Illegal Israel

More Money for Israel Fuel beneath a cauldron of hate At the heart of the Middle East mess; Protecting an ethnic-supremacist state, Defending its right to oppress. With the current wanton slaughter of Palestinians in which the state of Israel is currently engaged, it’s almost enough to give outlaws a bad name.  Even NBC News puts the current death toll in the war in the small area of Gaza at 30,000, and anyone can see from the nature of the destruction of housing complexes, hospitals, schools, churches, and refugee camps, that most of the victims are Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children. The fact of the matter, though, is that Israel is, indeed, an outlaw state and it has been…

FULL ARTICLE

Lawrence of Arabia and Yevgeny Prigrozhin

Most people find it quite easy to believe that the airplane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigrozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who had led a mutiny against the Russian government, was no simple accident.  In fact, word has leaked from U.S. intelligence that an intentional explosion brought the airplane down and that President Vladimir Putin was behind it. The CIA would have some familiarity with such methods.  The contrived “accident” is right there in their assassination manual as an expedient form of secret assassination, allowing the perpetrator to deny responsibility for something deemed not to be a murder at all and attracting little attention.   An airplane crash is not on their list of contrived accidents, but it takes…

FULL ARTICLE

About those White House Surveillance Cameras

We’re hearing a lot these days about all those surveillance cameras at the White House after the discovery of that small bag of cocaine and the 11-day “investigation” to determine who left it there that came up empty.  Here is Miranda Devine in her skeptical July 16 article in the New York Post: Even more astonishing [than the supposed absence of fingerprints on the plastic bag] is that, in a complex bristling with security cameras, the Secret Service said no surveillance video footage exists because the baggie was located in a “blind spot.” But where, on the day of his death, July 20, 1993, were all those security cameras in the early afternoon when Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W.…

FULL ARTICLE

The Most Under-Reported Big News Story

It’s definitely Tara Reade’s defection.  One has to be a real news hound even to know that Joe Biden’s accuser has taken refuge in Russia. This looks like a very rational decision on Reade’s part to me.  The very light reporting given to her allegations all along was a very bad sign for her, suggesting that she would never get any protection from our nation’s molders of public opinion.  One could imagine reading about her unfortunate “suicide” almost any day.  Had Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “DC Madam,” demonstrated Reade’s prudence, she would, in all likelihood, be alive and well today. While on the subject of underreported defections to Russia, we should not forget about John Mark Dougan, who used to have a Wikipedia page.…

FULL ARTICLE

Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what has become of America, It’s impossible to be all three. It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February  14, 2023.  The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation.  The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50thanniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S. military’s Vietnam War theater…

FULL ARTICLE

The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand?  That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968.  One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time.  Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there.  America’s…

FULL ARTICLE

Amazon Censorship

I posted this poem on my web site when the Internet was still in its infancy. Of Swords and Pens The pen may be stronger than the sword, But pens, like guns, can be bought. And battles of words, like battles with guns, Can be unfairly fought. Those who rule know all too well The power of the word, And so they ration carefully The ones that can be heard. In our land there’s little chance That virtue will prevail When “truth” is a consumer good And words are all for sale. That was on April 5, 1998, and the word battlefield has changed quite a bit since then.  Back then, control of the airwaves, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and…

FULL ARTICLE

We Pulled the Plug on the Shah

When I first wrote on this subject seven years ago, the title was in the form of a question, “Did We Pull the Plug on the Shah?”  With the help of a fairly recent but very obscure book by the American expatriate living in England, Arlene Lois Johnson, The Shah of Iran: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: Victim of His Times I have accumulated enough additional information to write the title of this brief essay as a declarative statement.  The book was published in the United Kingdom by News Source, Incorporated.  No date is provided, but Johnson tells me that it came out in 2018.  The book is apparently not available on Amazon, and I couldn’t get it to come up with…

FULL ARTICLE

Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998.  There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed.  No changes were made in the original entries. The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days.  It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription. Take…

FULL ARTICLE

Video on 9/11 Removed from YouTube as “Hate Speech”

If for some reason you should find yourself at the Internet site with this URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7ojSe-wqg&t=21s, what you will find there is not a YouTube video, but a black rectangle bearing this message in white, in the manner of chalk on a blackboard: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.  Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.”  Below that, in purple, is a “Learn more” click-on. Doing that, you get: Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting    violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes: Age Caste Disability Ethnicity Gender Identity and Expression Nationality Race Immigration Status Religion Sex/Gender Sexual Orientation Victims…

FULL ARTICLE

American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article.  It was right there on my AOL News.  Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

FULL ARTICLE

Important Assassination Movie Quashed

Sometimes, not all “accidents” are accidental. (statement on the screen before the opening credits) Released for public viewing in October of 2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already garnered 28 awards and seven additional nominations.  A 1962 movie with a similar title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best known and popular of all time.  This one, Lawrence: After Arabia, deals not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner.  Lawrence was just 46 years old. Just as Oliver…

FULL ARTICLE

“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice.  He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music.  Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more.  The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

FULL ARTICLE

Deranged Court Historian, Douglas Brinkley, on Jan. 6

One might think that the remarks of the well-known historian, Counsel on Foreign Relations member, Douglas Brinkley, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the breach of the Capitol Building, ostensibly mainly by people protesting what they perceived to be the theft of the 2020 Presidential election, would be embarrassing to the other members of his profession.  To compare that relatively mild dust-up to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and even the Holocaust has to strike any sensible person as complete lunacy.  We have noticed, though, that those who practice his trade in the United States, at least in our lifetime, are really not very much interested in anything so bothersome to them as the truth.  Apparently, it has been the…

FULL ARTICLE

The Early Thai Reports, the Press, and the Abbey on Thomas Merton’s Death

by David Martin and Hugh Turley The Trappist monk Thomas Merton might well have been the most significant Roman Catholic thinker and writer of the 20th century.  His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold over 600,000 copies in its original hardcover edition and, in one version or another, has remained continuously in print.  Its Kindle edition as of this writing has 803 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Merton was a prolific writer.  The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, lists 106 books that he authored, 42 of which were published before his mysterious violent death on December 10, 1968, while he was attending a monastic conference near Bangkok, Thailand.…

FULL ARTICLE

“Dean of Cold War Historians” on James Forrestal

His name is a simple one, but it is not a common one, and it’s not often in the news, so that makes it rather easy to forget.  Fortunately, there’s an easy way to call it up.  All you have to do it to turn to the “senior citizen’s memory,” the Internet, and search “dean of Cold War historians.”  It doesn’t matter whether you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo.  They all agree that the native Texan, Yale University history professor, longtime George W. Bush friend and admirer and CFR member, John Lewis Gaddis is the man.  When it comes to what Gaddis has had to say about a vitally important American leader in the early years of the Cold…

FULL ARTICLE

Untruths in Forrestal Book Review

The latest reviewer of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, one “Robert Buckley,” (kin to William F.?) en route to giving it just two stars—compared to the 4.5 out of 5 average of 205 customer reviews—has the following to say on Amazon.com: I agree with the other commenters who said that the book needs a good editor. There’s too much information of doubtful relevance. Martin makes a pretty good case that the Zionists had a motive to kill Forrestal, but as any lawyer knows, motive by itself does not prove a case. There must be other evidence.  Martin, for example, fails to give us any suggestion of how the “murder” could actually have been carried out. Forrestal was in…

FULL ARTICLE

An “Adult Content” YouTube Video

On August 4, I received this rather surprising email: Hi David Martin, We wanted to let you know that our team has reviewed your content and we don’t think it’s in line with our Community Guidelines.  As a result, we’ve age-restricted the following content: Video:  At What a Cost We haven’t applied a strike to your channel, and your content is still live for some users on YouTube.  Keep reading for more details on what this means and steps you can take if you’d like to appeal this decision. What “age-restricted” means We age-restrict content when we don’t think it’s suitable for younger audiences.  This means it will not be visible to users who are logged out, are under 18 years…

FULL ARTICLE

Godfather of Soviet Containment Is Cancel Culture Victim

In early 2020, I sent an email to 14 members of the history faculty of my alma mater, Davidson College, including one emeritus professor, whose primary purpose was to call their attention to a recent article by Laurent Guyénot entitled, “Fifteen Years before Kennedy, Zionists Murdered Forrestal.”  I have no idea how it was generally received, because only the emeritus professor responded, and, curiously, he ignored the main subject and chose to take issue with my take on the U.S. Civil War as he deduced from my article, “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech,” which I had alluded to in passing in the email. You can read about the episode in the beginning of my review article, “Life in the Confederate…

FULL ARTICLE

Bought Journalists: The Case of Udo Ulfkotte

MHB Report German author and newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte has been among the few prestigious mainstream journalists to tell the public that it’s being lied to by a large majority journalists and news organizations, most of which manipulate readerships for bribes and professional one-upmanship. Ulfkotte’s mea culpa was titled Bought Journalists, a German best-seller translated into nine languages, the English translation of which had to overcome unusual hurdles before finally coming to fruition.

FULL ARTICLE