their protected cosmos.  Even if Foote hadn't caught it, Texas historians Frank Vandiver or Douglas Brinkley should have!

     Davis said: "When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war and leave a soi disant democratic administration responsible for the fact. Genl. Cushing was here last week and when we parted it seemed like taking a last leave of a brother," (Jefferson Davis, "The Papers of Jefferson Davis," The PJD Project of Rice University retrieved from https://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/Content.aid+86).

     Churning out the military babble about the Civil War is to take a nation's eyes off the real issues and to transfix them on the dusty past and unless a historian's history is truly circumspect with respect to motives reminiscent of Denzel Washington's character in the film Glory...."ain't none of us clean in this thing".....how can we let go and not repeat it? The past even though it is "Gone With the Wind," as we have seen with the irrelevant symbol of a Confederate Flag and an increasingly troubling....as in the film In The Valley of Elah (2007), Union pennant. So Percy was not Lost in the Cosmos, but in the Mississippi Delta and in half-baked histories. It has always been readily apparent history that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was the pre-Civil War business partner of Confederate bumbler General Braxton Bragg whose California fort was placed in close proximity to the Frolic's final resting place near the Cabrillo Point Light House (Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade, Stanford University Press, 1999) and that Sherman would precede Savannah with the sacking of Vicksburg and the South's future rail crossing to San Diego, California. That was before all the rail ties east of Atlanta were torches and the rails very passionately twisted into cork screws as Sherman abandoned the recently freed slaves at Ebenezer Creek. Long before the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....Iraq that happened to have been at Basra, the opium port of David Sassoon, the Golden Crescent's leading opium shipper during our Civil War, and long before the U.S. was....as with fugitive slave laws, John Brown's backing by the Boston lead-miner, George Luther Stearns, and the weapons purveyors who knew that the opium had a ready-made market, too, for the canon fodder of Eli Lilly's battle targets. Yes, as Shelby has told us and Ken Burns has affirmed, war is hell.....and a very lucrative one! "No," said Smedley Butler, "war is a racket!"

     Historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth has explored Shelby Foote's avoidance of the original documents.  "Ken Burns and Shelby Foote stand in a long line of historians and story tellers that tell half a truth, but they aren't alone," said Wigglesworth.  "One of the most powerful examples of the denial that the South's proposed route across the Great Southwest can be seen in the way that the newspapers of the Northeast in the last half of the 19th Century covered-up the fact that the race was on to the Pacific and that that race was the real motive for the Civil War.  You can't look at the popular and highly awarded books to discover the truth of the matter. They are spinning the proper line. It must be dug out of the original documents that Shelby Foote was not wanting us to examine.  Take, the coverage of the U.S. governments' camels that were envisioned by Jeff Davis, continued under Union General Giles Alexander and Morgan Lewis Smith from the Truehart-Adriance  Building in Galveston, Texas.  This was one of the best kept secrets in U.S. history, not because camels needed less water, carried up to 700 pounds and could cover up to 100 miles a day, but because their acquisition at Smyrna, home port of David Sassoon's opium empire, was followed after the Civil War by the Union until the Union Pacific made the trek unnecessary.    These camels were not just being prepared to carry food and supplies to the distant military forts of the Southwest.  The Alta California newspaper reported this orchestrated cover-up in 1885 as it noticed that a Phoenix, Arizona newspaper had seen how the major papers of the Northeast had denied that the camels ever existed.  The report begins...'Several times during the past few months the Gazette has noticed that in the Eastern press an item, copied from some Galveston, Texas paper, to the effect that the United States Government never purchased or imported to this country any camels.'  The article shows an attempt to erase a significant piece of history that essentially defined what was then an East-West trade route, but which with the evolution of new drug markets like cocaine also became a North-South trade route.    Galveston had been the launch pad for William Walker's expedition to Honduras, the  Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the Iran-Contra supply lines into Central America and many other ventures operating out of this petro-chemical corridor of Texas.  The false report supposedly originating in Galveston where the Union Buffalo Soldiers had taken over Jefferson Davis' camel caravan after the Civil War even as they were the primary enforcers of Reconstruction in Texas under brother-Generals Alexander Giles and Morgan Lewis Smith, there was an attempt at credible deniability originating from the front lines of this historic war zone and 'Wall Street of the South'.  The Editor of the Alta California paper caught it!   The Fourth Estate, at least there in Alta, had not yet pinched the empire's incense.  The recently liberated slaves and the poor of the South like the poor of the major metropolitan centers of the Northeast....Boston, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis....would embrace like the poor Chinese....the coming supply of mind-altering agents," said Wigglesworth who noted the 300 percent rise in opioid addictions in the U.S. since the beginning of the "war on terrorism" and Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  "It was no accident that Lance Armstrong was doping for the US Postal Service team with it history with the Pacific Mail and Steamship Company, Cornelius Vander Starr's AIG, and the post-Civil War practice of rewarding people with 'Star Routes' across America like the Russell's Pony Express way stations," he concluded.

Government Camels: The United States Really Did Import Them--Why
Were They Sold?
From: Daily Alta California, Volume 39, number 12996, 13 October 1885.
CLICK PHOTO TO ENLARGE

 
     Is this what so enamored Shelby Foote with the legacy of Col. NB Forrest who threatened to kill General Bragg and who after Forrest left the KKK to Albert Pike is like a repentant Gov. George Wallace? When Percy both chides the "fierce Caucasion-Gentile-Visigoths" for violating the "helpless" African (God and Race, p. 177)....I can almost hear Forrest saying...."my mistake was not marching North in 1859 with my Negro and Johnny Reb army, 90% of which owned no slaves, but who now each own eighty acres and two mules....not to mention shares in our new cotton and silk fabric factories up there above the MD Line!"  Alas, Forrest was not Spartacus or Washington, but neither was, as Ebenezer Creek and his rail and shipping connections signify, William T. Sherman.

     Reading some original material might have informed Walker Percy's estimate of the relationship between Jeff Davis and W.T. Sherman when he notes a problem with Foote's Civil War history, Vol. III, "The paragraph on page 1042.." and "Most of the last 40 pp. go to Davis. OK but it seems a departure from the almost icy neutrality of the narrator up to now (you can't tell whether he's from Ala or Ohio----maybe the later considering how he treats Sherman....." (p. 188).

     Right, Percy actually caught it, and Thomas Bragg, Braxton's brother was the Confederacy's Attorney General and Braxton sat out the Battle of Atlanta in Walker County, Georgia (pretending not to surrender with Lee at Appomattox with Augusta in Walker County being home to the South's key gunpowder factory, Confederate Powder Works!) then Sherman returns to his railroad work in San Francisco after the war picking up where he left off with George F. Bragg and J. Mora Moss of the Sacramento Valley Railroad (Bancroft's Hand-book of the Pacific States, published in 1864, p. 91) with the establishment of the Transcontinental RR terminal there instead of San Diego, thanks in no small measure to Alfred Nobel's invention--Dynamite! No wonder Shelby Foote wanted to hold Forrest's sword and swing it above his head and hang his photo centrally above his Memphis desk. Forrest seems to have figured out that not only was he duped by General Bragg and his brother, but even by the KKKer's whose imported Scottish Rite leader from Wilhelm Wundt's Prussian playground, Albert Pike, who having usurped the Washington and Franklin York Riters' ethos had even incorporated through their Cincinnati, Ohio lodge, Alphonso and William Howard Taft!  Did this have anything to do with Benjamin French's White House installation of Andrew Johnson as the nation's first SR President?  Where are the conspiracy theorists when we really need them....or better yet, the serious historians who WILL check the original material?  And what might this all say about the fact that the NAACP's founder, W.E.B. Dubois, has been widely reported to be a SR member?
     Of course, these issues are shadow-dancing amid the Foote/Percy paragraphs and so much, much more, but given the evolution of U.S. history the easy reading "out of" and not "into" these conversations is what really makes them a 5 star read for those who have already read.

     Charles Peirce, Walker Percy, too, was fascinated with symbols as a determinant of human inspiration. Are we seeing the careful crafting of language, symbol and mind-science pragmatism at work here.....even in the long, passionate and paternalistic embrace of Mississippi's Confederate flag and Foote's assertion that "I told some interviewer that I knew the Negroes better than Baldwin ever began to know, mainly, I said, because, I was Southern." (find it for yourself.  James Baldwin didn't make Foote's index!).
     When we read in The Voyage of the Frolic by Thomas Layton (Stanford University Press, 1999) that abolitionist orator, Frederick Douglass, also known as Fred Bailey, worked in the Baltimore ship yards laying the hulls of the New England China Traders whose clippers were owned by the Cushings, Russells, Huntingtons and Heards, what if the Percy's control of the Mississippi Delta from New Orleans to Memphis was to insure that the South's rail ambitions were checked and that what had been thwarted by William T. Sherman was well-managed into the succeeding centuries? Braxton Braggs' death in Galveston, Texas as well as the placement of his relative's ranch that stretched across the Jeff Davis Highway route....essentially following the flat Southwest rail route that troubled the Northern China Traders and C. Wright Mill's boyhood on the Braxton Bragg Wright ranch at Lagarta with Mill's publication of The Power Elite seems to run a nice steady stitched seam along the edges of the argument, but Foote and Percy's Mississippi Delta connect nicely to Henry Stuart Foote and to Admiral Hull Foote when you look at the kick-starting of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina at Ft. Sumter with Edmund Ruffin and Louis Trezevant Wigfall figuring so centrally into the fuse lighting.   Suddenly the China Traders of New England and the South's rail ambitions from Savannah across the Mississippi.... through Texas to San Diego (Davis' choice) or San Francisco becomes clear(the New England Brahmin's first choice and to which Henry Stuart Foote will go before the Civil War like Wigfall's close Texas allies, John Coffee "Jack" Hays and Ben McCulloch....elected sheriffs of San Francisco and Sacramento on November 1, 1850, respectively, only to see Henry S. Foote return to Vicksburg where William T. Sherman arrived shortly, leaving George F. Bragg to hold down the San Francisco railhead.   Missippian, Edward C. Walthall, was aide de camp to Jeff Davis, but William Tecumseh Walthall whose ancestors were of the British East India Company connected Mercer family and Company with outpost on Virginia's James River was Caleb Cushing companion during his China treaty expedition. Edward will become Jeff Davis' aide in Mississippi with Davis working for the Trezevant-connected Carolina Insurance Company after his defeat).
      Cushing and his buddies duped Jeff Davis, but not the Bragg or Foote insiders....not until they were....to their chagrin....left in the China clipper's wake in the backwaters of American life.  Surprise!
     Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was a vacuum cleaner for erasing the real source of the South's traumatized memories under the mythology of the noble slavers and it was spun by Smith College graduate, Margaret Mitchell, in concert with the Vanderbilt/Whitney fortune that underwrote the Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh blockbuster via John Hay "Jock" Whitney.  Braxton and Thomas Bragg attended the wedding of Unionist slaver, Cornelius Vanderbilt,  to Mobile, Alabama Confederate socialite with the male name, Frank Armstrong Crawford, in 1869 and Vanderbilt had battled with both William Walker and friend, the enigmatic friend of Fred Baily/Frederick Douglass, the rich Caribbean freedman, Wall Street tycoon, Jeremiah Hamilton. 
     Controlling the South's memories started with controlling its river ways and for that job the North had imported for the initial river assault on Forts Donnelson and Henry, Admiral Andrew Hull Foote, from his fort-clearing twin project on China's Yangtze River.  It was there at Forts Donnelson and Henry that Nathan Bedford Forrest got his first big taste of Braxton Bragg and Simon Bolivar Buckner. Buckner attend the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant with Bragg's pre-Civil War business partner and supposed Civil War opponent, William Tecumseh Sherman, both pallbearers.  Little has been made of the relationship of the Civil War historian who admitted "I used no original material in my research.  It's all been gone over before," Shelby Foote, to Admiral Andrew Hull Foote or to Henry Stuart Foote from Mississippi, Texas and San Francisco.
     In his Paris Review interview Walker Percy speaks of artists and writers "making" while moralists are simply "doing". The power of language is that, seems to me, words and language, like other art does both.  Like with James Powers' Greek Slave, come to think of it, or the place of James Hamlet, a name with a fine Shakespearian ring to it....."To be or not to be," James Hamlet the Brown's Merchant Shot Tower worker in Baltimore, making lead musket balls and then becoming the subject of the war-baiting test case of the Fugitive Slave Laws. 
     Making inspires doing and vice versa. When the words and works of the poets and novelists, historians, religionists and scientists keep us locked in a failed system....."what goes up? Must come down!" (Not in zero gravity)....which both Foote and Percy do as fierce pedagogues (perhaps giving us a strong clue as to why Percy's Lost in the Cosmos was poking such fun at Carl Sagan for envisioning a wide open and positive future where survival of the fittest was not about brute strength, but adaptability), then what I wouldn't give to have heard Percy with his interest in linguistics in a discussion with MIT's linguist, Noam Chomsky.  That would have helped all of us who sometimes feel lost in our own little corner of the cosmos.
     Historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth charted the Foote connections from the North's river campaign against Forts Donnelson and Henry at the outbreak of the Civil War, kick-started as it was at Fort Sumter by Edmund Ruffin and Louis Trezevant Wigfall from Texas where Ruffin's descendant, Paul Ruffin, is the editor of the Texas Review Press which would make a great platform for Wiggleworth's assertions.   Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry Stuart Foote....all in Mississippi or Texas and their rolling attention directed, as with Caleb Cushing and North's power elites toward the China Trader's prized opium market in China from where Admiral Andrew Hull Foote had returned to lead the river campaign against the South and we see why Walker Percy and Shelby Foote leave us lost in their well-controlled, but mythical cosmos that's fit mainly for chameleons.



Click to Enlarge Lowell P. Wiggleworth's chart

UPDATE 7/9/2015

Dear W.H.

Received an email from a reader who sent your review to Noam Chomsky for his reaction. 

Winsip



From: William Carr [mailto:willhcarr@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2015 3:50 PM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject: Reference to you in review of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy letters

Dear Mr. Chomsky,
Greetings from Texas.  Could you comment....particularly on the reference to your work in linguists and Walker Percy's interest in the same?
Sincerely,
William Carr

From: Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>
To: William Carr <willhcarr@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2015 4:48 PM
Subject: RE: Reference to you in review of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy letters

Not much here about Percy’s thoughts, so can’t comment.

Response:

To: Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>
From: William Carr <willhcarr@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 9, 2015 5:48 AM
Subject: RE: Reference to you in review of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy letters

Dear Mr. Chomsky,
Yes, he points to his interest in linguistics as a tool for establishing a lasting Peirce/Percy legacy.  When you consider the context of his concerns for this line of thinking along with Foote's flawed management of the Civil War proper line, I believe that Percy and Foote were, together, extending like a large literary/linguistic net across their part of the nation, part of a bigger bamboozle.  With the fourth estate essentially dead....who....exactly has been controlling the bamboozle?  From your position with a front row seat at MIT and Cambridge, I was hoping you could tell us.
I am of the opinion that Anthony Sutton, as Brzezinski affirmed, was correct in that the Order is with respect to politics and ethics, agnostic.   That they have had their articulate mouth pieces left and right like the fight promoter, Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championships, controlling both corners and the lucrative ticket sales and concessions.  Historically, by way of example and not currently accurate.....from the right.....Senator Joe McCarthy or Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.   From the  left William Sloane Coffin and ?

Sincerely,
WHC
 

Lt. General Robert Neller and Admiral William McRaven

NELLER and McRAVEN TIGHT LIPS DON’T SINK SHIPS AND NEITHER WILL THEY TELL YOU WHERE OSAMA SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES

JUDICIAL WATCH REFUSED INFO ON OSAMA BIN LADEN DEATH IN 2011 FOIA REQUEST

By Guy Dwyer for CPW News Service

The new Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corp who was selected over six four-star generals was announced today, July 1, 2015 in Washington D.C. by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. Some reporters were told that he  would not be answering questions about why his predecessor really resigned nor about a rumored Chuck Hagel book titled Why I Really Resigned My Job As Defense Secretary.

 

Lt. General Robert Neller is best remembered for his role as a co-defender of the actions taken by the U.S. military to bury Osama Bin Laden’s body at sea standing together with JSOC’s Admiral William McRaven, now the Chancellor of the University of Texas and the subject of Jeremy Scahill’s film Dirty Wars .

“With the Marine Corp as part of the USN, it’s understandable that the six Marine four-stars may feel passed over for Neller, but Neller is a neat and tight lipped leader.  Judicial Watch thought that the nation should have, in an age of DNA analysis and crime scene investigation that leads the world, more than some yet unproven facial recognition software analysis of a face that has been misshapen by lead bullets flying at Mach 3 and they say they confirmed the DNA, so show us!” said Orville T. Smithers of the Crime Scene Investigators for Proper Identification of Corpses in Denver, Colorado.

“We have the ability to do a DNA analysis of Osama’s tissue samples and in as much as his older brother Salem, an excellent jet pilot, flew an ultra-light airplane into  a high power line near Admiral McRaven’s boyhood home of San Antonio, Texas only two and half hours from where Salem had purchased the Houston Gulf Manor Airport, we should have done that with a credible autopsy team.  That Houston airport is where the NASA astronauts parked their private planes, but which was demolished after 911.    With the ultralight event later reported by CBS reporter Lowell Bergman as having been Salem’s BAC-111, a British Air jet instead of the borrowed nylon and tubing toy that flew like a drone into into the high voltage line and someone should have known that those Judicial Watch folks would be sticking a pointed stick into this dog pile,” said Smithers.   Salem Bin Laden and the Saudi royal family banker, Khalid Bin Mafouz, had bought the Houston airport with the help of George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard roommate, James R. Bath.

Smithers believes that hair follicles from the members of the Bin Laden family that was ushered quickly out of the country following 911 could have accurately identified Osama beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Smithers noted that no retraction of Lowell Bergman's story, believed from his role in the historic outing of big tobacco's long-standing bamboozle of the American public  through the denial of the health risks of tobacco, the film The Insider, was surely a reliable news source.  "Well, I'm still waiting for that retraction," said Smithers.

Smithers said that he was sure that there was some issue with Osama's body when he read a May 2, 2011,  6:40 a.m.,  story about the wood chipper used to dispose of his corpse on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson that was published even before the official release of the USS Vinson's role in what Smither's said "should have been a policing action that avoided the destruction of crime scene evidence.  We now live in a world where the push toward a military police state is quickly approaching Germany of the 1930's or of Augusto Pinoche's Chilian affairs or those of Anastosia Samoza, the business partner of Neal Blue and his brother in the Honduras banana business, later on," said Smithers noting that Neal Blue and his brother make the Predator and Reaper drones that fire depleted uranium shells also sourced by the Blue's uranium interests.

Meanwhile, readers of Emma Sky’s The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq about the fiasco that has become  the Iraqi civil war are encouraging Ms. Sky to quickly publish Unraveled Again: How the Invasion of Iran Will Fray Like Iraq But Keep the Munitions Makers and Oil Companies Happy.

The following is from Judicial Watch’s legal brief on their attempt to obtain solid evidence of Bin Laden’s identification:

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA)

JUDICIAL WATCH, INC.,  Civil Action No.

Plaintiff, ) 1:11-cv-00890-JEB)

v. ) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, and )

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, Defendants. )

 

DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT

Pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 56, defendants U.S. Department of Defense and the Central

Intelligence Agency respectfully move the Court for summary judgment in their favor, as there is

no genuine issue of material fact precluding judgment in their favor. The reasons for defendants’

motion are set forth in the accompanying Memorandum of Law and attachments thereto.

Respectfully Submitted,

TONY WEST

Assistant Attorney General

IAN H. GERSHENGORN

Deputy Assistant Attorney General

JOSEPH H. HUNT

Director, Federal Programs Branch

RONALD C. MACHEN JR.

United States Attorney

/s/ Marcia Berman

ELIZABETH J. SHAPIRO (D.C. Bar No. 418925)

MARCIA BERMAN ((PA Bar No. 66168)

United States Department of Justice

Case 1:11-cv-00890-JEB Document 14 Filed 09/26/11 Page 1 of 29

Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch

20 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. Room 7132

Washington, D.C. 20530

Tel.: (202) 514-2205

Fax: (202) 616-8470

Email: elizabeth.shapiro@usdoj.gov

marcia.berman@usdoj.gov

Attorneys for Defendants.

2

Case 1:11-cv-00890-JEB Document 14 Filed 09/26/11 Page 2 of 29

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

)

JUDICIAL WATCH, INC., )

Civil Action No.

Plaintiff, ) 1:11-cv-00890-JEB v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, and CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, Defendants. )

 

MEMORANDUM OF LAW IN SUPPORT OF

DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT

INTRODUCTION

In this Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) case, plaintiff Judicial Watch, Inc. seeks

public disclosure of photographs and/or video recordings taken of Osama bin Laden during or

after the May 1, 2011 raid in Pakistan that resulted in bin Laden’s death. The Central

Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) located fifty-two responsive records but is withholding them in

their entirety pursuant to FOIA Exemption 1, which protects classified information from

disclosure, and Exemption 3, which incorporates other nondisclosure statutes. The CIA, the

Department of Defense (“DoD”), and indeed, the President, have all correctly determined that

images of Osama bin Laden after he was killed by United States forces must not be publicly

disclosed in the interest of national security. Among other reasons, the danger is simply too

great that dissemination of these images would inflame anti-American sentiments and provoke

violent attacks on the United States or its citizens abroad.

 

Case 1:11-cv-00890-JEB Document 14 Filed 09/26/11 Page 5 of 29

II. Plaintiff’s FOIA Requests and Lawsuit.

On May 2, 2011, Judicial Watch sent a request to the CIA and DoD under the FOIA

seeking “all photographs and/or video recordings of Osama (Usama) Bin Laden taken during

and/or after the U.S. military operation in Pakistan on or about May 1, 2011.” Declaration of

John Bennett, Director, National Clandestine Service (“NCS”), Central Intelligence Agency, at ¶

5 and Exhibit A (“Bennett decl.”); Declaration of William T. Kammer at ¶ 3 and Exhibit 1

(“Kammer decl.”). The agencies both provided interim responses stating that it was unlikely that

they would be able to provide substantive responses within the 20-day statutory time period

under FOIA. Bennett decl. at ¶ 7 and Exhibit B; Kammer decl. at ¶ 3 and Exhibit 2. On May 13,

2011, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against DoD seeking release of the requested records.

Subsequently, Judicial Watch amended its complaint to add the CIA as a defendant. The

defendant agencies answered the amended complaint on June 28, 2011.

III. Defendants’ Responses to Plaintiff’s FOIA Requests.

Following receipt of the plaintiff’s FOIA request, the CIA and DoD conducted searches

for responsive records. Both agencies thoroughly searched the components that were most likely

to have responsive records related to the May 1, 2011 operation. Bennett decl. at ¶ 10; Kammer

decl. at ¶¶ 4-8. DoD located no responsive records. Kammer decl. at ¶¶ 5, 7, 8. The CIA,

however, located a total of fifty-two unique responsive records. Bennett decl. at ¶ 11. These

records contain images of Osama bin Laden’s body after he was killed. Many are graphic and

gruesome, as they depict the fatal bullet wound to bin Laden’s head. Id. Some of the images

were taken inside the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed. Other

images were taken as bin Laden’s body was transported from the Abbottabad compound to the

4

Case 1:11-cv-00890-JEB Document 14 Filed 09/26/11 Page 6 of 29

location where he was buried at sea. Id. Several images depict the preparation of Osama bin

Laden’s body for the burial as well as the burial itself. Id. Additionally, some of the images

were taken so that the CIA could conduct a facial recognition analysis in order to confirm that

the body was that of Osama bin Laden. The CIA’s facial recognition technology, which is

 

highly classified, compares unique facial features, such as bone structure, age spots, hair growth

patterns, and the size and shape of the eyes, ears, and nose, as well as the relative positioning of

facial features. Id. The CIA compared historic photographs of Osama bin Laden with some of

the responsive photographs and concluded with high confidence that the deceased individual was

in fact Osama bin Laden. Id.

The CIA withheld the fifty-two responsive records in their entirety pursuant to FOIA

Exemptions 1 and 3. 5 U.S.C. §§ 552(b)(1), (3); Bennett decl. at ¶¶ 13-34. The CIA

specifically determined that no reasonably segregable, non-exempt portions of the responsive

records could be released. Bennett decl. at ¶ 35. The withholdings are fully supported by

declarations submitted by (1) John Bennett, Director, National Clandestine Service, Central

Intelligence Agency; (2) Admiral William H. McRaven, Commander, United States Special

Operations Command; (3) Lieutenant General Robert B. Neller, Director of Operations, J-3, on

the Joint Staff at the Pentagon; and (4) William T. Kammer, Chief, Office of Freedom of

Information Division, Executive Services Directorate, Washington Headquarters Service, a

Component of DoD. DoD submits Admiral McRaven’s declaration in a classified form,

pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(B) (providing for in camera review) and case law authorizing

an agency to submit a classified declaration to augment its explanation of the harm to national

security where such explanation cannot be made on the public record. See., e.g., Hayden v. NSA,

5

Case 1:11-cv-00890-JEB Document 14 Filed 09/26/11 Page 7 of 29

608 F.2d 1381, 1384 (D.C. Cir. 1979); Public Education Center v. DoD, 905 F. Supp. 19, 22

(D.D.C. 1995). A redacted version of the classified declaration is appended to this

memorandum.