By Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams

After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars.

On Tuesday, The New Yorker published 10 of the massacre photos—part of a collaboration with the “In the Dark” podcast that joined the magazine last year.

The podcast’s reporting team had filed its public records request four years ago, then sued the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command over their failure to hand over the images. “In the Dark” host Madeleine Baran also traveled with a colleague to Iraq’s remote Anbar Province to meet relatives of some of the 24 Iraqi civilians—who ranged in age from 1 to 76—slaughtered by U.S. troops.

Baran explained that she sought the relatives’ help partly because “we anticipated that the government would claim that the release of the photos would harm the surviving family members of the dead,” as “military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the final accused Marine.”

Khalid Salman Raseef, an attorney who lost 15 members of his family in the massacre, told Baran that “I believe this is our duty to tell the truth.”

The graphic photos show dead Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. One 5-year-old girl, Zainab Younis Salim, is shown with the number 11 written on her back in red marker by a U.S. Marine who wanted to differentiate the victims in photos.

Photos from the Marine Corp's 2005 Haditha Massacre in Iraq were just acquired under the Freedom of Information Act.

This is big. US interventionism must end now. pic.twitter.com/ES1bPCf3cg

— Greg J Stoker (@gregjstoker) August 28, 2024

On November 19, 2005, a convoy of Humvees carrying Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marine Division was traveling through Haditha when a roadside bomb believed to have been placed by Iraqis resisting the U.S. invasion killed Miguel Terrazas, a popular lance corporal, and wounded two other Marines.

In retaliation, Marines forced a nearby taxicab to stop and ordered the driver and his four student passengers out of the vehicle. Sgt. Frank Wuterich then executed the five men in cold blood. Another Marine then desecrated their bodies, including by urinating on them.

Wuterich then ordered his men to “shoot first and ask questions later,” and they went house to house killing everyone they saw. They killed seven people in the Walid family home, including a toddler and an elderly couple.

“I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny,” Iman Walid, a survivor who was 8 years old when her family was slain, toldTime in 2006.

Next, the Marines killed eight people in the Salim family home, six of them children. Finally, the troops executed four brothers in a closet in the Ahmad family home.

The Marines subsequently conspired to cover up what a military probe would deem a case of “collateral damage.” The military initially claimed that 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the same explosion that took Terrazas’ life. However, a local doctor who examined the victims’ bodies said they “were shot in the chest and head from close range.”

Eight Marines were eventually charged in connection with the massacre. Six defendants were found not guilty and one had their case dismissed. Initially charged with murder, Wuterich pleaded guilty and was convicted of dereliction of duty. He was punished with a reduction in rank and was later honorably discharged from service.

Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis—who earned his “Mad Dog” moniker during one of the atrocity-laden battles for the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004—intervened on behalf of the Haditha defendants and personally dismissed charges against one of them.

Later, while serving as former President Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Mattis oversaw an escalation in what he called the U.S. war of “annihilation” against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The general warned that “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” and thousands of men, women, and children were subsequently slaughtered as cities including Mosul and Raqqa were leveled.

The Haditha massacre was part of countless U.S. war crimes and atrocities committed during the ongoing so-called War on Terror, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in at least half a dozen countries since 2001. One of the reasons why the Haditha massacre is relatively unknown compared with the torture and killings at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq is that photos of the former crime have been kept hidden for decades.

“The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public,” Baran wrote in the New Yorker article. She noted that Gen. Michael Hagee, who commanded the Marines at the time of the Haditha massacre, later boasted how “proud” he was about keeping photos of the killings secret.

“This,” journalist Murtaza Hussain reminded the world on Tuesday, “is what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq.”

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An unvarnished assessment of what a Kamala Harris presidency would amount to.

41 years ago, on March 30th, 1981, on a drizzly Monday in the nation’s capital, the President of the United States was gunned down in the street. Shock reverberated around the nation, and upon President Reagan’s recovery, the public breathed a sigh of relief, averting the tragedy that befell President Kennedy just 18 years prior. The would-be assassin, a man named John Hinckley Jr., was written off by the press as a bizarre youth infatuated with actress Jodie Foster, who had tried to kill the president to impress her.

This is the story that would prevail for the following 40 years, becoming just a strange footnote in the history of the Reagan presidency, devoid of substance and thoroughly depoliticized. In a recent article published in The Washington Post, Hinckley’s shooting of President Reagan and three others is described as a “deranged plot” to impress the young actress. To The Post, the only impact Hinckley seemed to leave on America was through pop culture, as the piece details his portrayal in a Broadway musical and the use of his name by punk bands. To the press and popular history, Hinckley was a creature of American culture, warped by junk food and Scorsese movies, who committed an inherently political act with no political motive, and the only impression he left was a self-feeding cultural loop. Any discussions of the background of an almost-presidential assassin are described as “conspiracy theories about his family” which “fester in dark corners of the internet.”

For the purposes of this article, Hinckley’s supposed obsession in Jodie Foster is of minimal interest. Too much has been devoted to this one aspect of a decidedly major political event in recent American history. To argue that the attempted assassination of a U.S. President is apolitical would be absurd. Regardless of whether or not Hinckley’s fixation on Foster was his primary motivator, it will not be the primary focus of this article. Rather, his political upbringing, his family’s political background, and the major political ramifications in the White House and beyond will be discussed.

The Family Name

Before examining the would-be assassin, it’s necessary to illustrate his family history, and their ties to his victims. John Hinckley Sr. (called “Jack” by his friends) was raised in Oklahoma by his mother, after his father died before Jack was only three years old. At the age of twenty, he was commissioned as an ensign to the US Navy, at the very end of World War II. Jack was assigned to the USS Salamonie, which aided the Shanghai occupation forces with logistics after the Japanese surrender. Jack went to Nagasaki only weeks after the detonation of the atomic bomb, observing the city in ruins.

By the Fall of 1946, Jack left the Navy and married his wife Jo Ann Moore. At the same time, he entered the oil industry and “was employed by subsidiaries of major oil companies before becoming a petroleum consultant.” The CIA frequently used various roles in the petroleum industry as cover for covert operations, as evidenced by agency asset and close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt. Oswald’s friend worked as a petroleum engineer passing through Latin American countries just around the time of a US coup.

Jack seemed to have similar luck, as he did “relief work” in Guatemala beginning during the 1960’s, possibly earlier. This is at the time of its brutal civil war which left hundreds of thousands dead after being sparked by the CIA’s coup of democratically elected leader Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.

In 1957, Jack joined Gruy Management, a small oil company in Dallas, as an engineer. After working his way up the corporate ladder, Jack became president of the company, where he “oversaw the management of clients’ gas and oil properties”, and had a staff of about 25 people. His main role as president was to visit properties managed by Gruy, which he eventually renamed to Vanderbilt Resources Corp. in 1970, in honor of his son Scott, who received an engineering degree of Vanderbilt University.

The Hinckley family left Dallas, moving west to Evergreen, Colorado, a wealthy Denver suburb, in 1973. Their other son, Scott, was working on offshore oil rigs in Indonesia. Jack and his wife would live in Evergreen for years, up to the point when their son shot the president. At this time, the Hinckleys’ neighbor was A.B. Slaybaugh, the vice president of Conoco Oil Company. From 1977 to 1979, future Reagan campaign manager and CIA director William Casey was project manager for Conoco in Denver, which was a highly competitive city for anyone in the oil industry. Jack would soon find this out, as he struggled to pick up any leases in Colorado, with the government owning most of the land he wanted to drill on. So in 1975, Jack reorganized his company to get all the outstanding shares, which resulted in its operations expanding and lessening the tax burden. By 1980, the Hinckleys held $2.4 million in shares.

Amidst his quick rise to success, Jack became well acquainted with right wing politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and John Connally, all of whom he donated to. He even became close with Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, a usually conservative Democrat, with a few choice positions on environmental issues, like his strong advocacy to cut population growth down to zero.

World Vision

In 1976, Jack Hinckley became president of World Vision, ostensibly a Christian humanitarian relief agency, but in practice a CIA front. During the waning days of the Vietnam War, World Vision allegedly used boys off the street to do spy-work for the CIA in Saigon, a charge the organization has vehemently denied. Some of the Vietnamese refugees from that war who migrated their way to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, would be looked over by Mark David Chapman, another World Vision employee, at the camp there. Chapman too would squeeze his trigger to fame, when he killed John Lennon in December, 1980, after being given deadly hollow point bullets by a Georgia cop and possible CIA asset.

Founded by evangelist Bob Pierce in 1950, World Vision was an intensely anticommunist organization. Pierce, who worked throughout China during the civil war of the 1940’s, felt that Christianity was the only effective way to combat the spread of godless atheistic communism. To him and many other charity leaders, this meant it was wartime. Pierce’s most frequently used weapon were propaganda films, shown to church audiences, full of cold war era paranoia.

Based in Southern California, World Vision spent most of its time in Africa, and its budget for 1987 was over $145 million. Up to 20% of the organization’s funding comes from USAID, which is frequently used as a CIA cutout. How much of that budget was actually spent on feeding starving people underwent serious scrutiny, and World Vision was known to inflate statistics. When a reporter asked for their documentation asserting that “12 million people are on the brink of death in East Africa,” as they did in a 1981 ad, a World Vision spokesman had to sheepishly admit they had none. Even the United Nations didn’t have any exact count of how many people in East Africa were starving.

Even well after Bob Pierce left the organization in 1967, his tactic of propaganda films was set in stone. World Vision became known in the 1980’s for their television documentaries displaying images of starving children across the world. But after they aired a program titled “Crisis in the Horn of Africa” in the early 80s, relief workers in Somalia charged that it was “almost fraudulent”, as World Vision was raking in cash on the promise of alleviating the famine in Somalia, months after the emergency had already been abated. But sustained calls for aid don’t raise as much money as desperate pleas for help in the midst of an emergency, so World Vision got what they wanted, and the cash was flowing.

World Vision’s misinformation strategy goes further than shady fundraising. In 1981, when Secretary of State and Watergate coup plotter Alexander Haig declared that the Soviets were supplying the Vietnamese with biological weapons, the scientific community was less than accepting of the “yellow rain” myth, believing the substance was likely due to natural means rather than germ warfare. Suddenly feeling the burden of proof on them, the US embassy in Thailand requested World Vision send medical samples from refugees who said they were affected by the yellow rain. World Vision eagerly complied, furthering the Reagan administration’s line.

Some of the most disturbing accounts of World Vision’s use as a tool in American regime change are regarding their treatment of Salvadoran refugees fleeing the civil war in their home country, with death squads receiving US funds to rape, torture, and murder civilians. In addition to telling refugees in their camps that rival faith-based aid organizations were communists, World Vision employees also deliberately turned a blind eye to further murder of innocents. In May 1981, when two new Salvadoran refugees showed up at World Vision’s Colomoncagua camp after closing time, rather than just admit them in anyway, as was standard practice, the camp coordinator turned them over to the anticommunist Honduran army. The civilians were arrested on the spot, and Honduran soldiers marched into the camp and took two more refugees with them. One was released the next day, but the three others were found as rotting corpses riddled with bullets.

The organization claimed this was all just a big misunderstanding, and the event was a tragic accident, but the damage to its credibility had already been done. World Vision conceded, as reported by investigative journalist Sara Diamond, that its problem “in Central America began when it allowed its staff to come under the control of an anticommunist Cuban exile, a Nicaraguan exile evangelist and a group of Salvadoran military veterans. One person on the World Vision staff was a member of the Honduran military.”

A report prepared by a human rights group that interviewed dozens of refugees found that World Vision workers in Latin America were likely working with both the Honduran and Salvadoran militaries. Furthermore, several refugees in World Vision camps said they were forced to accept the organization’s right wing Christian evangelicalism, and if they refused, they would be starved or turned over directly to the Salvadoran military.

Strangest of all are World Vision’s ties to Jonestown. Their first recorded communication with likely CIA asset Jim Jones was in 1965, as he was running Happy Havens Rest Home in Southern California, despite a lack of any formal training in treating the elderly. Even after the mass murders in Guyana that left hundreds dead, World Vision continued apace, apparently working to repopulate the site left by Jones with Laotian refugees who had worked for the CIA. It seems the organization has a penchant for finding themselves at the scene of agency-linked atrocities.

The Hinckley family’s political connections

Part of the Hinckley family’s oil money was contributed to Texas Governor John Connally’s ill-fated 1980 presidential campaign. Running in the primaries against Reagan and Bush, Connally raised a fortune, but his actual results were dismal, placing fourth in the Iowa caucuses. Following his poor showing there, Connally turned his attention to South Carolina, where he campaigned heavily alongside segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. Even with their favorite son, it just wasn’t enough. Reagan won the South Carolina primary in a landslide, and Connally dropped out shortly thereafter. What made the Texan’s candidacy special was that he refused to accept federal matching funds, something virtually everyone else in the running did, meaning his campaign was entirely privately funded. One of those private donors was John Hinckley Sr.

The other Texan in the 1980 Republican presidential primaries the Hinckleys gave part of their fortune to was family friend George Bush. When his son, George W. Bush, was running for Congress in 1978, his brother Neil moved to Lubbock, Texas, to run the campaign. Lubbock was home to the Texas Tech campus, which John Hinckley Jr. attended on and off for years, and where he lived from 1974 to 1980. After the shooting, when pressed by reporters on whether he had ever met Hinckley, all Neil could say was “I have no idea. I don’t recognize any pictures of him. I just wish I could see a better picture of him.”

His brother and future president George W. Bush was less evasive, but still not direct, telling a Houston Post reporter in a phone interview “it’s certainly conceivable that I met him or might have been introduced to him.” But he reverted back to the same excuse Neil had, saying “I don’t recognize his face from the brief, distorted kind of thing they had on TV. And the name doesn’t ring any bells. I know he wasn’t on our staff. I could check our volunteer rolls.” If George W. Bush ever did check those records, it was never publicized, but the Hinckley family did donate to Bush’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978.

But why was the press digging into whether the Bush clan knew this shooter anyway? Because, shortly after the shooting, The Houston Post reported that on the night after the attempted assassination, Neil Bush was set to dine with Scott Hinckley, the assailant’s brother. The dinner was cancelled. A story about the Vice President’s son meeting a failed assassin’s brother on the night the president had been shot certainly raised some eyebrows, yet it received virtually no follow up.

Scott Hinckley, vice president of Vanderbilt Oil, lived in Denver, as did Neil Bush and his wife Sharon. The story goes that Neil and Scott had only met once, at a surprise birthday party for Neil at his house several months earlier, and on the day after the attempted assassination, Sharon was set to bring over a girlfriend of hers for dinner, and Scott was tagging along as her date. Upon hearing news of the shooting, their plans were scrapped.

Bush aide Chase Untermyer was informed by a Houston Post reporter about the story, and so he passed it along to his boss. Upon learning about his son’s direct ties to the Hinckleys, all the Vice President said was “Jesus.” His staff relayed the full extent of the story, as it was known to The Houston Post at least, and Bush eased up, appearing only mildly concerned. He didn’t even call Barbara. The acting president could breathe a sigh of relief. As shocking as the connection was, he could rest assured it would only be seized on by the “conspiracy freaks,” as a Post reporter called them. Federal investigators would have no interest in probing the connections between the shooter and the family with the most to benefit from the shooting.

Lone nuts and Nazis

John Hinckley Jr. was born in 1955, and was raised in Dallas, Texas. As a boy, he was fairly popular, and attended the most elite public high school in Dallas. But Hinckley began withdrawing as a teenager, becoming a shell of his former self. With his family moving to Colorado in 1973, Hinckley started attending Texas Tech for college. However he only lasted his freshman year, dropping out shortly thereafter and moving back to Dallas to live with his sister Diane and her family.

He was an off-and-on student, with other classmates barely remembering him. Two dozen former high school classmates of Hinckley’s attended Texas Tech, and not one could even recall seeing him, let alone speaking with him. In 1974, Hinckley was assigned a black roommate at college, which allegedly led Hinckley to turn to the “literature of bigotry.” Otto Nelson, a professor at Texas Tech gave Hinckley an A minus for a paper he chose to write on Mein Kampf, which made the professor conclude “he read the material carefully and thought about it effectively.”

Eventually Hinckley went west, to Hollywood in 1975, where he holed up in a small apartment in a seedy part of town. The building he lived in, Howard’s Weekly Apartments, was said by police to be a den of drug use and “homosexual hustling.” When federal investigators would work to retrace Hinckley’s steps in Los Angeles following his brush with fame, they interviewed clerks at the Sunset Palms Motel on Sunset Boulevard to determine if Hinckley had ever stayed there. None of the employees recalled seeing him. With dreams of becoming a songwriter, Hinckley watched Taxi Driver fifteen times in theaters during the Summer of 1976. He became obsessed with the film, creating a fictional girlfriend modeled off of Jodie Foster’s character, Iris, that he would write home to his parents about.

Hinckley’s dreams of making it big in Hollywood wore thin, and he drifted back and forth between Los Angeles and his family’s home in Evergreen, Colorado for the next year, working as a busboy. In 1978 he again tried college, re-entering Texas Tech, this time as an English major. Much like his earlier school days, virtually nobody remembered seeing Hinckley in classes or on campus at this time. Instead, Hinckley chose to spend his time with the National Socialist Party of America, which he joined early that same year.

On March 12th, 1978, Hinckley was dressed in a full Storm Trooper uniform, marching with his fellow National Socialists through the streets of St. Louis, honoring slain American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell’s birthday. Rockwell, like many of his extremist peers, was in the US military, serving in World War II as a Navy pilot in the Pacific, specializing in intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and training fellow sailors. A resume almost identical to that of Vice President George Bush, another Navy aviator who flew in the Pacific during World War II. Bush conducted top secret reconnaissance missions for the United States, taking photos of the Japanese Navy, and training other pilots to become part of his unit. The project Bush was a part of, Operation Snapshot, was classified, and anyone who even mentioned its name would be court-martialed.

Michael Allen, the leader of the St. Louis regional National Socialist Party of America introduced himself to Hinckley at that controversial March 12th demonstration. Although Allen had seen Hinckley at previous events, the Nazi leader remarked that after the turbulent protest, where counterdemonstrators threw bottles at the Nazis, ‘’he seemed like a different person.’’

Four months later, on July 26th, 1978, the campus newspaper for Texas Tech published a letter written by Hinckley, responding to an editorial that defended the rights of Nazis to protest. While certainly agreeing with the op-ed writer that Nazis should be able to demonstrate freely, Hinckley took objection to the author’s view that Hitler’s defenders were “senseless” and “losers.” Writing about the possibility of a tilt into National Socialism using the specter of communism to seize power, Hinckley wrote: “In a few years [American Nazis] could become more dangerous than the atom bomb.’’

Leaders of the National Socialist Party of America were disturbed by Hinckley and his penchant for violence. Despite National Socialism being an inherently violent ideology, the party was not officially fond of troublemaking members looking to crack skulls in the street. Allen eventually decided to expel Hinckley from the group in November 1979, saying the young man wanted to commit acts of violence. Allen went further claiming ‘’When a guy comes to us advocating that, we make the assumption that he is either a nut or a Federal agent trying to entrap us. Either way, we don’t want them. [Emphasis added]’’

In a curious move, all records indicating Hinckley was a member of the party were destroyed, prompting some in the press to wonder if Allen and other National Socialist Party of America leaders had made this entire saga up in a bid for publicity. Allen firmly denied that, although the destruction of Hinckley’s files makes it hard to determine what his role in the party was during his short tenure.

Hinckley’s father told the FBI that in early 1979 he believed his son was involved in another Nazi organization on campus called American Front. The memory of Hinckley Sr. should not be taken as gospel, as he also contradicted himself, claiming his son was never a member of any Nazi party nor did he participate in any demonstration. Mrs. Hinckley seemed to corroborate the idea that Hinckley was associated with Nazi groups, stating she received a letter from her son earlier that same year saying he was active in a group called American Front. She believed this was some sort of radical organization. However the name American Front is curious, as that group did not officially exist until several years later. The exact date of its founding is nebulous, with the Anti Defamation League claiming it was organized in 1987, some reports that it was formed in 1984, and Nazi-obsessed Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy actually saying it was founded as late as 1990.

Any speculation of Nazi ties was supposedly put to an end during the trial of John Hinckley Jr, when psychiatrist William Carpenter, who had interviewed Hinckley for 45 hours, stated under oath that American Front never existed, and it was simply a figment of Hinckley’s imagination. This explanation is unsatisfactory though, as the organization would clearly come to exist in future years, if it didn’t already in 1979. Its nebulous origins lend credence to the theory that Hinckley indeed was a founding member of this group.

The creation of this supposedly fictional organization was a key piece of evidence brought forward by Hinckley’s defense team that made the jury rule he was not guilty by reason of insanity. In the closing arguments, Hinckley’s lawyers stated “at the same time he is doing those things he is creating — Dr. Carpenter, you may remember, testified about the American Front, and an exhibit was introduced in the course of Dr. Carpenter’s testimony about the American Front. It was reams of pages. Reams. It was lists of names. All made up [emphasis added]. All out of this boy’s imagination. Not one iota of relationship with reality.” According to his attorneys, every member of Hinckley’s Nazi organization didn’t exist, and the organization itself wasn’t real either, despite the fact it would become a very real hate group some undetermined amount of years later.

Don Carter, an art student, infiltrated the National Socialist Party of America in Chicago in 1974 for a day as part of a project on the growing Nazi movement in the United States. One nameless man he snapped a picture of, holding a pistol with a poster of Adolf Hitler behind him, bares a resemblance to John Hinckley, a fact which was not lost on Carter or the press. In May 1981, The New York Post worked with Carter to try and conclusively determine the man’s identity. However, once the Washington DC district attorney, the FBI, and the Secret Service caught wind of the story, it became a public mess.

Finally, reporter Steve Dunleavy worked directly with the Secret Service to try and figure out who this man was. Two days later, The New York Post stated that the USSS was “90% sure of this man’s identity.” Were they 90% sure that this man was Hinckley? Or were they 90% sure this was someone totally different? It was left unsaid. Carter tried fruitlessly to get to the bottom of this, as some of the biggest press outlets in the country, like Time and The New York Daily News had all expressed interest in purchasing the photos. The mystery remains unresolved, though a recent FOIA request by Carter obtained an FBI report stating that Director William Webster had received a request to “perform a full photographic comparison of these photos with photos of subject John Warnock Hinckley, Jr.” The results of that full comparison are unknown.

While there’s plenty of reason to be wary of amateur sleuths throwing two different photos of people together and claiming they’re the same man, there are several key things that set this apart from the usual fare. For one, the man who took the photos of this unknown Nazi was the first to bring up the comparison, and he worked through official channels, both with the press and federal investigators. When the former couldn’t reach any conclusions, and the latter remained tight-lipped, it’s only natural for suspicions to linger.

The resemblance between this man and Hinckley is certainly apparent. If they aren’t in fact the same man, this could raise the possibility of multiple Hinckleys, similar to witnesses spotting Lee Harvey Oswald in places he simply couldn’t be before the assassination of President Kennedy. Was Hinckley impersonated by fellow Nazi party members as far back as 1974? The question is a disturbing one, but if this is all wrong and the man in the photo actually is Hinckley, it opens up a new set of problems with the official story, namely that his Nazi associations and love of firearms started far earlier than we were led to believe. This remains a possibility, considering all the records that could conclusively prove this were destroyed by Nazi party leaders, and federal authorities would not release the results of their findings to the public. Then again, it’s also quite possible these photos are of two entirely different men with no relation to one another.

In their book, Breaking Point, the Hinckleys stated that all of the reports about their son’s Nazi activities were “totally fictitious” and did not contain a grain of truth, alleging that the FBI told them this was all a publicity stunt by the National Socialist Party of America leaders. This contradicts their own previous statements, where Jack Hinckley told investigators that his son was involved in the previously mentioned American Front organization, which Jo Ann Hinckley said she knew was some sort of “radical” group.

The Hinckleys’ explanation aside, what this may all add up to is another cover up, concealing the Nazi network John Hinckley Jr. was enmeshed in. By destroying the documents about his role in Allen’s group, labeling American Front as a delusion, and stating that the files containing the members of this group are all phony names, it largely left public memory of the assassination attempt.

The Nashville incident

On October 9th, 1980, President Jimmy Carter was floundering. Election day was only a month away, and he not only had to focus his efforts on states he won overwhelmingly in 1976, but he had to change strategy. A series of scorching attacks levied against Reagan had backfired, causing his strategists to try a major course correction in the campaign’s home stretch. In an ABC interview the night before, Carter stated he felt he got carried away in his rhetoric towards his opponent on a few occasions, but told the television audience that this was all behind him. Starting the next day, he would cut down his cheap potshots at the California governor, and instead focus more on the policies affecting the American voter most, whether it be energy or the ongoing hostage crisis.

Carter’s first of his new policy-focused speeches was to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Grand Ole Opry concert venue, in a town hall style format. The fact that vigorous campaigning was required in Tennessee was an illustration of how desperate the race was becoming. In 1976 Carter had carried the state by fourteen points, and was now forced to try and rebuild the crumbling “solid South.” While national polls showed the election would be close, it was clear that Reagan held a strong advantage. He wasn’t changing campaign strategy less than a month before election day.

As the president arrived in Nashville, someone else did too. John Hinckley Jr. arrived, after watching Carter at a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio, just days earlier. Although employees at the hotel Hinckley stayed at didn’t recognize him when presented with photos of the man by authorities, even after the Reagan shooting. Regardless, it seemed the president had a stalker, although not one who was always armed. When Hinckley was following Carter in Ohio, he left his guns in his luggage at a bus station, and walked forward without any weapons, allegedly just to see if he could get close enough to the president to fire. Hinckley actually got within arm’s distance of Carter, and film of the president’s campaign trip to Dayton was shown at Hinckley’s trial, as the prosecution froze the footage and zoomed in on the pudgy face in the crowd.

Judging his Dayton trip to be a success, Hinckley had to make one more stop before seeing Carter, for what he thought would be the final time. The day after the rally in Ohio, Hinckley flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he planned to meet “one of the leading ideologicians” of the American Nazi Party. In some reporting on this strange proposed meeting, that man is referred to as the director of the Nazi Party. Allegedly the meeting fell through, even after Hinckley had arrived in Lincoln. This episode was mentioned in the trial, but there’s scant reporting on it, despite the numerous questions it raises.

This proposed meeting cannot simply be dismissed as another one of Hinckley’s fantasies, since he flew to the other side of the country to meet this man. Furthermore, if this was all fiction, it’s out of character for Hinckley to actually travel to meet these people he made up in his imagination. Whenever Hinckley lied to the people in his life about one of the many constructs of his mind, like his fictitious girlfriend Lynne, he never traveled to further embellish the myth. When Hinckley told his parents he wouldn’t be home for Christmas in 1979, since he was out in New York City with his friends and lover, he didn’t actually go to New York, he just stayed at his apartment. But Hinckley absolutely was in Lincoln on October 6th, 1980. So what was he doing there, and who did he meet? Was the American Nazi Party director ever questioned about this event? His name escapes all mention, but if this story is true, and there’s little reason to doubt it, then this man would be implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Carter.

Matthias Koehl was the American Nazi Party’s leader in 1980, at the time of this meeting, after he assumed the position following the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967. Was Koehl the man Hinckley planned to meet? Perhaps, but it could’ve been another high-ranking leader, as any official reports of this incident have practically no details. To reiterate, this is one of the most crucial parts of the entire case against Hinckley. Flying across the country to meet with a leader of the American Nazi Party just hours after scoping out the President of the United States and judging him to be vulnerable, and one day before attempting to assassinate him, would have all the indications of a wider plot organized by American Nazis across the country to kill the US President. In other words: a conspiracy. But just like the details of Hinckley’s extensive Nazi ties, claims of being a federal agent, and long list of names, this was all buried.

Following the Lincoln, Nebraska incident, Hinckley completed the next stop on his whirlwind cross-country assassination tour, flying down to Nashville. However, something happened at the airport to change his mind, or his heart. Suddenly deciding on the spot not to assassinate the beleaguered President Carter, Hinckley tried to board an American Airlines jet and fly off. Almost as if it were purposeful, he pushed his luggage filled to the brim with guns and ammunition through airport security. The metal detector caught it, immediately setting off an alarm. When airport security discovered two .22-caliber R.G. Model 14s, a .38-caliber pistol, and 30–50 rounds of ammo, Hinckley was arrested.

Astonishingly, the police were unconcerned, and only fined Hinckley $50 before quickly releasing him. At this time, the U.S. Secret Service maintained a list of potential assassins, and tens of thousands of subjects of interest. In 1981, the number of people on the first list were 400. The number of people catalogued by the second were 25,000. The gun-toting presidential stalker who had now been arrested was not added to either list, and in fact, the USSS was not even notified about the incident.

As mind-boggling as this apparent oversight by airport security may be, it was not their sole responsibility. Both the FAA and FBI were told about Hinckley’s arrest too, shortly after he was apprehended, and neither federal agency felt it was worth passing on to the USSS. The FBI even told an airport security officer that they “did not have time to question the suspect.” The failure at every level was stunning, almost unbelievable, and when questions were raised by Congress following the attempt on Reagan’s life by Hinckley six months later, answers were evasive. FBI director William Webster, who would serve as George H.W. Bush’s CIA director, defended the Bureau’s decision to not inform the Secret Service of Hinckley’s arrest, stating “We don’t want to barrage the Secret Service with excessive information.”

There was one clear result of this intelligence failure, and that was the Secret Service’s pledge to massively expand their surveillance capabilities. A scientific panel convened in the summer of 1981 widened the scope of their criteria for identifying possible assailants, greatly increasing their lists of American citizens deemed to be threats.

President Carter may not have known it at the time, but he escaped Nashville with his life in October 1980. His opponent on the other hand, curiously canceled a campaign visit to Tennessee scheduled for that same day. Yet despite his setback in Nashville, Hinckley was undeterred. He may not have been able to assassinate Carter after all, but he had to continue on the strange mission he had set out to complete. Four days after his arrest in Nashville, he retreated to Dallas, where the next step on his journey would be accomplished.

Pawn shops

It was only natural for many comparisons to be drawn between the shooting of President Reagan, and the last assassination of a president, when John F. Kennedy was gunned down in the street on November 22nd, 1963. But which street was it? Elm St, in Dallas, Texas, which happens to be the exact same street the gun shop where Hinckley purchased his pistols is located. Rocky’s Pawn Shop is only yards away from the location where President Kennedy’s skull was shattered open. The owner of the shop, along with his son who actually sold Hinckley the weapon, both claimed they had no memory of the man who shot President Reagan at all.

When Hinckley walked in to the store on October 13th, 1980, he wasn’t just entering an ordinary pawn shop, some of its recent customers had been Chinese gangs in New York City. The NYPD and ATF both traced the origin of 32 handguns, all purchased by one member of the Flying Dragons gang, to Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas. Every gun was a .22 or .38 caliber, all obtained in 1978. Investigators found the guns were linked to a shootout with the Ghost Shadows, a rival New York City gang. At the time of the attempt on Reagan’s life, the Flying Dragons were not well known, only gaining notoriety with several high profile trials in the early 1990’s, the murder of their leader Michael Chen in 1983, and their encroachment on former mob territory in the heroin trade, after the mafia’s own racket got shut down.

Immediately following the shooting of President Reagan, the serial number of the pistol Hinckley fired was given to the ATF. Within just sixteen minutes, they had traced the gun to Rocky’s Pawn Shop. In similar cases it takes several hours, but for reasons unknown, this time they were able to track the weapon almost instantly. Further adding to this incredible feat, the Secret Service misidentified the gun as another type of pistol entirely that same day, yet that didn’t seem to stop the ATF from tracking its origins immediately. What explanation did the ATF offer for their near unbelievable work? A spokesman simply told the New York Times, “it was a fast trace.”

This wasn’t even the first time federal authorities had sought out Rocky’s Pawn Shop to trace a weapon the president had been shot with. In 1963, the FBI inexplicably visited Rocky’s, inquiring about where the rifle Oswald allegedly used came from. Rubin Goldstein, owner of the shop, traced it to Klein’s Sporting Goods. As a side note, Goldstein claims he was even in the presidential motorcade when the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, and was one of the appraisers of Jack Ruby’s estate.

What makes the FBI’s decision to visit Rocky’s so inexplicable, not even counting the facts that Oswald never fired a gun on 11/22/63 and that he likely didn’t even own that rifle, is that Rocky’s had no discernible connection to the assassination of President Kennedy at all. So why did the FBI seek them out? Did the federal government have a pre-existing connection with the shop about tracing firearms, dating back to even before 1963? That could explain the high amount of weapons the Flying Dragons purchased from the shop, and the unexpectedly fast trace speed on March 30th, 1981.

In fact, by 1990 Rocky’s had moved locations in Dallas, to a police supply store run by David Goldstein, while his father Rubin ran the pawn shop in the same building. Neither the owners, nor the police, seemed to pay much mind to the unsavory characters milling around the same building cops frequented.

Programming

After abandoning his plans to assassinate President Carter, John Hinckley Jr. set his sights on the man who had just won the 1980 presidential election in a landslide. According to media accounts, the trial, and Hinckley himself, this desire to assassinate a top political leader was all an attempt to impress the actress Jodie Foster, who had just turned 18 a few days after Reagan was elected. Hinckley was obsessed with the 1976 film Taxi Driver, which he saw in theaters fifteen times. He saw himself as the lonely Travis Bickle, who commits an act of violence at the climax, which in his mind is seen as a way of freeing Jodie Foster’s character, a teenage prostitute.

In a neat closed loop of life imitating art and art imitating life, the screenplay to Taxi Driver was primarily inspired by Arthur Bremer’s The Diary of An Assassin which he allegedly wrote before shooting George Wallace on May 15th, 1972. In turn, Taxi Driver inspired John Hinckley’s infatuation with Jodie Foster, which he would use to justify his shooting of Ronald Reagan on March 30th, 1981.

Hinckley’s obsession with Foster appeared genuine, in the sense that he really did believe this shooting would endear himself to her. But everyone who ever interacted with Hinckley noted how dispassionate he was. Several witnesses and police interrogators stated he had a “glazed” look in his eyes, and seemed completely casual. It wasn’t as if Hinckley was unaware of the enormity of the crime he had committed, he just seemed nonchalant about it.

The possibility that Hinckley was programmed to carry out the attack should be examined. After being found guilty of the shooting, Hinckley was sent to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, an institution with ties to the earliest instances of American mind control experiments. During World War II, the OSS organized a “truth drug” committee directed by Dr. Winfred Overholser, the head of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Other members of the group included Watson W. Eldridge, chief of Medical and Surgical Services at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Harry J. Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and Dr. Edward Strecker, then president of the American Medical Association. The site itself was where CIA asset George Hunter White — involved in the JFK assassination nexus and many MK/ULTRA projects — first tried out a vapor made up of marijuana fumes intended to generate a “state of irresponsibility” in a target.

White met with Stanley Lovell, OSS head of Research and Development (lovingly referred to by “Wild Bill” Donovan as his “Professor Moriarty”) at the Pentagon on November 24th, 1943, to brief General George Strong on the results of the drug program. They reported that thorough experimentation had been conducted at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, and by the next day their experimentation continued in New York.

The shooting

A little after 2:00pm on Monday, March 30th, 1981, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to over 3,500 members of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Workers Union at the Washington Hilton Hotel. While Reagan was relaxed and at ease, telling stories about baseball games and the need for small government, his crowd was unenthusiastic. Most union members voted for Carter in 1980, and calls to increase defense spending did little to help out this audience.

Around half an hour before the speech even began, a man on the seventh floor of the Universal North Building, across the street from the Washington Hilton was observing the small crowd by the side door. He noticed Hinckley walking rapidly up and down the area by the entrance, and turning his body side to side. The man even thought to himself that this strange person may shoot the president, but felt the Secret Service probably had it under control. Who was this man watching Hinckley? John Dodson, a computer specialist for the Pinkertons. It’s at the least thematically fitting that Pinkerton spies were perched, possibly inadvertently, to observe the assassination attempt on the President of the United States moments after he spoke to the AFL-CIO, given the Pinkertons’ history of crushing unions through violent methods. Of course they never had anything to fear in this president, since just a few months after the shooting Reagan would go on to crush the air traffic controllers’ strike.

It wasn’t just Dodson who noticed this strange man, it was also ABC cameraman Hank Brown, who observed that the security surrounding President Reagan was unusually thin. The majority of the crowd outside the Washington Hilton were, according to Brown, not members of the press, yet they were included in the press area. Brown, clearly at a loss to explain these lackadaisical security measures, stated that previous visits by presidents to the Washington Hilton were “never like that.” This area filled with unvetted strangers was only a few feet from where the president would enter his limo, and it was where Hinckley lied in wait.

Back inside the hotel, the president’s punchlines weren’t hitting the way they often did, but after finishing his fairly short 20 minute address, he smiled and waved to the crowd. Reagan noted in his diary his disappointment at the crowd’s low enthusiasm, but he put on a happy face for the public.

At 2:27pm, exiting the VIP door of the hotel, the president’s bulletproof car was not parked directly in front of the door, which is against standard procedure. This meant Reagan had to walk an additional 25 feet to enter the vehicle, putting him directly in the shooter’s sights. In the wake of the shooting, the Secret Service investigated the matter to determine why the car was placed further away from the hotel’s side entrance, and the press remained curious. At first glance, this is certainly suspicious.

Whether the explanation is believable or not is another matter, but Secret Service spokesman Richard Hartwig told the press on April 1st, 1981 that the reason was due to the layout of the hotel. If the presidential limo had been parked directly in front of the doors, they would’ve had to circle through the hotel’s front driveway before driving up Connecticut Avenue. With the car in the modified position, they would’ve been able to get out of the hotel complex quicker. While that explanation holds true when observing the layout of the hotel, it begs the question of whether a convenient exit was more important than the safety of the president, as his limo is parked directly outside of an exit to minimize the odds of events like this. Hartwig added that the question deserves a thorough examination. Whether it got a satisfying one is up for debate.

Meandering his way over to the limo, Reagan turned and beamed to the small crowd as he heard a smattering of applause. In the press area, ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson shouted out a question about the current crisis in Poland, and Reagan looked for a split second as if he was about to answer. But before any words could leave his lips, John Hinckley Jr. dropped to the combat stance policemen are trained for, and fired.

The bullets used were devastators, meant to explode inside the body and destroy all of their surroundings. None of them worked. The first shot hit White House Secretary James Brady in the forehead, splattering blood over the ABC camera lens, as he crumpled to the ground. The second bullet hit Washington DC Police Officer Thomas Delahanty in the back of the neck, as he was turning to observe the president enter the limo. He too fell to the pavement, face down. The third shot missed entirely, embedding itself in a building across the street. The fourth shot hit US Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the chest while he shielded the president with his own body as Reagan was shoved into the limo. McCarthy was literally lifted off his feet by the force of the bullet hitting him, and clutched at his chest, wincing. The fifth shot hit the bulletproof glass of the presidential limo, but did not penetrate it, and fell to the ground.

The sixth and final shot hit the limo again, but ricocheted, and hit President Reagan. Entering his chest just below his left arm, the bullet entered at a downward angle, heading for the heart. But a rib deflected the projectile, flattening it. The mangled projectile entered the president’s lower lung, an inch from his heart. Before Reagan could even tell what happened, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr threw him down in the backseat of the limo, and clamored in too, falling on top of the president. Reagan wasn’t pleased, swearing and telling Parr he thought he might’ve been hurt by him, maybe even broken a rib, not yet realizing he was already profusely bleeding. Parr’s job wasn’t to care whether the president was comfortable or personally angry with him, it was to make sure Reagan was safe. Agent Parr shouted to driver Drew Unrue that they needed to get to the White House. Unrue responded by speeding off from the shooter, racing towards the Oval Office before quickly changing course to George Washington University Hospital, once it became clear the president was seriously wounded.

The shooting only lasted 1.7 seconds, and immediately after Hinckley fired his last bullet, someone in the crowd punched him in the face, as a mob of bodies swarmed on top of him. Newsmen and police officers were piling on top of each other, while the Secret Service’s job instantly changed. They now had to protect Hinckley as vigorously as they had to protect the president. At the bottom of the pile-up, agent Dennis McCarthy (no relation to previously wounded agent Tim McCarthy) was able to handcuff the shooter, who he described as having a glassy expressionless look on his face the entire time, which puzzled the agent. However, McCarthy kept thinking that the shooter had to be alive, with fears of Oswald’s execution by Jack Ruby on everyone’s minds. Not dissimilar to the assassination of Robert Kennedy, when several people in the Ambassador Hotel pantry shouted “we don’t want another Oswald!” when attempted to subdue Sirhan Sirhan.

Questions immediately arose around whether there was a second shooter, with people in the crowd not sure of what they just witnessed. While eventually it became widely reported that Hinckley was the lone gunman, a few doubts remained. NBC news reporter, and current anchor of PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff said she believed a Secret Service agent had fired his gun at some point during the chaos, perhaps from the Washington Hilton roof, where USSS counter-snipers were perched. While the USSS fastidiously denied this assertion, according to an article in D Magazine, a CBS tape of the event analyzed by two experts detected a seventh shot, as did an NBC tape. However, the trajectory of the shots fired by Hinckley line up with the wounds of those who were hit. After all, we can even see the victims’ reactions to those injuries on video. So if there was a seventh shot, was it just a total miss? Most likely. That makes it less likely there was a second shooter in on a wider plot, as there was in the assassination of Robert Kennedy, where another “lone gunman” fired up close with a pistol drawing all the attention his way, while the real killers concealed themselves in the crowd.

The key difference in the two shootings, and how they were arranged, is that Kennedy was meant to be killed at the Ambassador Hotel. It was absolutely vital that he could not leave alive, hence the use of multiple shooters to ensure that. With the shooting at the Washington Hilton however, that appears less likely. We’ll return to the motive behind this attack later, but if there were multiple gunmen as part of a wider plot to assassinate President Reagan, they were deeply ineffectual. If there was a seventh shot, it was probably a misfire by some trigger-happy Secret Service agent.

That only raises more questions though. If there were Secret Service counter-snipers perched on top of buildings ready to fire into the crowd, it pokes a devastator bullet sized hole in the official version of events, which is that the USSS didn’t have tight security at the event and accidentally allowed Hinckley to slip by. Furthermore, this possibility would demonstrate that security on the ground was indeed low, as mentioned by witnesses, but that it was top notch up on the roofs.

“Constitutionally, gentlemen…”

As the president was bleeding out, Secretary of State Alexander Haig raced towards the White House. Haig’s foot bouncing up and down, he told his executive assistant, Woody Goldberg, “We have to send a message to all of our posts about what is happening. We are not going to have another Kennedy situation. If there is a conspiracy, we have to let the American people know.” The general’s reference to the unresolved questions held by the public about Kennedy assassination was telling.

Serving as a staff officer at the Pentagon in the early 1960’s, Alexander Haig had an important role in America’s secret war against Cuba. In 1963, he was tasked with informing top Cuban exile leaders of plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, and directed that information to the White House, Department of Defense, and CIA. An unnamed marine officer, who served as a top Defense Intelligence Agency official in the early 1980’s, stated that Haig “worked hand in hand in keeping the nationalists from the Cuban Brigade happy” and “even checked out potential members for the hit teams with older members of the Cuban Brigade.”

Some of the men Al Haig worked with were Ricardo Canette, one of the founders of the Movimiento Nacionalista Cubano, a violent group of Cuban dissidents. In September 1963, they disrupted the United Nations ceremony in New York, rushing the podium where General Assembly president Carlos Sosa Rodriguez was speaking. The Cubans got within five feet of the rostrum before they were tackled by security guards and removed from the building. That same year, Haig was working with Canette to redirect Cuban exiles’ efforts from unauthorized raids on the island and channel that energy into assassination squads. Canette stated “Haig kept promising us things. We kept pressing the government. One of the ways they satisfied us was by giving us a role in the support teams to hit Castro. We were allowed to participate in the shipment of weapons in March 1964 into Cuba for a hit.”

Al Haig urging violent right wing Cuban exiles to form hit-squads and organize assassination plots is enough to raise eyebrows. Particularly considering that same milieu’s deep involvement in the violent overthrow of President Kennedy just two months after their disorganized attempt to attack the UN General Assembly president. However, Haig was not to last long in his position organizing Cuban exile groups. By 1966, he was off to Vietnam, and his former assignment was given to USAF officer, CIA liaison, and probable CIA agent Alexander Butterfield, who gained notoriety by blowing the whistle on the secret White House taping system during the Watergate investigation, ultimately leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The role played by General Haig in Watergate is far beyond the scope of this article. Yet White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman’s interpretation of President Nixon’s cryptic references to the “whole Bay of Pigs thing” (which he thought would come out if the Cuban exiles and E. Howard Hunt’s Watergate involvement were sufficiently probed) was that the president had been referring to the Kennedy assassination. If Nixon feared that anti-Castro exiles set up to assassinate the Cuban leader had been turned inward to set their sights on President Kennedy, Al Haig’s involvement with these groups would’ve been worth investigating.

Regardless of any connection to Dallas and Watergate, Haig’s role in organizing assassination squads is relevant in light of the events on March 30th, 1981, and his ruminations on the last time an American president had been gunned down. Haig’s fears of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination were characteristically misguided, as he had suspected that the Soviet Union or Cuba were behind the killing for years. Whether he genuinely suspected that or simply used it as a backchannel disinformation technique, as CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton did, is unclear. But as one of the men who has helped plan Kennedy’s funeral, the assassination weighed on General Haig, especially at a time like this.

Haig’s first action when arriving at the White House that rainy March afternoon was to speak with Vice President George Bush, who was in Air Force Two at the time, just having left Dallas. Barking through a hastily assembled secure line to Bush, Haig tried to inform the man next in the line of succession about the president’s condition, but it was useless. All Haig heard was radio silence. Judging the connection to be too poor to communicate anything, the General ended his call by yelling at Bush to turn around and head to Washington immediately.

Onboard Air Force Two, Secret Service Agent Ed Pollard, head of Bush’s detail, burst into the Vice President’s cabin and informed him of the news. Reportedly stunned, Bush immediately inquired about where the shooting had taken place. Attempting to get more information, he tried Haig’s secure line, but found it every bit as useless as the General had. Eventually a message was communicated through a teletype machine that the Vice President must return to Washington at once.

Taking a seat in his high-backed chair, Bush quickly brushed aside any concerns for the president’s condition, or for Nancy Reagan, and began focusing on what really mattered. His mind swirled, yet he remained collected. Reagan had only been office for a little over two months, yet Bush had been a very active vice president, attending most of President Reagan’s most important meetings. Bush knew at this moment that if he became president this day, he would be fully prepared.

One of the men who had watched Al Haig unsuccessfully try to communicate with Bush was National Security Advisor Richard Allen, who had his White House roots with the Nixon administration. Before ultimately settling on NSC Special Assistant David Young, Richard Allen was the Nixon administration’s first choice to head the White House Plumbers (Reagan White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan was their second choice). Knowing a presidential crisis when he saw one, Allen started shepherding people into the Situation Room, which he had already used more than anyone else in the Reagan White House. Joining him were Haig, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, White House staff director David Gergen, Counsel to the President Fred Fielding and the Vice President’s Chief of Staff Dan Murphy. To even begin an overview of these men’s careers would require an article in itself, but ever so briefly, it’s worth bearing in mind that Fielding also had his roots in the Nixon White House and later represented Blackwater killers in a lawsuit revolving around massacres they committed in Iraq. Additionally, Murphy had served as Bush’s deputy director at the CIA and had a group of military and intelligence operatives running covert operations out of his office in a criminally underexamined aspect of the Iran Contra affair.

With the group in the Situation Room trying to understand the president’s condition after communicating with Jim Baker, who was at George Washington University Hospital, all men agreed the White House should release a statement. But it must be unified, and serve to reassure the public rather than frighten them. General Haig made a point of noting that anyone at the White House trying too hard to play public relations would create a panic. After revising a draft of David Gergen’s statement to add an explicit mention of his own presence in the Situation Room, Haig approved it.

When Gergen gave his statement to reporters and proved unable to answer any of their most pressing questions, Haig began getting anxious. With more cabinet members and administration officials flowing into the Situation Room, their most pressing concerns were on the level of alert for all US armed forces, the possibility of a conspiracy rather than just one gunman, and monitoring Soviet troop movements near Poland. Haig did not seem to share those same priorities. Banging the table with his fist, the increasingly erratic General wanted all communications to the public about the situation to flow directly from the Situation Room. Allen, someone who had disliked Haig since their time in the Nixon White House, was trading looks with Fielding, who he often chatted about Haig’s bizarre behavior with.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s brief mistake in identifying the DEFCON level to which US armed forces should be set to (Weinberger had misspoke and stated he wanted them to be at DEFCON 2, when he actually meant DEFCON 4 when discussing it with Haig) seemed to confirm the General’s worst fears. The president was unconscious, the vice president was unreachable, and he was surrounded by men in command of the military who didn’t even know which DEFCON level was which. When Fielding began reviewing legal options in the case of transferring power and word came in that Reagan was on the operating table beginning his surgery, Haig seized the opportunity.

Throwing down the gauntlet, the General declared “So the helm is right here, and that means right here in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.” At this moment, Allen and Fielding were in disbelief. Haig seemed to be operating under the assumption that the Secretary of State was next in line to the presidency after the vice president. For a man who had served in government long enough to have witnessed two different presidents prematurely removed from office and not know that the Speaker of the House was next in the line of succession after the vice president was nothing short of stunning.

As White House spokesman Larry Speakes floundered in the press room, Haig was so outraged he was practically crawling up the walls. Allen and Fielding both took a hands-off approach to the General, preferring to just let him work himself up watching TV in the Situation Room while the others did the actual duties of keeping the government running. However, CIA director William Casey had different plans. Only joining the group in the Situation Room less than an hour before Speakes’ pathetic attempt at dodging practically every question posed to him by the press, Casey kept feeding Haig exactly what he wanted to hear. Rather than monitoring the possibility of a Soviet submarine veering out of its standard path, which was presently preoccupying everyone else, Casey kept commenting on Speakes, saying he was in “over his head”. Echoing Haig’s earlier fears of White House statements creating a panic, Casey said Speakes’ answers were scaring the public.

When Speakes said he couldn’t answer who would be determining the status of president, it was the final straw for General Haig. Just finishing a call with Edwin Meese, presently at the hospital, Allen was grabbed out of his chair by Haig, who commanded him to move up to the press room with him and salvage this disaster. Running up the stairs, once Allen realized what Haig was about to do, he finally spoke up and tried to stop the General from making any sort of comments, but it was too late.

On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Haig leapt in front of the cameras, gripping the White House podium in the press room with white knuckles. Allen began running through what he had to do if Haig collapsed right in front of him, noticing the General’s profuse sweat and shaking knees. Gasping for air, Haig told the press what they already knew from other sources, but what the White House hadn’t been able to confirm to them until now: that the president was in surgery. A reporter interjected to ask if the crisis management would be put into effect upon the vice president’s arrival, to which Haig stated that the crisis management was already in effect.

Finally, Bill Plante of CBS asked “who’s making the decisions for the government right now?” Taking a gulp of air, General Haig responded: “Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state in that order and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.”

The reaction was unanimous. The Situation Room was in uproar. Don Regan questioned Haig’s sanity. Weinberger stated flatly that the General was wrong. Positioned behind Haig in front of the cameras, it took all of Allen’s willpower to not express any emotion. High above the skies in Air Force Two, Vice President Bush did not have the same restraint. Despite his calm manner the entire afternoon, Bush broke his poker face and grimaced watching Haig, although he still remained silent. Texas Democrat Jim Wright, House majority leader, was on the plane with the vice president and noted Bush “seems so calm, no signs whatever of nervous distress.”

Just days earlier, Bush had been named head of the White House crisis management team. This was widely regarded as a snub of Haig, who had lobbied hard for that exact position, and it fueled a major feud between the two men. Almost prophetically, when telling the press about his new role, Bush said “I see it as kind of when the president’s not there, not on hand, I will be in the situation room in charge,” adding that it would only be necessary in “a sudden crisis or national emergency.” When asked what exactly would constitute a crisis, Bush answered: “‘We’ll know it when the president sees it.”

As Air Force Two neared Washington, the Secret Service onboard began trying to convince Vice President Bush that in the interest of his own security, it was necessary he arrive by helicopter directly on the South Lawn of the White House. Bush refused, quickly calculating the damage it would serve to his image to appear as if he were forcefully taking power in a time of crisis. Relaying this to the men in the Situation Room, one of whom had just tried to do exactly what Bush wanted to avoid the image of, the vice president wrote: “We will touchdown at 1835 local at Andrews. I plan to helicopter to the observatory and motorcade to the White House. Approximate arrival there at 1900. Feel strongly about proper mode of arrival unless situation dictates more immediate route to White House.”

Upon Jim Baker’s return to the White House, and communication of Reagan and Brady’s conditions, the conversation turned to the line of succession. The men in the Situation Room all agreed that Bush would be handling the president’s duties in the immediate future. Reviewing what ultimately proved to be an erroneous CIA intelligence estimate claiming Soviet troops were on the verge of invading Poland kept the Situation Room busy until Vice President Bush strode in at 7:00pm. Before even sitting down, Bush demanded to know the condition of the president. Baker told him that the doctors at George Washington University Hospital would be holding a press conference within minutes, and as Secretary Weinberger began discussing Soviet military movements and readiness of American defenses, Baker quickly cut him off to make sure everyone in the room had the proper security clearances for the information. Bush agreed anyone who didn’t should be escorted out, and several officials shuffled outside the room.

Interrupting their meeting to view the televised GWU press conference, which provided everyone in the Situation Room with relief (Bush commented on Dr. O’Leary by saying “this guy is good”), it was agreed that the Vice President should give a brief statement. Within minutes, Bush entered the White House press room, stated his confidence in the president’s recovery, and reassured the nation that the United States government was functioning to its usual standards. Descending back to the Situation Room, Bush then began his presidential duties, with the attempted power grab by General Haig aborted.

Vice President Bush would receive considerable praise within Washington and the media for his tasteful response to the attempted assassination, particularly in contrast to Haig, whose standing never recovered after his impromptu press conference. Bush had quietly and carefully taken charge in a moment of crisis, and averted any unwanted negative attention, even with his own family’s connections to the president’s assailant. This newfound status positioned him perfectly as a key figure in the nexus of private interests, intelligence fronts, and death squads which would be known as The Enterprise. Managing to guide this network yet avoid serious repercussions would earn Bush the label of “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”

With that, President Reagan’s approval ratings shot up to an outstanding 73%, where they would hover at for months. Washington Post political reporter David Broder would speak in awe of the reception Reagan’s recovery received, stating that it “is the stuff of which legends are made,” and that “As long as people remember the hospitalized president joshing his doctors and nurses — and they will remember — no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callous or heartless man.” Any support which Democrats in Congress were counting on to oppose the president’s agenda was swept away in a single afternoon, with House Majority Leader and fellow Air Force Two passenger Jim Wright noting that evening “we’ve been outflanked and outgunned.”

Multiple congressional investigations were promised after the attack, but none ever came to fruition.

Copycats

One of the strangest unresolved mysteries of the Reagan shooting is the story of Edward Michael Richardson. While the tale of Hinckley and his bizarre life has been frequently recounted, after initial reporting, barely any mention has been made of Richardson in all the later chronicling of the shooting. The story has been almost entirely forgotten.

Just eight days after the president had been wounded, an unemployed 22-year old man was arrested with a .32-caliber revolver in Manhattan, after authorities discovered a note in his New Haven, Connecticut hotel room that contained threatening messages to President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State Al Haig, and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Cartoonishly, Richardson’s room at the Park Plaza Hotel in New Haven was littered with photographs of Reagan that had X’s over his face, with the words “targeted for death” underneath them. Ammunition was also found at the scene of the crime, and investigators couldn’t hide their surprise at how it was left in plain view, almost as if they were meant to see it. Dan Marchitello, the man in charge of the Connecticut Secret Service, stated “we don’t know if they were inadvertently left behind or if he was trying to be stopped.”

Among his other belongings were writings, allegedly penned by Richardson, that said he intended to assassinate a right-wing public official and to see “this country turned to the ‘Left.’’’ His letters were addressed “To the Fascist Powers.” The attempt to frame this second attempt on the president’s life on American leftists brings to mind the propaganda spewed about Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as E. Howard Hunt’s plan to break in to Arthur Bremer’s apartment and plant left-wing literature after the shooting of George Wallace in 1972. Like Oswald, this reported extreme leftist who wanted to shoot down right-wing political figures had a military background, serving in the Air Force for just 6 months after graduating high school in 1976. Further adding to the similarities, Richardson’s father stated that his son liked Reagan (as Hinckley did, and as Oswald liked Kennedy).

As strange as this all may be, did Richardson actually have any connections to Hinckley or the shooting? Yes, he did. Richardson lived in Lakewood, Colorado for some time, the same Denver suburb that Hinckley lived in and purchased a gun in. Amazingly, Richardson left the Park Plaza Hotel in Lakewood on March 4th, 1981, and Hinckley moved in to the same hotel on March 8th, just missing his fellow attempted assassin by four days. Furthermore, Richardson also shared Hinckley’s fixation with Jodie Foster, even going to the extraordinary step of phoning in a bomb threat to the building at Yale where Foster was living. One of the notes left for investigators in his apartment ended with this: “I depart now for Washington D.C. to bring to completion Hinckley’s reality.”

The letter Richardson allegedly penned to Jodie Foster said as follows: “Hinckley was only the beginning. Our dual reality has merged into a single vision. I will finish what Hinckley started. R.R. must die, he (‘J.W.H.’) has told me so in a prophetic dream. Sadly though, your death is also required. You too will suffer the same fate as Reagan and others in this fascist regime.”

A close friend of Richardson told the New York Times that the man was obsessed with Charles Manson and the Symbionese Liberation Army, bringing to mind another attempted presidential assassin, FBI informant Sara Jane Moore, who tried to kill Gerald Ford in 1975. The middle aged mother had connections both to the SLA and Manson, and her role as a Bureau informant was to spy on the Hearst family. The same friend of Richardson’s also mentioned that the attempted assassin “was constantly becoming interested in one movement or personality after another,” drifting between radical political ideologies as freely as water.

Neighbors of Richardson recall him abandoning his Catholicism and becoming a born-again Christian, attending a Bible college in Florida. Echoing another American assassination, Mark David Chapman, yet another lone nut who shot his way to fame, was a born-again Christian, being converted in Georgia by Arthur Blessitt, the same man who would convince George W. Bush to see the light a few short years later. If the similarities between all these supposed lone nuts seem apparent, it wasn’t lost on them either. Richardson owned a copy of the book Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald by Angleton mouthpiece Edward Jay Epstein, who was also a friend of Jeffrey Epstein (no relation).

Further adding to the absurdity of the situation, Richardson was not even the only lone nut arrested for making threats against President Reagan that month. In the two weeks between Hinckley’s shooting and Richardson’s arrest, three other men were accused of making threats against Reagan, all of whom were from Pennsylvania. Robert Wilson, a 40-year old from Scranton was arrested and underwent psychiatric tests after making threatening phone calls to Reagan and Bush. Robert Ekholm, a 39-year old man from Philadelphia was arrested in Maryland and underwent psychiatric tests after telling a Secret Service agent he wanted to kill Reagan. Stephen A. Seach, a 58-year old boarding school employee from Philadelphia described as a “drifter”, was arrested and underwent psychiatric tests after telling a coworker he wanted to go to Washington and “finish the job” that Hinckley started. In the election five months prior to this rash of assassination attempts and threats, Reagan won the state of Pennsylvania by over 7 points. It’s not as if the Keystone state was some hotbed of anti-Reagan hatred. If, as the authorities insisted, there truly was no conspiracy and no connection between any of these lone nuts, it would be a deeply bizarre coincidence.

When you observe the pattern of all these American “lone nuts” who tried to assassinate public figures, a profile of the average suspect becomes clear, although it is not quite the one the FBI puts forward. Many hear voices, and some, like Richardson, allege they were instructed to kill their target in dreams. The media draws attention to their upbringing, but almost never ascribes political intent to their act, unless it can be utilized to harm left-wing movements. It was widely reported that Hinckley was active in at least one Nazi organization, yet that was almost never factored into analysis on why he decided to commit such a shocking crime. Instead all the focus was placed on Jodie Foster. In America, any political figure can be struck down by the bullets of a deranged individual, as happens across the globe, yet it seems the country is an outlier, in that nearly all of its political assassinations are uniformly apolitical. They’re only done by loners with strange psychological issues, and never once committed by an organized group with a political agenda.

As Norman Podhoretz wrote in Commentary magazine shortly after the coup of 1963: “Is the possibility of a treasonous political conspiracy to be ruled out? Not the least fantastic aspect of this whole fantastic nightmare is the ease with which respectable opinion in America has arrived at the conclusion that such a possibility is absurd; in most other countries, what is regarded as absurd is the idea that the assassination could have been anything but a political murder. [emphasis in original]”

Richardson, Hinckley, Chapman, Moore, Fromme, Bremer, Sirhan, Ray, Ruby, Oswald, and many more all had political backgrounds. They often drifted from contradictory radical groups, and despite this, political ideology is almost never offered up by the media or the government as the true motive for their crimes. To say nothing of the fact that these high crimes that would require a massive organization to be carried out always are the work of just another lone nut, with the typical failures made by intelligence agencies along the way, holding the hand of the bullet as they guide it to its ultimate target.

In essence, a far-right regime seized power after making backroom deals with another nation involving arms and hostages. Then the president was gunned down in the street by a man with close connections to the former intelligence chief with the most to benefit from the crime. The same man who had a fierce rivalry with the top cabinet minister who had embarrassed himself by trying to publicly take power amidst the crisis after being egged on by the current intelligence chief, effectively destroying his political career. The resulting effect ultimately being that the former intelligence chief gained considerable power and crushed any congressional opposition, priming his position for a massive years-long secret foreign policy agenda that trafficked arms, drugs, and cash across the world. The shooting left a physical wound on Reagan, but his administration benefitted more from it than almost any other singular event.

Sources

Spiritual Warfare by Sara Diamond

Rawhide Down by Del Quinten Wilber

Five Reasons Not to Miss Our Facebook Live Visit With Ex-Governor Dick Lamm

Black Hole of Guyana

John Warnock Hinckley Sr (1925–2008)

HINCKLEY INQUIRY STUDIES ALLEGED NAZI ‘FLIRTATION’

Suspected Gunman: An Aimless Drifter

IT’S BUSINESS AS USUAL AT THE SHOP IN DALLAS WHERE HINCKLEY BOUGHT GUN

Meet Evelyn Goldstein, the daughter of Deep Ellum’s last Jewish pawnbroker

Where one man’s trash became another man’s treasure: Pawnshops lined Elm Street in Deep Ellum for decades

Carter to Get Bluegrass Welcome

SUSPECT WAS ARRESTED LAST YEAR IN NASHVILLE ON WEAPONS CHARGE

Professor: Hinckley’s ties to TTU brought assumptions about west Texas after Reagan assassination attempt

12 — The Insanity Defense United States v. Hinckley (1982)

Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan: Chronology of the Shooting

The man who shot Reagan wants to play concerts. It’s not going well.

Suspect in threat to Reagan undergoes mental test

Reagan stays out of the Oval Office on doctors’ orders

Man jailed for threats on Reagan visited area

Movimiento Nacionalista Cubano (Cuban Nationalist Movement)

Bush Angle to Reagan Shooting Still Unresolved as Hinckley Walks

The Saving of the President

Misc. Reagan Shooting Files

TESTED UNDER FIRE

TWENTY QUESTIONS: WHO SHOT REAGAN?

‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative

Bush: Haig ‘excellent’ secretary of state

When will people on the left get smart and build the wherewithal to prevent this from happening yet again? William A. A. Carsey was a covert operative working for the Democratic Party in the late 19th century, who infiltrated labor organizations and other independent political groups with the goal of sabotaging them, coopting their messaging, […]

The post For Over 150 Years, Democratic Party Operatives Have Infiltrated, Coopted and Destroyed Independent Political Movements in the U.S. first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.

This article is from my last book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.(Nov., 2020).  Although it was written in 2018, it still seems appropriate on this anniversary of the evil U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.

 

“Ahab is forever Ahab, man.  This whole act’s immutably decreed.  ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me billion years before this ocean rolled.  Fool!  I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”

– Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”

– C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters

American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase.  Maybe radical “evil” will suffice.  But right from the start the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.”  Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions and millions of innocent people that continues down to today.  “Others” have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although most Americans, if they are aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by “bad apples.”  Or something from the past.

Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent.  We are conscienceless.  We are brutal.  We are in the grip of evil forces.

The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, “The American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”  It still hasn’t.

When on August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally.  It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay – were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.

Is there an American artist’s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso’s Guernica, where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?  In Tokyo alone more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm.  All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional.  Is that not radical evil?  Demonic?  Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing.

The atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan.  President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary-of-State James Byrnes  wanted to use the atomic bombs – “as quickly as possible to ‘show results’” in Byrnes’ words – to send a message to the Soviet Union.  So “the Good War” was ended in the Pacific with the “good guys” killing hundreds of thousand Japanese civilians to make a point to the “bad guys,” who have been demonized ever since.   Russia phobia is nothing new.

Satan always wears the other’s face.

Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb.  They are lucky. They grew up.  They got be scared.  They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it.  Do you remember dog tags?  Those 1950s and 1960s?  The scary movies?

The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 didn’t get to grow up.  They couldn’t hide.  They just went under. To be accurate: we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die.  But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It’s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them.  But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it’s a magic incantation.  Poor us!

Fat Man, Little Boy – how the words echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country’s demonic nature.  Innocence – it is wonderful!  We are different now. “We are great because we are good,” that’s what Hillary Clinton told us.  The Libyans can attest to that.  We are exceptional, special.  The next election will prove we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its “core values.”

Perhaps you think I am cynical.  But understanding true evil is not child’s play.  It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions.  Evil is real.  There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature.  How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?

But average Americans play at innocence.  They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election the nation will be “restored” to the right course.  Of course there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers.  Today Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration.  He is far from it.  He’s straight out of a Twain short story.  He’s Vaudeville. He’s Melville’s confidence man.  He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant?  He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel’s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates.  And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.

Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the “evil” great white whale, and what do you see?  You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power.  You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks.  On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view.  An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.  Resist and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.

Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament.  They urged him to move in that direction.  Kennedy was sympathetic to their position.  He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below.  According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?”  Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war.  Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom.  And he knew it would.  He knew it would.

So hope is not all lost.  There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications.  False innocence must be abandoned.  Carl Jung, in “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” addressed this with the words:

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people?  American history is rife with such examples up to the present day.  Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc. – the list is very long.  Savage wars carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds.  Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.

Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape.  And we will pay.  Nemesis always demands retribution.  We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child’s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear.  “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape, the devil, tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”  That’s the road we’ve been traveling.

The projection of evil onto others works only so long.  We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections.  Only the fate of the world depends on it.

 

 

 

 

 

We have seen a myriad of reports about systematic torture and murder in Israeli concentration camps, aka prisons, for Palestinians. These reports come even from prime media which generally serve as outlets of the ruling class. There are by now...