May 8, 2013

JFK Author Larry Hancock on the Radio This Evening at 6PM Central

 

 

New post on Larry Hancock

Lancer Conference plus

by Larry Hancock
As mentioned, I'm afraid I will be blogging only infrequently for a couple of months as we go through the edit process on the new covert warfare book - the publisher would like to have it out in January and that means a lot of work right now. I did want to mention that I will be going on internet radio with Jeff Bushman against this evening, for a full hour.  It will be live at 8 pm Central at
 http://www.GoingBeyondRadio.com.
but its archived for anyone who wants to check in later.  I'll be on for a full hour this evening.  I also wanted to give everyone a bit of an update on the JFK Lancer Conference coming up in November.
The conference will be considerably larger this year, both in terms of length and number of participants -  you can find the details on the JFK Lancer web site - we began receiving requests to participate in the 2013 conference last November and have been working on reviewing proposals and scheduling since the end of last year.  The focus of this conference is on taking a new look at the evidence officially presented against Lee Oswald as the shooter and sole participant in the crime. We have a number of professionals lined up to address the forensics and ballistics evidence, presenting what has been learned including considerable information that was either filtered or simply not presented to the official investigations.  We will also have critiques of each of the official investigations based on what has been revealed by the past 50 years of research, in particular the new information surfaced beginning in the 1990's with a vast amount of oral history work and document releases.
In addition a number of speakers will be offering brand new research, literally never presented previously. If anyone thinks that nothing new exists on the case - well the conference should dispel that notion. We always try to maintain a real balance in the conference participants, covering the range of interests without too much redundancy and also offering the attendees the chance for personal dialogs with authors they have read or specialists the have read about - of course nobody will agree with all the information presented but its good to remember that nobody every learns much new by only talking to people with whom you already agree.
To elaborate on that point, one of the things going on at this years conference will be a number of focus group discussions on a wide variety of topics.  We have recruited researchers specializing in those subjects to moderate the focus groups and Debra Conway has obtained a separate conference room for that.  She has also organized cash breakfast and lunch buffets so that attendees will have to option of eating while listening to and participating in some of the structured discussions.  That is going to be important this year given the crowds expected in Dallas and the lines at restaurants, etc. Beyond that we will be running conference activities from around 8 am in the morning to 9 pm each evening.  If you are coming, rest up in advance as we will be keeping you quite busy.
A final point on Dallas this November, I know some folks are concerned about access to the Plaza. Debra has pursued that issue with the Mayors office for months, starting last year. Although its pretty clear that Dallas still has some work to do and decisions to make about the crowds at its official ceremony, we have been assured that once that is over, the Plaza will be open to the public on November 22.  And of course our normal walking tour of the Plaza area will be a couple of days later on Sunday, so attendees should have no concern about access to the Plaza during their time in Dallas.

-- Larry








Larry Hancock | May 8, 2013 at 1:23 pm | Categories: Everything else | URL: http://wp.me/p1DeOb-4G
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Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Islamophobia in The United States

Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity....often promoting Islamophobia.....

their crime.....always pretending to have a discussion when there is obviously no intention of trying to find actual facts or information.

 They both "pretend" they are discussing the issue when in reality their ploy of asking a "question" only serves to further their point of view.....especially when they attempt to force the guest to "just answer the question, why won't you just answer the question, I'm the host, it's my show, I'll ask the questions."

 What a stupid game by these particularly ugly Americans.

If  fox news, or these American embarrassments were truly interested in finding facts and information they would certainly conduct themselves differently..........   

Recently, mr. o'reilly had a representative on from CAIR but instead of letting the man talk he proceeded to interrogate the individual.    He must have felt embarrassed, if that is possible, but he continued to proclaim his innocense and the reasons for his vulgarity on the following shows.

 There is a reason why Wesley Clark would not go on o'reilly...I wonder why.....  

 copied from wiki.... The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is America's largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization that deals with civil advocacy. It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with regional offices nationwide.[1]
CAIR's mission statement is "to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding".[9]

copied from CNN opinion.......

 

Missing the best chance to prevent terror bombing

By Arun Kundnai,n Special to CNN
updated 8:10 AM EDT, Tue May 7, 2013
From left, Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev went with Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Times Square in this photo taken from the social media site VK.com. Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev were <a href='http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/us/boston-attack/index.html'>arrested on Wednesday, May 1,</a> on charges they tried to throw investigators off Tsarnaev's trail. <a href='http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/us/boston-bombings-galleries/index.html'>See all photography related to the Boston bombings.</a> From left, Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev went with Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Times Square in this photo taken from the social media site VK.com. Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev were arrested on Wednesday, May 1, on charges they tried to throw investigators off Tsarnaev's trail. See all photography related to the Boston bombings.
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Suspects tied to Boston bombings
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Debate has ranged widely over how to prevent terrorist attacks
  • Arun Kundnani says answer is not more and more surveillance
  • He says mosque leaders are fearful of engaging in discussion with radicals
  • Kundnani: Don't toss people like Tamerlan Tsarnaev out of mosques; confront them
Editor's note: Arun Kundnani is author of the forthcoming book "The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror," to be published by Verso Press in January 2014. He teaches terrorism studies at John Jay College, New York.
(CNN) -- Since the bombing of the Boston marathon -- in which three people, including a child, were killed and more than 200 injured -- attention has naturally focused on what could have been done to prevent it.
Some, such as Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, have argued for increased surveillance of Muslims in the United States. Local police departments "have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there," he says.
Others have asked whether leads were properly followed and if better sharing of information between agencies would have helped thwart the bombing.
Arun Kundnani
Arun Kundnani
However, the government, with its $40 billion annual intelligence budget, already amasses vast quantities of information on the private lives of Muslims in the United States. The FBI has 3,000 intelligence analysts working on counterterrorism and 15,000 paid informants, according to Mother Jones.
Exactly how many of them are focused on Muslims in the United States is unknown; there is little transparency in this area. But, given the emphasis the FBI has placed on preventing Muslim terrorism, and based on my interviews with FBI agents working on counterterrorism, there could be as many as two-thirds assigned to spying on Muslims.
Taking the usual estimate of the Muslim population in the United States of 2.35 million, this would mean the FBI has a spy for every 200 Muslims in the United States. When one adds the resources of the National Security Agency, regional intelligence fusion centers, and the counterterrorism work of local police departments, such as the New York Police Department (where a thousand officers are said to work on counterterrorism and intelligence), the number of spies per Muslim may increase dramatically. East Germany's communist-era secret police, the Stasi, had one intelligence analyst or informant for every 66 citizens. This suggests that Muslims in the United States could be approaching levels of state surveillance similar to that which the East German population faced from the Stasi.

Boston Imam: Suspect should be buried

Student visas under scrutiny post-Boston

The roots of radicalization
Yet, as the Stasi itself eventually discovered, no system of surveillance can ever produce total knowledge of a population. Indeed, the greater the amount of information collected, the harder it is to interpret its meaning. In the majority of terrorist attacks in recent years, the relevant information was somewhere in the government's systems, but its significance was lost amid a morass of useless data.
What is obscured by the demands for ever greater surveillance and information processing is that security is best established through relationships of trust and inclusion within the community. The real missed opportunity to intervene before the bombs went off in Boston likely came three months earlier, when bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev stood up during a Friday prayer service at his mosque - the Islamic Society of Boston, in Cambridge - to angrily protest the imam's sermon.
The imam had been celebrating the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which Tsarnaev thought was selling out. According to one report, Tsarnaev was then kicked out of the prayer service for his outburst.
Since 9/11, mosque leaders have been under pressure to eject anyone expressing radical views, rather than engaging with them and seeking to challenge their religious interpretation, address their political frustrations, or meet their emotional needs.
That policy has been forced on mosques by the wider climate of excessive surveillance, which means mosques are wary of even having conversations with those perceived to be radicals, for fear of attracting official attention.
The fear is that every mosque has a government informant listening for radical talk. Unsurprisingly, this means most people are reluctant to engage with young people expressing radical views, who instead tend to be ejected from the congregation.
The Tsarnaev brothers were said to be angry about U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly drawing parallels with their own experiences as refugees from Russia's brutal wars of counterinsurgency in the Caucasus. But because discussions of foreign policy have been off-limits in mosques since 9/11, they were unlikely to have had their anger acknowledged, engaged, challenged or channeled into nonviolent political activism.
The heavy surveillance of Muslims has meant there is no room for mosques to engage with someone like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, listen to him, challenge those of his ideas that might be violent, or offer him emotional support. Instead, Muslims have felt pressured to demonstrate their loyalty to America by steering clear of dissident conversations on foreign policy.
Flawed models of the so-called "radicalization" process have assumed that the best way to stop terrorist violence is to prevent radical ideas from circulating. Yet the history of terrorism suggests the opposite is true.
Time and again, support for terrorism appears to increase when legitimate political activism is suppressed - from the French anarchists who began bombing campaigns after the defeat of the Paris Commune, to the Algerian National Liberation Front struggling to end French colonialism, to the Weather Underground's "Declaration of a state of war" after state repression of student campaigns against the Vietnam War.
Reconstructing the motivation for the bombings is fraught with difficulty; there can be little certainty in such matters. But pathological outcomes are more likely when space for the free exchange of feelings and opinions is squeezed.
As many community activists and religious leaders argued in Britain in the aftermath of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on the London transport system in 2005, the best preventive measure is to enable anger, frustration and dissent to be expressed as openly as possible, rather than driving them underground where they more easily mutate into violent forms.
These activists put this approach into practice, for example at the Brixton mosque in south London, by developing initiatives in the community to engage young people in discussions of foreign policy, identity and the meaning of religious terms like jihad, in order to counter those who advocate violence against fellow citizens. It is difficult to measure the success of such programs. But many see them as having played an important role in undermining support for terrorism. In what must seem a paradox to backers of East German levels of surveillance like Peter King, more radical talk might be the best way of reducing terrorist violence.
No one could have predicted from Tsarnaev's outburst that, a few months later, he would be suspected of carrying out an act of mass murder on the streets of Boston. And we don't know what would have made a difference in the end. But a community able to express itself openly without fear, whether in the mosque or elsewhere, should be a key element in the United States' efforts to prevent domestic terrorism.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Arun Kundnani.