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2 comments about JFK Vs. CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency's Assassination of the President.

1. this is one of my favorite books on the JFK assassination. it's very easy to read and it's just easy to follow. the book is smooth and brings up very interesting points. it has no pictures, but Mr. Calder's words alone start to create pictures in your head. i recommened that you read this book. you won't be dissapointed.



2. Mr. Calder has written a powerful but deeply flawed book. He offers a seemingly coherent integration of the entire official assassination corpus (Warren Commission, Schweiker Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations), which he has not merely read, but apparently inhabited. Calder offers a wealth of characters and factual details that informs who did what when and where. But just as importantly, Calder has delved into both popular and obscure contemporaneous journals that illuminate precisely why the financial elite, the military establishment, and the CIA hegemony considered JFK nearly treasonous, a closet socialist, and a national security threat. The US media establishment, strongly allied with the CIA and military intelligence units that effected the murder, has worked concertedly to obscure these motives, but Calder brings them into bold relief.

   Unfortunately, Calder lacks scholarly competence and basic judgment, so casts into doubt the other allegations and inference that make his findings so rich. For example, Calder dismisses the possibility that Oswald might have been a shooter because, he proclaims, the famous photo by James Altgens taken just when JFK clutched his throat, shows Oswald standing in front of the Texas State Book Depository, not in its sixth floor "sniper's nest." That Oswald is the man in Altgens' photo is a major point to which Calder devotes four pages of detailed argument (pp.23-26). The Warren Commission concluded that the man in the photo was Oswald look-alike co-worker Billy Lovelady. Calder cites the testimony of four co-workers of Lovelady and Oswald who were standing outside the Depository in the shadows behind the disputed "Oswald" figure to the effect that Lovelady was with them, hence in the shadows, hence not the man in the photo. Calder ignores that one eyewitness has Lovelady standing, another sitting, and Calder completely ignores the fact that eyewitness testimony is inexact and often is in error. Calder ignores that this testimony collectively locates Lovelady in the general area of the "Oswald" figure, so that a reasonable question is whether or not Lovelady was a little in front of them in the light while they remained unseen in the shadows. But Calder argues that such points need not even be considered since Lovelady was wearing a red striped shirt that day, whereas the man in the photo has on a plaid shirt over a white t-shirt.

   Calder's book was published in 1998. Robert J. Groden, to whose efforts the public owes its first access to the Zapruder film in the 1970s - CIA asset Henry Luce had Life purchase and sequester the film - has spent his life exposing the JFK conspiracy. In 1993 Groden wrote The Killing of a President, and addressed the issue of Billy Lovelady on pp. 186-187 with material straight from Groden's contribution to the HSCA conclusions. Groden advises that Lovelady's resemblance to Oswald was so strong that Lovelady's wife had mistaken Oswald for him across a room; when the FBI asked Lovelady to come in to be photographed they told him that there was no need to wear the same shirt, so Lovelady wore one with vertical red stripes; Lovelady still had the plaid shirt he wore in the Altgens' photo packed away and posed in it for Groden.

   Groden's book is a coffee-table classic, yet Calder never addresses its points, despite publishing five years later and twenty years after the HSCA report. Worse, had Groden never done his research, Calder's identification of the man in the photo with Oswald lacks prima facie plausibility. In all his close scrutiny of the records, in all his deep inhabiting of the characters and players of this drama, it never occurs to Calder that had the man in the photo been Lee Harvey Oswald, one or more of the four co-workers over whose sworn testimony he labors who make the identification, would have said, in effect, "And there right in front of us was ol' Lee Oswald watching the President go by." The absence of any such remarks never registers on Calder as evidence of Oswald's absence. Calder is not the man in whom we can place implicit trust to pick the right characters and the right connections amongst them to unravel the JFK conspiracy, though he may have taken us much closer to the goal.

   Calder makes many such errors, but this is a brief review, so three final examples. First, Calder declares pp.67-68 that Lt. Day must have taken a palm print from Oswald's corpse because two experts testified that the print was "fresh," that it came from porous cardboard on which it could not last more than 24 hours, and yet the FBI received it from Day five days after the assassination. Calder has leapt to this bizarre conclusion because he fails to understand that the experts are merely stating that the print had to be fresh when it was dusted. Second, Calder is so much the diviner by the book's end that he feels he has only to mention a death to reveal it as CIA handiwork. On p.351 he advises that six FBI agents involved in the original investigation who were scheduled to testify at the HSCA died within six months of each other and declares, "The CIA was back." We'd like to know their names, how they died, and which of their deaths can be reasonably construed as CIA hits. One must be William Sullivan, whose 11/9/77 death by hunting accident I long believed was a CIA murder until I read the police reports. Unless these were brilliant forgeries, Sullivan's death was a tragic hunting accident in which the shooter was a teenaged son of a local peace officer, both of whom knew and were on good terms with Sullivan. The youth was overwrought by what he had done. Third, Calder takes the suicide of William Bruce Pitzer, whom Calder mis-describes as the JFK Bethesda autopsy photographer, as a CIA murder, but the meticulous research by Allan Eaglesham over the course of a decade has shown it to be a genuine suicide.

5 comments about The Confederate Dirty War: Arson, Bombings, Assassination and Plots for Chemical and Germ Attacks on the Union.

1. Jane Singer writes a very readable and compelling story of terrorism during the civil war. I could not put this book down. Especially unsettling are the parallels to todays evil-doers



2. The reader wonders if Singer did any research at all in what seems to be an effort to divert attention from the scores of Union Army atrocities. Her alleged "war crimes" are complete fantasies. The best example is the tragic "Sultana" disaster, which she alleges was the work of sabotage. Never mind that the war was over by this point, and all investigations proved that the ship was grossly overpacked with passengers and the ship's boilers simply exploded (a common occurrence with steamships of the time). She adds real howlers with allegations that the Confederacy planned to use chemical war (HUH???) and an entirely invented plot to blow up the White House which was supposedly scheduled for APRIL 10, 1865, the day AFTER Appomattox, when the south's war was gasping its last breath and the southern armies were desperate for soldiers and armaments.
   
   She ignores the many opportunities Lee's army had for pillaging the north on its invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania, the orders Lee gave to southern soldiers promising swift discipline to any soldier who did harm to civilians or property, and of course the REAL terror inflicted by the northern armies.
   
   Singer had a wealth of true and documented material available had she chosen to write about northern war crimes - Sherman's march through Georgia, the mass rapes of slave women by northern troops, the dreadful atrocity at Roswell, Georgia - 400 southern women packed into train cars and shipped north for use as slave labor in an act decried by both north and south - and Sheridan's rampages through the Shenandoah Valley. She obviously missed these well-documented references during her research:
   
   "The Northern people accused us of manufacturing and useing explosive and poisoned bullets during the great war. To show the falsity of this charge, and showing very plainly that the Northern army did use them, I will quote from an article written by the Rev. H. D. Hayden, who served in the first Virginia regiment, who gets his knowledge from official papers on file in the war department at Washington . . . 'The bullet was in two parts, one hollowed out and the other also hollow, being encased in the larger and containing the poison, the latter being loose would slip out and remain in the body or pass through leaving its poison' . . . Samuel Gardner, Jr., offered to sell these poison and explosive bullets to Mr. John Tucker, [Union] Asst. Sec. of war . . . who ordered 10,000 rounds to be purchased . . . The Asst. Sec. of war at once ordered 100,000 rounds. In June 1863, the second New Hampshire made requisition for 35,000 of these shells and received 24,000 . . . In the pat office report of 1863-4 will be found No. 40,468 Samuel Gardner, Jr., of New York. Improvement in Hollow Projectiles, Pat dated, Nov. 3rd 1863." - "Liberty Dethroned," C. M. Calhoun, privately printed, Greenville South Carolina, 1903, pages 240-242
   
   "Lincoln Hospital, Aug. 14, 63...If a wounded Reb should come in to our ward I would hardly dress his wound...the Drs cut the Rebs up when they die. They are...taken to pieces. I see one the...day after he died...he was...cut up and put in a tub. It was an awful sight. But I could stand it very well knowing that it was a Reb." - Letter of Pvt. James Morrison, Co. E, 149th N. Y. V. I.
   
   Letter of Union prison guard, William H. Willet of Walpole, Massachusetts, Camp Carrington, Indianapolis, Indiana Aug 30, 1864 - "About 3 or 4 of them rebs die everyday shoot one once in a while shot 2 since i have been here i had rather to guard over there than round here for all you get to do is stand and look over ... Capt of the Ind. Regt. clipped one felow over the head with a sword laid him out one was run through with a bayonet 2 or 3 knocked over and kicked round don't do to say too much to these Ind. boys are death on them..."
   
   "History of the Eighty-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry - The Greyhound Regiment," T.B. Marshall, Sidney, OH. First Sergeant, Co. K, Published by the Eighty-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Association, Wm. H. Davis, Secretary, No. 19 Fosdick Building, Cincinnatti, Ohio, September 12, 1912 - "The field over which the charge had been made, had been planted with many thousand torpedoes, or 'subterra shells,' as the Confederates termed them, but not one had been stepped on by any of our regiment...After the battle, the enemy were compelled to locate, cap, and dig them up, under a penalty of being marched in a body, back and forth until all had been exploded."
   
   "The Siege of Blakley and the Campaign of Mobile," Roger B. Hansen & Norman A. Nicolson, Historic Blakley press, 1995, Nall Printing Co, introduction by Mary Y. Grice, Executive Director, Historic Blakley Foundation - "As Hansen and Nicolson note, 'Fort Pillow' became the battle cry of the black troops, and one of the U.S.C.T. (U.S. Colored Troops) commanders, Brigadier General William A. Pile, '...brought his outspoken abolitionist views into the field with him, `advocating death to all supporters of the South, past and present'...there was no general massacre...many of the union black troops did attack the Confederate whites after surrendering, and even shot two of their own officers [one fatally] trying to stop them [one Union officer had to shoot three of his own troops to stop their attacks on the prisoners]. One white sergeant who was commissioned an officer the day after the assault wrote home ...and stated his regiment took no live prisoners, 'they killed all they took to a man.' "
   
   "Mobile, 1865 Last Stand of the Confederacy," (2001) Sean Michael O'Brien - "Many historians remember April 9, 1865 as the day that Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Much further to the south at Fort Blakeley, Alabama the final major battle of the War Between the States was taking place only a few short hours after General Lee's farewell to his troops...Confederate Major General Dabney H. Maury was hoping his seasoned veterans of Vicksburg and the Nashville Campaigns could hold off the massive Union offensive designed to take the last remaining Confederate stronghold at Mobile. Union troops numbered approximately 45,000 and would overwhelm the 3500 troops defending Fort Blakeley later on the afternoon of April 9...While the battle was fought courageously, sheer numbers overwhelmed the Confederates defending Fort Blakeley. At Redoubt 1, Colonel William Barry's 35th Mississippi Infantry Regiment fought bravely but was over run by Union soldiers of the United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.). The Confederates at Redoubt 1 honorably surrendered and laid down their weapons...After the unarmed Confederate soldiers surrendered, the U.S.C.T. lost control and began bayoneting and shooting their captives. Private Ben H. Bounds of the 4th Mississippi raised his hands in surrender with 50 of his comrades, only to be fired upon by the U.S.C.T. 'It looked as though we were to be butchered in cold blood,' said Lt. Ed Tarrant. Lt. Walter Chapman of the 51st U.S.C.T. said, 'the [colored troops] did not take a prisoner, they killed all they took to a man.' Trying to stop the slaughter, 2 Union officers of the 68th U.S.C.T. were fired on by their own men. Captain Fred W. Norwood was wounded in the knee and Lt. Clark Gleason died several days later from his wounds. It was stated that more Confederates were killed after the surrender of Redoubt 1 than died during the entire battle. The slaughter stopped only as additional Union officers were able to halt the carnage."
   
   "The Ohio Soldier and National Picket Guard," Letter written by Elias Moore, Co. A. 114th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, published September 10, 1887, in Chillicothe, Ohio Pg. 51 - "Boys that saw them charge say there could have been no more courage displayed than was shown by the colored troops. The rebels made a desperate resistance, but could not stand against the overwhelming numbers and cool and determined soldiers. They started in hollering every jump, 'Remember Fort Pillow!' As soon as the rebels found there was no longer use in resistance they fled to our part of the line for protection. Others less fortunate were bayoneted or shot; some few prisoners were taken but not many...One of the boys is now telling how the negroes bayoneted and clubbed the rebels in their possession in Mobile."
   
   Just a few out of thousands. Instead the author chose to write science fiction in yet another thinly veiled attempt to revise history. I can't wait to read the reviews by more credible historians and professors, who will be less impressed than this reviewer. One star because there are no lower ratings.



3. This is certainly not the "banners and roses, bugles and sabres" popular military history of The War, but a serious examination of the South's willingness to entertain exceptional, desperate measures to resist a foe growing in power. As such, historical researcher Singer has expanded our awareness of how far some individuals--and even government officials--were willing to go. The thoroughness of her research and documentation (twelve tightly spaced notes in a book of less than 175 pages, tracking down and interviewing descendants, exploiting previously unpublished manuscript sources) should rebut the notion that our ancestors would never have entertained such "modern" concepts as improvised explosive devices and weapons of mass destruction.
   Placing thse ideas in the context of a Washington effort to formulate (unilaterally) acceptable standards or "rules of warfare" (eventually to lead to the modern "Geneva Convention" concept) is a reminder of American idealism and pioneering in the international arena. (Nathan Bedford Forrest's formulation is said to have been simply "War means fightin' and fightin' means killin'." Probably no argument from Sherman and Sheridan.)
   Ms. Singer's work will shock some and cause others to re-evaluate the lessons of 1861-1865. She has done more than "scratched the surface," but there is more work to be done. Let's hope she will return to the subject.



4. The following review appeared in the Georgia Historical Quarterly:
   
   James O. Hall, William A. Tidwell, and David W. Gaddy raised considerable controversy among scholars with their since imitated but never surpassed pioneer work Come Retribution (1988). The authors argued, with logic and extensive, meticulous research that Abraham Lincoln died as the result of a plot approved of by the Confederate government and carried out by its clandestine services. Despite a huge and lucrative modern market for conspiracy theories, many Americans still do not want to accept that any United States president died as a result of a conspiracy. "We the People" want to believe, at all costs, that our votes decide our government and not any small group of individuals. For this reason, Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials escaped trial for Lincoln's assassination. Recent presentations of the events in Ford's theater keep discussion of this view to a minimum but no one has successfully countered the extensively documented arguments presented by Hall, et al.
   
   That Davis and most of his fellow Confederates did not suffer retribution for any part in the death of the president of the United States, or other acts of clandestine acts of terrorism and sabotage proves appropriate, according to Jane Singer in her new and more concise history of such operations: The Confederate Dirty War. Lincoln made highly legalistic arguments for fighting secession that categorized everyone from the lowliest Confederate mule skinner to Jefferson Davis as criminals subject, in theory, to civil prosecution. A war could not, as Singer points out, be fought under such rules and she begins her work with how the United States adopted law professor Francis Lieber's ideas on rules for conduct of war for the practical military suppression of what the federal government officially defined as civil disobedience. General William T. Sherman would work within these regulations to wage a war of terror in Georgia and elsewhere even as he could condemn potential Confederate use of indiscriminate land mines and the actions of guerillas.
   
   These issues appeared in Come Retribution as part of a history of the Confederate secret services that explained the reasons for the simultaneous attacks on the executive leadership, and legal successors to the president, in April 1865. Tidwell went further on this theme in his April '65. Jane Singer, a disciple of Dr. Hall, now offers a more specific historical treatise on developments of terror weapons of mass destruction by Confederate scientists and operatives in Confederate Dirty War. This book deals the specific tools of mass destruction and the persons who would have used them.
   
   Fear, used as a mass political weapon, presents a different topic that, if covered properly, would in the South extend from long before the Civil War to the present time and in which the subjects of Singer's book would appear as hardly more than one moment in a long, dark history. During the American Revolution, for example, partisan warfare in the South became so brutal that the murder of unarmed prisoners became cynically known as granting "a Georgia parole." Criminal conspiracies existed even earlier and would continue in Georgia and elsewhere to at least the 1830s with Daniel McGirth's operations, the Murrell gang, and the Pony Club. Slave conspiracies and their suppression, as terrorism, had a parallel history in Georgia and other slave states. As Singer points out, Jefferson Davis regarded Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as an act of terrorism bent on instilling the fear, if not the reality, of a bloody race war. Any Confederate qualms about the use of fear and of weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction ended when documents found after the Dahlgren raid of 1863 showed that the federal governments had condoned fire and assassination respectively against Richmond and the leaders of the Confederate government. The letters may have been faked but Davis believed that they were genuine and felt that they justified any measures taken against the Lincoln administration and the United States.
   
   Confederate Dirty War weaves an encyclopedic study of colorful Confederate characters into a single narrative about Confederate dark schemes before and after the Dahlgren raid. Members of the Sons of Liberty and the Knights of the Golden Circle prepared to commit acts of sabotage in the North and to arrange for the release of 40,000 imprisoned Confederate soldiers. Gabriel J. Rains in Georgia designed land mines and bombs, such as the device later intended for use against the White House. Professor Richard Sears McCulloh worked on incendiaries and chemical weapons.
   
   This work, however, stays to the facts and leaves speculation in psychohistory to the reader. Singer, for example, presents the backgrounds and later years of these want to be mass killers, with the exception of the mysterious Irish bomber Thomas F. Harney. (His past and fate remain hidden, as does credible information on his pre Civil War history.) The other major players in the Singer work had no homicidal pasts or anything but respectable post war careers. Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn, the physician known to have tried to wage biological warfare with yellow fever against the North even earned election as governor of Kentucky and John William Headley, one of the men who would have burned down New York City, later served as secretary of state in Kentucky. The author of Confederate Dirty War, however, leaves the reader to speculate on any meanings about their fate.
   
   Increasingly Americans have become victims of terrorism but with a correspondingly declining interest in understanding the motives, operations, and goals of persons who use fear and weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction. Certainly, we have not come to grips with the use of terrorism in our own history, from colonial times to the present. Should the people of the United States finally decide to face this subject with knowledge, instead of panic and rhetoric, they will find Confederate Dirty War on the all too short list of credible historical studies on terrorism.



5. In a day and age where comparing the Confederacy to Nazi Germany or to Islamic Terrorists is all the rage, Jane Singer adds her own 2 cents to the insanity. Problem is, this piece of drivel is more akin to Science Fiction than it is History. The only thing missing from this gaggle of lies was Confederates with table cloths on their heads and AK 47s in their hands screaming, ALLAH IS GREAT!
   
   The Confederacy practiced germ warfare? Ummm, let's see, I think the Union was perhaps more guilty of trying to do this than the Confederacy -
   
   "The devilish malignity of that people passes belief and comprehension - from the driving a negro broken out with smallpox to swim the Rappahannock in January, when he was rescued in a drowning condition by our pickets, to whom they called "there was a [...] worth $[...]"...."
   (from "Inside the Confederate Government", by Robert Garlick Hill Kean, page 89)
   
   And I suppose when a group of Confederate raiders robs a bank in Vermont and scares the collective pants off some complacent Yankee citizens, it qualifies as terrorism? I guess the phrase "War is Hell" is ONLY applicable when practiced below the Mason Dixon line?
   
   Nice goin' Jane. You really outdid yourself. I'm sure you'll be an instant star. By the way, do you have any plans to write a book on Northern terrorism in the South? My email address is public knowledge. Contact me - I'll give you hundreds of pages of research.
   
   "The negroes went out and begged for the cloth," wrote Mrs. Canning, "saying that it was to make their winter clothes. The cruel destroyers refused to let the Negroes have a single piece.......Meanwhile, Mr. Canning's interrogators got down to business in the swamp, two miles from the house. "Now, old man, you have to tell us where your gold is hidden." When he replied that his money was in the bank, they cursed and led him to a tree over the path, tied a rope around his neck, threw it over a branch, and lifted him up until his feet were off the ground. Just before he lost consciousness, he was asked again, "now, where is your gold?" Another denial led to another jerking off the ground until he nearly suffocated. Lowering him again, they shouted, "now tell us where that gold is or we will kill you, and your wife will never know what has become of you."..."Oh! The horrors of that night!" wrote Nora Canning. "There my husband lay with scorching fever, his tongue parched and swollen and his throat dry and sore. He begged for water and there was not a drop to be had. The Yankees had cut all the well ropes and stolen the buckets." (From "War Crimes Against Southern Civilians", by Walter Brian Cisco, pages 135-136)