Did GWB call Laura a "cunt"?

A sensational story is creeping around the shadier regions of the internet. Clearly, some people want to believe this report, or are ready to believe it. But is it true? And how did it start?

The tale traces back to gadfly investigative journalist and former U.S. Naval Officer Wayne Madsen, of the Wayne Madsen Report:

Our White House Press Corps sources report further disturbing news about President Bush.

Our sources have witnessed a clearly inebriated Bush approaching members of the press corps and making rude comments, including one particularly crude remark about First Lady Laura Bush.

In that case, Bush, nodding toward Laura, called her a "c**t."

While Bush's drinking is no secret to the White House press contingent, that particular comment was reportedly the worst they have heard uttered by Bush.

Our sources also report that Laura Bush's stays at the White House are less frequent and that her overnight trips to the Mayflower Hotel often coincide with the president's drunken binges.

Does this story pass (pardon the expression) the smell test? Note that Madsen pins neither when nor where on this incident. No first-hand source confirms it. We don't even have any second-hand rumors from a source that traces back to someone other than Madsen.

One cannot easily believe that any journalist would overhear such a remark without making reference to it. On the other hand, reporters understand that any disclosure of such an incident would result in the loss of White House access.

Wayne Madsen's track record is best described as frustrating.

He often cites anonymous "intelligence sources" for scoops that never receive outside confirmation. Of course, Madsen did work for the NSA and the Navy, positions which allowed him to make contacts unavailable to others. Even so, most of his revelations remain suspended in a maddening realm of "Maybe so, maybe no."

Let's look at some recent examples (with emphasis added throughout):

1. Madsen claims that any story in which Democratic politicians have trouble with Capitol Hill police will always involve Terrance Gainer, the Senate Sergeant at Arms.

Our sources on the Hill said that McKinney was targeted by Gainer and the Republican leadership in a ploy to embarrass her.

2. Madsen claims that the Foley scandal involves the Department of Justice:

WMR has learned from informed sources in the Justice Department that the salacious e-mails from Rep. Mark Foley were leaked to ABC News by career Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who are incensed that Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales covered up the House page scandal for political reasons. The back story of Pagegate is that there was a criminal conspiracy by the top political leadership of the Justice Department to cover up the predatory activities of Foley and other GOP members of Congress since at least 2003 and, likely, as early as 2001.

Nobody else working on the Foley scandal has even hinted at this.

3. Israel (says Madsen) played a bizarre role a then-notorious 2002 terror incident (blamed on Al Qaeda) in Bali:

Our Indonesian and American sources report that there was a significant U.S. and Israeli military-intelligence connection to the October 12, 2002 bombings of the Sari Club in Bali, Indonesia. A DeHavilland Dash-7 aircraft registered in Queensland, Australia, landed at Denpasar Airport in Bali only hours before a massive explosion ripped through the Sari Club, killing over 200 people, many of them vaporized.

Our sources claim that an Israeli military team arrived at Denpasar Hospital a after the explosion and claimed four bodies of white men in uniform and flew them out of Bali on the Dash 7.

Most, but not all, of the flight logs were deliberated altered. Or so claims Madsen. Moreover:

Our sources also indicate that the then-U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, who is now posted as ambassador to Thailand, was fully aware of U.S. intelligence pre-knowledge of the terrorist bombing in Bali.

4. Russian expatriates control the U.K.:

Our sources in Britain report that the scandals surrounding British Prime Minister Tony Blair and key members of his government are part and parcel of the fact that Britain's government has been co-opted by the Russian-Israeli mobsters, much in the same way that their American colleagues, acting through neo-con proxies, have captured control of the Bush administration.

One could go on. Madsen relies on the nameless "sources" nearly every day -- and nearly every day, he reports some fact or claim that causes his more skeptical readers to shrug and to roll their eyes.

Madsen is scarcely the only person claiming that Bush has returned to the bottle and that the President's marriage has undergone great strain. The supermarket tabloids, all controlled by the same Republican-friendly company, have made the George/Laura separation a recurrent theme. Capitol Hill Blue (another source which does not command universal respect) has made claims of Bush's unhinged behavior. Bush's poor on-camera performances have persuaded many observers that he may have returned to the bottle, although such assessments remain highly subjective.

A oft-repeated Madsen claim holds that Laura Bush spends many nights in the Mayflower Hotel. The rumor has entered into beltway lore, and some folks seem to be under the impression that it was confirmed by the BBC, although no-one can point to the actual BBC story. As far as I can tell, every single "Mayflower" tale on the internet traces back to Wayne Madsen.

Could Laura Bush and her Secret Service detail take up residency at the Mayflower without the knowledge of any other reporter? Each reader must supply his or her own answer to that question.

Laura stays at the Mayflower...Bush is drinking again...Bush called a Laura a vicious name in front of witnesses... If anyone can cite any non-Madsen source for any of these claims -- or if anyone has first-hand testimony -- please write to me at cannonfiremail@yahoo.com.

Who was the Mad Gasser?

In August of 1944, during the worst of World War II, the city of Mattoon, Illinois came under attack. A phantom "gasser" attacked women in their bedrooms at night, spraying a strange "sweet smelling" gas in through the bedroom window. The gas left victims paralyzed, at least in part. They also suffered from dizziness, dry mouth, palpitations and difficulty walking.

The authorities investigated, but never discovered the culprit. In 1945, The Journal of Abnormal Psychology wrote an article characterizing the attacks as a classic case of "mass hysteria" brought about by war jitters. Why those jitters should manifest themselves so oddly in one Illinois town, and nowhere else in America, went unexplained.

Since then, aficionados of the odd have considered the strange case of the Mad Gasser a classic example of "Fortean" phenomena, akin to England's "Springheel Jack" sightings of the 1800s. On the skeptical side of the aisle, introductory psychology books have long referenced the case as a classic instance of collective behavior gone awry. As one sociologist put it:

Could the case of the Mattoon episode have been initially triggered by a real prowler or phantom gasser, or could it have been caused by a paranormal entity as some have suggested? Theories involving a real prowler or gasser are highly speculative and made in ignorance of basic theories of social psychology (specifically, conformity dynamics, reality-testing, perceptual and memory fallibility), and a knowledge of the scientific literature on epidemic hysteria and collective delusions.

The man who wrote those words, like most of the people who have written about the incident over the decades, never visited Mattoon.

In 2003, writer Scott Maruna, a former resident of Matoon, published a book which revealed some little-known aspects of the case. The inhabitants of that city always felt that the Gasser was real. They even knew who he was: An emotionally disturbed fellow with the unlikely name of Farley Llewellyn, the offspring of a well-regarded family.

He was an amateur chemist, widely thought to be homosexual. The derision he encountered in those less-enlightened times caused him to become somewhat unhinged, and the attacks, it is said, were his means of achieving vengeance. All of the attacks were within a short distance of Llewellyn's household.

The police considered Llewellyn a prime suspect and, although they had him under surveillance for a brief period, they never did find enough evidence to charge him. The "Mad Gasser" attacks ended when Llewellyn's family had him committed to a mental institution. Maruna argues that the gas involved could well have been 1,1,2,2-, tetrachloroethane, which smells sweet and produces symptoms similar to those described by the victims.

Here we see the difficulties facing anyone who investigates "X-File" material. Whenever a case of this sort occurs, one type of person will immediately espouse an unprovable supernatural explanation, while an opposing faction will fasten on vague psychological theories. Farley Llewellyn was neither a spook nor a figment of the mass imagination, and the gas he used was hardly outside the range of the possible.

But one mystery remains..

An exactly similar series of attacks occurred in Botetourt County, Virginia, between December of 1933 and February,1934. Residents (usually women) were overcome by a sweet-smelling gas that left them dizzy, with headaches, nausea, and partial paralysis.

"Prowlers" were seen running from the crime scenes. On one occasion, no less than four "prowlers" were chased off.

The perpetrator(s) were never caught.

When the Mattoon incident occurred, local journalists made no reference to the Virginia attacks of a decade previous. No print source connected the Botetourt attacks to Mattoon until the 1980s.

Did Farley Llewellyn somehow "catch wind" (so to speak) of the Virginia mystery?

Woody Harrelson, his Dad, and the JFK assassination

Charles Harrleson has died. That news may not mean much to you, even after you learn that he was the father of actor Woody Harrelson.

Woody's father was a hit man, convicted of killing Texas Judge John H. Wood back in 1979. The elder Harrleson committed this crime, it is said, at the behest of a man named Jimmy Chagra, an accused drug smuggler from a well-known family in El Paso.

The obits don't tell you that Charles Harrelson admitted, in the stand-off before his arrest, that he had been involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy.

Later, in prison, Harrelson retracted that statement. However:

At Harrelson's trial, Joe Chagra, the brother of the man who was believed to have hired Harrelson, testified that Harrelson was given the contract to kill Judge Wood after he claimed to have participated in the JFK assassination. Indicted along with Harrelson in the plot to kill Judge Wood was the brother of New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, who was one of the Mafia figures identified by the Select Committee as possibly having been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

At the time of arrest, Harrelson had in possession the business card of a R.D. Matthews, mobster who was a known Jack Ruby associate. Matthews later worked for casino operator Benny Binion, who may have been the "go between" who introduced Harrelson to Jimmy Chagra.

This page presents some fascinating original research into the Harrelson affair:

A reporter for the Dallas morning news by the name of Chuck Cook interviewed Harrelson on the judge Wood case and subsequently asked him about his claims of murdering the President, Cook said that Harrelson ‘got this sly little grin on his face, Harrelson is very intelligent and has a way of not answering when it suits him’(6). At a later interview Cook brought the subject up again and at that point Harrelson became very serious, Cook quoted Harrelson as saying "Listen, if and when I get out of here (prison) and feel free to talk, I will have something that will be the biggest story you ever had" and added "November 22, 1963. You remember that!".

Moreover,

There is evidence that Harrelson was identified in 1982 by Florida Law enforcement officials as being a member of a group of hired gunmen known as ‘The Company’(36), which takes its name from the CIA. It is claimed that ‘The Company’ owned million in assets including planes ships and real estate. Florida officials claim that ‘The Company’ imported drugs from South America and also were involved in gunrunning and mercenary operations.

The "Company" has been linked, by some researchers, with both the Kentucky drug ring outlined in the book The Blue Grass Conspiracy and with another ring run out of the China Lake Naval Research Facility.

Quite a few researchers noted a similarity between 1963 arrest photos of Harrelson and the "tall tramp" arrested on the day of the 1963 assassination, one of three tramps hauled in that day and not identified. Both heads have similar cowlicks, and in both cases, the mouth does not parallel the eyeline.

The identities of the tramps were one of the great mysteries of the JFK assassiination for three decades. In the mid-1990s, researchers discovered that the Dallas police records contained the names of three homeless individuals arrested in a boxcar that day; the tramp thought to be Charles Harrelson was in fact a man named John Gedney. However, arresting officer David V. Harkness has said that more than three transients were pulled out of the boxcar on that day.

Woody Harrelson believes that his father was innocent of the murder of Judge Wood. I do not know the younger Harrelson's response to the claimed connection to the JFK assassination.

Rudy Guiliani and the pedo priest

Odd, isn't it, that the media refuses to take an interest in some of the juiciest stories. Right now, the Republican frontrunner is former mayor Rudolf Giuliani, who is trying his darnedest to win the evangelical vote.

But Rudy has a few skeletons in his closet.

In boyhood, he developed a close friendship with one Alan Placa, who grew up to become a bigwig in the Roman Catholic Church -- to be specific, he was a Monsignor in Long Island, New York. Placa, it seems, developed what we may now call the "priestly ailment" -- a yearning for underaged males. His legal staff would attempt to buy off any talkative victims for a few thousand. He counseled other accused priests in other parishes on the best ways of fending off such accusations.

Eventually, Placa's odd sexual drives hit the newspapers. From a 2002 Newsday article:

Richard Tollner, 43, a mortgage broker now living in the Albany area, said he told prosecutors he had his first encounter with the priest in January 1975, on a day that classes were out, and the teen had come in to help make banners for a Right to Life march in Washington, D.C.

He said the priest pulled out some posters in the deserted administrative area as if to show him something, and then began fondling him - all the while making conversation about the posters.

Tollner said the incidents repeated every month or so for the next year and a half. "It was always groping," he said. "He'd draw his hand deliberately to the inside of my thigh, and over my penis. It would go on for four or five minutes, sometimes as long as 10."

Even though the statute of limitations put Placa in the legal clear, he was, in essence, defrocked. I say "in essence" because he case is, technically, still being considered by Rome.

Throughout this entire period, Placa remained close to Giuliani. The bond remained close throughout Rudy's years at the Justice Department, and throughout his tenure as Mayor of New York City.

Placa provided the necessary ecclesiastical "wink" when Giuliani decided to marry his second cousin, a union normally frowned upon by the Roman Catholic church. (According to some, Placa, Rudy and the lady in question were all childhood pals.) When the marriage went sour, the Church annulled it following the "shocking" revelation of the familial tie.

In 2002, lauded worldwide as "America's Mayor" in the wake of the 911 attacks, Rudy Giuliani stepped down from his post and started a consulting firm -- called, unsurprisingly enough, Giuliani Consultants.

Of course, even former Monsignors have to earn a living. I suppose it might be too much to expect Placa to take on a humble position as a fast food clerk or gas station attendant or even (ahem!) a carpenter.

What gets to me is the lack of media attention.

Suppose John Edwards or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton had given a cozy sinecure to a defrocked priest accused of pedophilia. What would occur? I'll tell you what: Every newspaper reader, every radio listener and every television watcher in America would be discussing the matter the very next day.

I'll bet you're learning about Rudy and his child-friendly priestly pal for the first time right here.

Israel and the FBI

In 2001, the United States Government shut down a Texas-based Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The charge: Funneling funds to the terror group Hammas. The case finally went to trial -- and it now may be headed for acquittal.

The reason: The evidence provided by the FBI was proven to be fabricated.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the FBI conducted wiretaps of the HLF back in 1996. A summary of these wiretaps was entered into evidence at the trial. But when the summary was checked against the actual transcript, something odd showed up: The summary included inflammatory anti-Jewish rhetoric which was not actually uttered by the individuals under surveillance.

According to the discredited summary, Holy Land officials referred to Israel as "the government of the demons" and to Jews as trying "to rob as much money as possible from the American taxpayers for the illegitimate excuse of protecting and preserving the chosen people of God."

One Muslim charity official supposedly told a colleague: "Even Jesus Christ had called the Jews and their high priests … the sons of snakes and scorpions."

None of those comments was contained in a 13-page verbatim transcript of the conversation recorded April 15, 1996, by the FBI. In response, defense lawyers demanded declassification of large portions of the government's documents in the case.

On Monday, federal prosecutors argued that the discrepancies were not serious enough to justify such sweeping declassifications.

"Not serious enough"? How could the matter possibly be more serious? This is the largest terror funding trial ever conducted!

The key question is: Who added these words, and why?

Note that the subject matter concerned Israel and Jews. In my opinion, these are the sentiments that an Israeli intelligence asset might wish to place into a Muslim's mouth. A non-Jew bent on "salting" the evidence would have been more likely to include references to Osama Bin Laden, or to Hamas, or to some other topic more directly related to the charges.

Did a Mossad asset penetrate the FBI and include fabricated evidence in a terror case?

Although that suggestion might seem, at first, like the product of an anti-Semite's imagination, we have startling evidence of Mossad involvement with American terror cases:

The trial of Muhammad Salah, a Chicago businessman, and Abdelhallen Ashqar, a Virginia professor, marked the first time an American court allowed the testimony of two Israeli security agents in a U.S. courtroom. Despite petitions filed by the Chicago Tribune and civil rights groups, Judge Amy St. Eve allowed the agents to testify in a closed hearing that amounted to secret evidence. (In the case of Salah, the prosecution sought to prove he provided aid to Hamas terror activities based on an admission obtained under torture in a foreign country and in a language the defendant does not understand.)

SEE: “U.S. Jury Acquits Two Men of Hamas Conspiracy” (Reuters, 2/1/07)

But was the Mossad directly involved in the handling of the HLF case? Apparently so:

Months before the Salah indictment was announced three years ago, the Holy Land Foundation was shut down amidst similar allegations of providing material support to Hamas terror activities. As detailed in a June 2006 Los Angeles Times report, “Israel’s prominent investigative role appears to be unprecedented in post-Sept. 11 terrorism cases”, including in the HLF over 8,000 pages of Israeli intelligence.

What, some may ask, is the problem with using Israeli intelligence in an American trial? To a degree, the practice is fair: Intelligence services often "swap" data. Sometimes, for complex reasons, these swaps even occur between services generally thought to be in opposition.

Difficulties arise when a foreign service takes a leading role in an American investigation. The Israeli agenda may not be ours. Their standards of justice and fairness may differ. They may be willing to falsify evidence, as appears to have occurred int he HLF case.

If a jury in a terror case becomes convinced that the evidence was neither collected nor presented in an impartial manner, an acquittal may result:

And more recently, the terrorism trial of South Florida professor Dr. Sami Al-Arian also included Israeli intelligence prominently as evidence, but resulted in acquittal on eight of 17 charges and the jury deadlocked on the rest. In each of these cases, the use of Israeli evidence failed to convince American jurors.

Even in the face of the terrorist threat, American justice must remain truly American. We cannot allow operatives employed by, or emotionally beholden to, a foreign government to have any effect on how our FBI does its duty.

Disinformation, Bush and UFOs

The secret services of Britain and America -- and perhaps other countries -- employ a disinformation technique which we may call “Look, but do not copy.”

The tactic is simple. Colin Wallace, who used to run the trick when he was attached to the British Army’s psyops unit in Belfast back in the 1970s, called it the “double bubble.” Robin Ramsey, a British writer who has worked closely with Wallace, thus describes the gambit in his book Conspiracy Theories:

Wallace would take journalists, especially foreign journalists with a limited understanding of British politics, into a back room and show them ‘secret documents’ which they could read but not copy. Some of the documents were genuine, some forgeries. We have copies of some of the forgeries.

Why do such a thing? Three reasons spring to mind:

1. To bring discredit to a person dupe by this scheme. The double-bubble can be a terrific way of tempting some journalistic irritant into making a fool of himself.

2. To bring discredit to a topic, fact or to an allegation.

3. To place a false fact into the public's consciousness while allowing the government to maintain deniability.

The double-bubble has been employed outside Ireland and the U.K. In fact, we've seen the tactic at work here in the United States. The topic: Unidentified Flying Objects -- UFOs.

In the 1970s, attorney Daniel Sheehan achieved fame when he helped win a lawsuit in the then-notorious Karen Silkwood case. He later formed the Christic Institute to expose American covert operatives who were up to various shadowy enterprises in Central America. Many within the Christic Institute knew that Sheehan had a longstanding, and more-or-less quiet, interest in UFOs. In this interview from five years ago, he revealed the incident which prompted that interest.

Back in 1976, Sheehan was the General Counsel for the Jesuit National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Through his church, he happened to meet Rosemary Chalk, the Secretary of the National Academy of Science in Washington D.C. When SHeehan mentioned that he had once wanted to be an astronaut (as did most boys of his generation), Chalk arranged an introduction to Marcia Smith, director of the Science and Technology Division of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service -- who was heading up a research project into the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

And why was the Library of Congress involved with such a thing? Here's how Ramsey tells it:

Before becoming President in 1976, Jimmy Carter had been Governor of Georgia and, while Governor, had seen a UFO. He had even filed a report of the incident with one of the UFO monitoring groups. Becoming President, Carter went to see the Director of the CIA, George Bush, and asked about UFOs. He was told by Bush that the didn't 'need to know' and would get nothing from the Agency. Bush suggested, however, that Carter approach the Congressional Research Service and ask them to prepare a briefing on the subject.

That briefing was the job of Marcia Smith, who asked Sheehan to get access to the Vatican's files on UFOs. The Vatican refused. Sheehan then asked to see some of the classified material that Uncle Sam had. Here's how he tells what occurred (with paragraph breaks added for readability):

Well, she said that she didn't know whether the Air Force and the Department of Defense would agree to release these to the Library of Congress, but she would try. So she contacted them and shortly thereafter she called me and she said, much to her surprise, "They have agreed to do this."

So she gave me a particular date and time and told me that I should go over to the new building at the Library of Congress, which was on the other side of Independence Avenue. I had mentioned before, when asked about this, this building had not even been opened yet. There were no people in it.

I went over there, I believe it was on a Saturday morning and brought my identification. I went to the door, and there was an Executive Protective Service officer at the front door of the library. I showed him my identification. He was a little puzzled because there was nobody in the building; no offices had been opened yet. I showed him my identification, and he made a call. A little bit to his surprise he said, "Yes, you are expected."

So I went in, and he told me what room I was expected to go to. I went down the hall, and went downstairs into the basement looking for this room. I found this place, and there was a room and these two security officers there at the door, and there was actually a third, plainclothed, sitting at a desk to the right of them. As I came in there I showed them all my identification, and they checked some documentation that they had, and said "Yes. I was supposed to be here."

As I started to go in, the man sitting at the desk told me I had to leave my briefcase there. I wouldn't be allowed to take any notes. It turned out I had a yellow pad under my arm, so I set the briefcase down, gave it to him, and I went into the room.

I was in there for some time. There were a bunch of documents there. There was actually a film machine. It was like a little reel-to-reel-kind of a film machine there. I don't know if it was 35mm, or whatever those things were -- so there was actually some little films there.

I looked at some of the films and they were like the classic films that you have seen, sort of far distant shots of strange moving vehicles. So I decided I wasn't making much headway on this, so I began to look into these little boxes, that had these canisters there. There was one of these overhead filmstrip machines that was sitting in the room. I began to take these little canisters out, and open them up, and put the filmstrips in and look through these things. I don't know how many I had gone through. I had gone through several, or at least a few of these boxes, when I hit upon this one canister that had film and pictures. I started going through, turning the little crank and there it was. Again I have told people about this a number of times.

There were these photographs of unmistakable -- of a UFO sitting on the ground. It had crashed, apparently. It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle. There were Air Force personnel.

As I cranked the little handle, and looked at additional photos, these Air Force people were taking pictures. In the photograph they were taking photographs of this vehicle. One of the photos actually had the Air Force personnel with this big long tape measure measuring this thing. You could see that they had these parkas on, with little fur around their hoods. You could see that they had the little name tags on their jacket. They were clearly U.S. Air Force personnel.

I was kind-of in this strange state saying: "Here it is!" So I turned the crank for more pictures, and I could see on the side of this craft these, like, little insignias - little symbols. So I turned ahead a couple of pictures to see if there was a closer picture. Sure enough, there was. One of the photos had kind of a close-up picture of these symbols.

As Ramsey notes, the entire episode is absurd. Anyone within the government who wants to make the truth about UFOs known would not pick such a bizarre method of revelation. What would be the purpose of showing pictures of a crashed disc to someone like Sheehan? Why would he be on "need to know" -- even though President Carter was not?

The entire episode traces to George Bush the elder. When you take one or two steps back, you can see how this version of the "double bubble" might be used to discredit Sheehan, who was, even then, already establishing himself as the sort of lawyer who might annoy the Central Intelligence Agency.

But if you take three or four further steps back, the real target of the enterprise becomes clear: Jimmy Carter.

I believe that Bush -- using Sheehan and Smith as innocent dupes -- engineered this entire enterprise to make sure that false information reached the new Democratic President. Since everything (ostensibly) ran through the Congressional Research Service, the CIA remained completely unconnected with these events.

The motive: Making sure that Carter (who had pledged to rein in the CIA's covert activites) believed that the Armed Forces had captured a downed flying saucer, and that photographs documented the retrieval.

If Carter had announced the existence of such "evidence" on national television, everyone in the country would have laughed at him -- especially if the Department of Defense convincingly denied that it possessed photographic proof of extraterrestrial visitation. Thus, a handful of fake documents and rigged photos could have helped destroy a President unloved by the CIA.

In a future post, we will discuss other uses of the "double bubble" methodology.