Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4
November 28, Email to Jim Rarey,
Investigative Journalist
Dear Mr. Rarey,
I have just finished your
three interesting articles about Dr.
Kelly. I am in
concurrence with your theory that he was suicided (i.e.,
assassinated). I take particular
interest in your references to Judith Miller, who is regarded as an imperious
bitch by her colleagues at the NY Times and elsewhere. Public affairs officers like me (it was my
specialty after years in military intelligence), loathed her for her apparent
connections with the powers that be in D.C., military and political. I hadn’t realized that she was the recipient
of the “many dark actors playing games” remark, or of earlier Kelly emails.
While I was enlisted
(77-80), I was a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist (of the
lowly, tactical variety), eventually teaching the NBC warfare course for
battalion-level officers and enlisted at the III
Corps NBC
School at Ft. Hood, Texas
(where I served in the 1st Cavalry Division). Frankly, I hadn’t given much thought to the
accumulation of NBC secrets that would have been in the head of Dr. Kelly – what I taught was straight out of FM 21-40
(our NBC defense bible) and open-source, mainstream press. But I can well-believe that what Dr. Kelly knew was extremely unsettling to the
military/industrial complex and the government it serves (and is served
by). For all my ignorance of the
particulars of Dr. Kelly’s life and
death (which you have somewhat ameliorated), I have a keen insight into one
part of the puzzle of his assassination, and I believe you will find it of
interest. [Editor’s emphasis, in all
cases]
I believe that during late
June/early July there was a struggle of interests in the U.S. and G.B.
over the continuance of the war. You
noted that Wesley (a.k.a. Weasely) Clark was a Machiavelle. I
concur completely (but then, having known so many generals, that concurrence
comes easily). Well, it was June 25 when
Weasely made his denunciations of Bush. Let’s start a chronology of my pieces of the
puzzle with that date.
I called my Houston
Chronicle editors (David Langworthy and Frank Michel)
that same afternoon to pitch an anti-Iraq essay (a continuance of my April 3 piece predicting a quicksand war),
saying that at last a figure of prominence was saying what I had been saying
for months. Up to that point they had been
refusing me permission to publish any further military/historical
analysis. Clark’s
defection from the pro-war side, though, encouraged them, so I crafted the
piece that you rightly took for a pro-Clark essay. You were right about it in tone, but wrong
about its intents.
The op-ed was solidly
written, and accompanied by a transcript of his CNN Crossfire interview for
validation of my Clark quote. It was timely; it was a follow-up piece to my
intelligent warning of April 3… and it sat on their desks for two weeks. They didn’t tell me that it was
irrelevant, ill-conceived or illogical; they just said that they had to wait –
for one shabby reason after another. And
wait they did. When I became importunate
they didn’t tell me to go to hell, as they normally would have done; they
evaded and placated and promised some more – then both David Langworthy and Frank Michel took unannounced vacations to
get out of the line of fire.
On July 6 the NY Times
published the Joe Wilson piece undercutting the Bush WMD (Niger) argument. On July 7 I phoned-in to Clear Channel
affiliate KPRC (our major right-wing talk station in Houston) and gave a
fifteen-minute explanation of things that I extracted from open sources (but
were almost surely classified at the highest levels) about U.S. losses in
Iraq. The host, Chris Baker, was
enthralled by the expert, plausible information he was hearing. The top of the hour news broadcasts were due,
but he couldn’t have cared less: Before
he hung up he asked his producer to get my contact information, promising to
get back in touch with me after his broadcast.
After our talk I played an
old public relations trick on Chris Baker:
I followed-up by having my mother-in-law call the station to tell them
that her grandson was going over to Iraq and she just wished everyone
was as supportive of the war effort as she was.
It was hype, of course, but it was the kind of hype they were begging
for on the air: pro-war hype. Once on the air she was to comment on my
call, which she had heard herself while listening to the radio. Curiously, although I had gotten on the air
after a mere five-minute wait, the producer put my mother-in-law on hold as
soon as she called – and left her there for two hours. Curiously, although Chris Baker had been soliciting
pro-Iraq comments before then, there was not another Iraq
comment all day; instead he talked about a stale stalwart topic: the corruption of manners by Hollywood. Curiously, Chris Baker announced that he was
going on vacation effective immediately, and would not be hosting the show for
a while. Curiously, the third-in-rank
editor of the Chronicle editorial page called me that afternoon and told me
that she had reconsidered my
anti-Iraq piece and would run it the next day, July 8.
Please recall that my July
7 remarks on air and my July 8 op-ed ran in the Bush hometown paper, and were
overheard and read by the most stalwart Bush Team supporters, including his
parents, who live in Houston. From July 8 on, I began to suffer from the
kind of anxiety that would be irrational, were it not for the events that
followed: The Bush Team absconded to
Africa, I suspect to distance itself from the collapsing causus belli that had been contrived to
convince the U.S.
and G.B. to enter the war. While they
were gone, foul deeds were done: Joe
Wilson was punished for his indiscretion of July 6 with the outing of his wife
on Monday, July 14 – an outing that would have made any homicide that had
befallen her seem to be an act of international terror, not home-grown assassination. The ABC reporter (forget his name), who
broadcast GI remarks castigating Rumsfeld, was outed to the Drudge Report, which (hats off) outed the would-be outers as Bush Team players. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic,
Dr. David Kelly was identified, probably
through an unethical journalist (and Judith Miller seems as likely as any),
confronted (July 8), outed (July 9), interrogated by
Parliament within the week, then killed July 17.
I believe that Dr.
Kelly, Ambassador Wilson and others were doing what I was doing: blowing the lid off the quicksand war. Bush had made a strategic blunder of historic
dimension; men of good intelligence could see it coming before it started, and
men of good conscience began to oppose it vocally when enough fence-sitters
(always many) began to come off the fence against
the war.
Mr. Rarey,
I believe you have done quality research on Dr. Kelly’s
background, but I ask you to take a step back from that fallen tree and look at
the whole forest. I believe that the
prime reason for Dr. Kelly’s
assassination was because he opposed the war, upon which the leaders of the U.S.
and G.B. have staked their political careers, and the imperial ambitions of
greater Anglodom.
Please observe that my
analysis of the Kelly-killing parallels
nicely with the Valerie Plame set-up. Both were exposed first, thereby setting up
the later deaths, in the doctor’s case rationalized as suicide because of
pressures; in the agent’s death, rationalized as international thugs (Moslems
at best) getting even for her patriotic service to the U.S.
At this point, rather than
belabor my theories (which I hope have some confluence with yours), I’d like to
attach my email to the BBC. It is the most recent installment of my
private newsletter, circulated by email, to an impressive list of readers in
media, politics, academe and the military.
The two principal recipients are usually Thom Shanker
(the Times reporter with whom I have some rapport) and Chase Untermeyer, my friend and the best man at my wedding, who
was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and is a Bush family
retainer. Shanker
was amused when I first spoke with him, July 15, but became more serious when I
began speaking Russian with him (he was in the Moscow
bureau of a Chicago
paper for a few years). I sent him a
letter detailing what I knew (and haven’t yet told you) that was a major
impediment to the war effort. He passed
it on to his editors. In the next two
days my contacts began to urge me to go underground. They prevailed on me, and I spent the next
three months in hiding. I went into
hiding twelve hours before they killed Dr.
Kelly. When I
discovered that Dr. Kelly was dead I
expected to be next.
All of my assertions are
documented by email, essays, phone records and multiple candid witnesses, many
of whom thought I was simply a military-intelligence paranoid who had gone off
the deep-end because of the war. Now
that they are reflecting, and reading my material, few of them are so sure any
longer. I will be most-interested to
receive any opinion that you may venture.
I will attach the BBC letter below this one. You will note that it has three categories of
attachments:
My five published war
essays (three on Iraq)
since Desert Storm.
Twice as many war essays
that the mainstream media will not publish.
I particularly urge that you read the first of them: “3/7 Cavalry, tragedy and travesty,”
which explains why it was that military public affairs played the public a
trick with the Private
Jessica mini-series over the weekend of April 5-6 while U.S.
forces bled for Baghdad.
My July correspondence,
which made me as many enemies as a man could want – all of them with great
power.
I hope you will enjoy,
perhaps respect my efforts. I can
honestly say that I feel that way about you, having read your three articles.
Best regards, and happy
hunting…, and be careful, because they kill the messengers when they’ve
decided that breaking silence is sedition.
Captain May
Ghost Troop Home
Page April
Fools Part 4