December 29, 2009

The Left's Blind Eye to the Obvious

By Jack Cashill

The approach of the new year might be an appropriate time to summarize what I have learned in researching the several books and articles that I have written this decade. That I came to own -- or even break -- many of the stories involved, although satisfying to me, should appall any ordinary citizen.

These stories were too big for a responsible media to miss.  They became mine as a result of what I call the "ABETTO Syndrome."  For at least the last generation, the left in general, and the media in particular, have been turning A Blind Eye To The Obvious -- ABETTO. Here are some nuggets the media chose not to notice. These are all thoroughly and inarguably documented.

  • More than half of those incinerated during Janet Reno's tank attack at Waco on April 19, 1993 were ethnic minorities -- 39 out of 74, to be precise. Six of them were Hispanic, six of Asian descent, and a full 27 of them black, ages six to sixty-one. They did not commit suicide.
  • About a third of the Jonestown dead did not commit suicide either. Three-year-olds typically don't know how. Authorities dumped the bodies of more than 250 of these children, most of them black, into a mass grave in Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery. There they lie to this day, unsung and unmourned because they serve no useful political purpose.
  • They serve no purpose because their killer, James Jones, was a self-professed "communist" in deep with a slew of leading Democrats -- George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Willie Brown, Jerry Brown, and even Rosalynn Carter and Walter Mondale. Moscone appointed Jones to the Human Rights Commission and then to the chairmanship of the city's Housing Authority.
  • All witnesses who saw Timothy McVeigh on the morning the Murrah Building blew up saw him with a short, swarthy fellow. According to the Washington Post, a judge detained McVeigh without bail "after listening to four hours of testimony from FBI special agent John Hersley in which he described eyewitness accounts of a yellow Mercury with McVeigh and another man inside speeding away from a parking lot near the federal building."
  • Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, the so-called "field commander" of the Oklahoma City task force, played an even more aggressive role managing the TWA Flight 800 investigation a year later. The Clintons appear to have rewarded her for her steely performance with the vice-chairmanship of Fannie Mae, a job for which she had no known credentials.
  • Six years and about $25.6 million in salary and bonuses later, Gorelick responded to the call of duty once more and took one of five Democratic seats on the 9-11 commission.
  • By the FBI's own count, no fewer than 270 eyewitnesses gave formal reports to the FBI describing a red-tipped object with a smoky contrail striking TWA Flight 800. About a hundred witnesses tracked the object from the surface. Astonishingly, the New York Times would interview none of them.
  • Four weeks after the disaster, the Times' Don Van Natta would report, "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."
  • Likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI immediately shifted its storyline away from a missile to a bomb, and a month later, from a bomb to a mechanical failure. The Times reporter who got the call to document both shifts was Andy Revkin, the same reporter at the center of the Climategate scandal.
  • Bizarrely, Richard Clarke, Clinton's anti-terror czar who knew next to nothing about aircraft technology, claimed to have discovered the official cause of the TWA 800 crash months, if not years, before the NTSB did.
  • Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was dispatched on his fatal plane flight that same election year, 1996, for no more noble a purpose than to broker a sweetheart deal between the neo-fascist president of Croatia and the Enron Corporation.
  • The Air Force concluded that the controlled descent of Brown's USAF plane into a Croatian mountainside was "inexplicable." The maintenance chief responsible for the airport's navigation system showed up with a bullet hole in his chest the day before his Air Force interview.
  • Brown's fatal head injury struck the forensic photographer and attending pathologist as having the size and shape of a gunshot wound. He was nonetheless buried (over the protest of the pathologists) without an autopsy. The photographer and three Armed Service pathologists would sacrifice their careers going public with their discontent. The major media reported close to none of this.
  • As the Nation of Islam plotted to kill "heretic" Malcolm X, Malcolm's wife Betty Shabazz approached the one person with the clout to dissuade Malcolm's fellow Muslims. "You see what you're doing to my husband, don't you?" she pleaded. Muhammad Ali blew her off, saying, "I'm not doing anything to him." Malcolm was gunned down shortly thereafter.
  • If a young Ali jeopardized his liberal chic by betraying Malcolm X, a reformed Ali risked it again when he publicly supported Ronald Reagan and even attended the Republican National Convention. Who would have guessed?
  • Alex Haley plagiarized his Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction bestseller, Roots, from a book written by white novelist Harold Courlander, who sued Haley for damages. Midway through the trial, the judge threatened to charge a dissembling Haley with perjury unless he settled, which he did for big bucks.
  • Sorry, Virginia, but there was no Kunta Kinte. Writing in the Village Voice, literary detective Philip Nobile would call Roots "one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times."
  • Speaking of the literary hoaxes, not a single one of the scores of mainstream book editors who reviewed Christopher Andersen's Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage chose to notice Andersen's most newsworthy revelation: "In the end, [Bill] Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant -- so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."

For the more explosive of these stories -- the death of Ron Brown, the destruction of TWA Flight 800, the Ayers' involvement in Obama's Dreams -- I made every effort to alert the mainstream media. I talked in person to many reporters and producers, including a few household names, and offered to share what I had gathered. To a person, they did not want to know. 

I believe I was the first reporter even to request the USAF's twenty-two-volume report on the death of Ron Brown -- this despite the fact that the New York Times lost a reporter in the crash. It was in the report that I learned about the Enron connection. Even after the Enron scandal broke, no one wanted to know about Enron's role in Brown's fatal mission.

One last nugget. When questioned by the Air Force, U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith observed that Zdenka Gast, the liaison between Enron and Croatia, had been scheduled to fly with Brown but thought better of it.

Said Galbraith, "There were problems in-in-in this...in concluding this deal where they wanted to sign a letter of intent, and so, rather than...than go on the Brown trip, she stayed with the Inron [sic] people to do the final negotiations."

"We've been looking for her," volunteered Air Force Capt. John Cairney. The Air Force was apparently not allowed to look too hard. Investigators conducted 148 witness interviews, but Gast's was not among them. A few years later, they could have found her at a White House wedding reception.

A Croatian language magazine named Gloria featured a photo of three smiling women at the reception, all linked arm in arm.  In the middle is Zdenka, an attractive, full-figured redhead. On her left is the bride, Alexis Herman, who dispatched Brown on his fatal trip. On her right is none other than Hillary Clinton. Only forty people were in attendance, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al and Tipper Gore, and "several governors and senators."

I found this interesting.  Plagued as they were by the ABETTO syndrome, the bright lights of the mainstream media failed to share my interest. 

If only there were a vaccine.