"The Assassination of JFK, Jr."
Far Right Draws First Blood in the "War on Terror"

A Review by Michael Green

Version 1
October 21, 2006

 

“George magazine debuts A man who had been the subject of reporters all his life turned journalist in 1995 with the debut of George magazine. The motto for the publication was "not just politics as usual." Its trademark became celebrity covers; the first issue featured Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington, sporting a bra top, white wig and tight pants.” [1]   The plotters of 911 murdered John F. Kennedy, Jr. in anticipation of their deed to assure his silence.

Summary of Evidence:  John F. Kennedy, Jr. checked in with the FAA Tower at Martha’s Vineyard at 9:39 p.m. on July 16, 1999.  This check-in activates two alarm systems: one if the plane thereafter descends below 100’ outside the landing area, another if the plane fails to land within five minutes.  Each alert should trigger an alarm and a search, but no focused search was begun for 15+ hours.  The delay was required by his killers to find the downed plane and remove the battery from the cockpit voice recorder, remove the Flight Log that listed all passengers, and remove the body of the Certified Flight Instructor who was on the plane.   Contrary to procedure, the Pentagon took control of the civilian crash and “disappeared” crucial evidence.  Even after honest FAA employees used Kennedy’s unique transponder identity to construct an N-Tap Radar Analysis of his entire flight from departure to crash – showing a vertical nose-dive at the precisely located crash point -- the Air Force lied by pretending that the radar showed a normal descent, did not show where the plane went down, and that they could not be sure that the radar of the (crashed!) plane was the one they were looking for.  Members of the establishment media were variously complicit in the cover-up of the murder, or else first intimidated into silence, and then conscripted to smear Kennedy as reckless and irresponsible.

 

John Hankey’s DVD examining the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. is not well known in the 911 Truth community, and it is not thought of as a 911 DVD, but it should be provided he meets the deserved caveats in the following endnote. [2]  Hankey does what regrettably so few 911 DVDs even attempt to do – to put his subject matter into an understandable historical context, identify the major protagonists and forces at play, provide a clear and convincing sketch of the motivations for their act, and most importantly, amass and integrate a compelling body of evidence to reach his conclusion.  At the center of this DVD sits a rock-hard proof that Kennedy, Jr. was murdered by high-ranking brass at the Pentagon.  The major institutional conspirators at the operational level in the death of JFK, Jr. are the FAA and the Air Force, just as in 911, with a crucial supporting cover-up role by the National Transportation and Safety Board and the establishment media.  The true charm and force of Hankey’s production is to juxtapose simultaneous media coverage filled with well sourced, damning hard facts – coverage that was quickly disappeared down the memory hole – with the outrageous lies trumpeted by the Pentagon and repeated by the media blasters as part of their complicity in the murder.  As the narrative takes hold, you realize that you are watching the replay of a live execution.

 

Hankey’s movie consists of three parts: the historical background and motivation for the murder, the proof that a murder was committed and covered up, and the account of the technical means by which the murder was accomplished.  The cornerstone is the central proof of the murder and cover-up – it is a wholly self-contained and thoroughly gratifying proof and analysis, the strength of which is unaffected by the many unhappy weaknesses that undermine the other two parts.

 

Who Won World War II &
Who Cares About A Spoiled Rich Kid Who Crashed His Plane,
And What The Hell has any of it got to do with 911?

 

For starters, Kennedy was not a spoiled rich kid, but a scion of a political family with a strong social conscience and with strong anti-fascist roots who had his own magazine, George, as a forum.  John’s third birthday was spent at the state funeral for his father – the one imprinted in many of our memories with John-John’s famous salute on the cover of Life.  Kennedy Jr. had never accepted the Warren Commission Report, and like his uncle Robert F. Kennedy who was murdered by the same forces of the American military-industrial war machine that killed JFK for opposing it and seeking peaceful coexistence with the USSR, Kennedy wanted to expose and if still possible bring to justice his father’s killers.[3] 

 

Kennedy, Jr. showed his interest in murders of state and covert operations by publishing an article by Oliver Stone stating that in the course of history powerful men typically murdered their opponents, and that JFK had been dispatched this way.  George also published “A Mother’s Defense” by Guela Amir, the mother of Yigal Amir, who was convicted of assassinating Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who offended the Israeli far-right by wanting to trade land for peace much as JFK had offended -- amongst others -- the military industrial complex and the Council on Foreign Relations that wanted war in Vietnam and continued hostilities toward the USSR.  Guela Amir revealed that her son had operated under the tutelage and training of a Shin Bet agent, Avishai Raviv, working for forces seeking to halt the peace process.[4]  Gentle reader, if you were part of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) powers that were already hard at work in Florida to fix the 2000 Presidential Election with the help of former (CIA) drug runner Hank Asher working hand-in-glove with Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris; if you were part of that far-sighted group of global strategists actively “shaping” the future in which they would soon be navigating, following their New Pearl Harbor, by eliminating any “potential capacity” for resistance, would you want George and Kennedy, Jr. around? [5]  I do not think so.

 

You may wish to protest, “But this is AMERICA!  Who could do such a thing?!”  Hankey’s general answer is that American industrial and banking finance leadership, the oil cartel in particular, has a potent fascist past that has been hidden and disguised from its people by the control that these very forces exercise over the media through ownership and influence.  And though the general answer is correct, Hankey weakens his case and presentation by claiming, falsely, that Hitler was a mere puppet of these “American Nazis” who supposedly ordered him about.  Hankey claims literally that “the Rockefellers ran Auschwitz” until the end of WWII, and claims that these American Nazis are part of the Illuminati.  

 

Underlying Hankey’s claims seems to be an odd belief that whoever supports or trades with the Nazis is a die-hard Nazi himself, unlike the measured view of scholar Charles Higham that much of the American support for Nazism came from a “Business as Usual” attitude that put personal profit and global economic hegemony high above such petty if not irrelevant issues as patriotism – the pragmatic pro-Nazi Rockefeller clan, Nelson in particular, comes to mind.  Higham also describes in detail the American collaborators that were fascists to their core such as Henry Ford, Irené du Pont and elements of the Morgan group. [6]  But to be a real Nazi, as opposed to a garden-variety fascist, requires the racial bloodlust and desire to exterminate the likes of Jews, Roma, Slavs, and homosexuals as an intrinsic good.  Du Pont not only traded with and protected Nazi Germany throughout WWII, but he also heartily embraced core Nazi blood racism:

 

Irené du Pont was the most imposing and powerful member of the clan.   He was obsessed with Hitler’s principles.  He keenly followed the career of the future Führer in the 1920s, and on September 7, 1926, in a speech to the American Chemical Society, he advocated a race of supermen, to be achieved by injecting special drugs into them in boyhood to make their characters to order.  He insisted his men reach physical standards equivalent to that of a Marine and have blood as pure as that in the veins of the Vikings.  Despite the fact that he had Jewish blood in his own veins, his anti-Semitism matched that of Hitler. [7]

 

There is a important difference between a Hitler and a Himmler who want to kill all the Jews and a mindless amoral functionary like Eichmann who takes pride in his technical proficiency at doing so, and say, a Nelson Rockefeller who plays both sides against the middle to maximize profits and give the American oil cartel a decided leg up on what he knew would be his greatly weakened post-WWII British competition, by turning against Britain the age-old strategy of divide-and-conquer that it had used against any continental power that became too strong: let the Nazis, Britain, Western Europe and USSR bleed themselves white, and let American capitalists collect and count the chips. 

 

In fact, the gross indifference of the Western powers to saving the Jews during WWII – refusing even to bomb Auschwitz or the trains running to it – cannot be made sense of without understanding that Great Britain, the United States, and the most powerful Zionists world-wide did not want a glut of refugee Jews fleeing Europe to Israel because such an influx at that time would have roused Arab opposition and destabilized the West’s control of the oil resources of the Middle East.  One need not want to break bread with Lord Moyne, who did not want to risk British oil alliances, and refused the Jews entrance to British Palestine with the remark, “What can I do with this million Jews?  Where can I put them?”  Nor need one be blind to Moyne’s anti-Semitism to see that he is not a Nazi bent on exterminating all Jews.[8]  All such distinctions are lost on Hankey, so that he is too often left with pure evil as a motive when tactics and strategy play crucial functional roles. 

 

I don’t wish to make too much of these points. The distinction is becoming increasingly moot as the US pragmatic fascists for whom oil is more important than people join the purists, under the duress of resources increasingly unable to sustain world populations, in a war against their own peoples – part of a world-wide consolidation of power against the peoples of advanced industrial societies.   In any case, the dark side of the CIA, the Willmoore Kendall side that with William F. Buckley Jr. wanted to smash the Bill of Rights back in the 1950s and 1960s, now clearly has all but full control of the organs of state. [9] 

 

Hankey contends that these dark fascist forces that had been planning 911 for some years beforehand, and who otherwise controlled the media, did not want to have a loose end like Kennedy, Jr. around which to navigate in their post-911 future.  Hankey has a secondary thesis that may or may not be true: that “W” participated in the murder of JFK, Jr. as a rite of initiation, as his father did with JFK, to earn a place at the table of fellow killers.  This secondary thesis is based on W’s disappearance for several days just before and after Kennedy’s death, is otherwise supported mostly by hunch and intuition, is inessential to his most important claim, and will not be discussed here. [10]

 

What Makes You Say JFK Jr. Didn’t Crash All By Himself?

 

On July 16, 1999, the night of his fatal crash, JFK Jr. was flying to Martha’s Vineyard in a Piper-Saratoga airplane with his wife Caroline and her sister Lauren Bessette to drop off Lauren before flying to Hyannisport to attend the wedding of his cousin Rory the following day.  Approximately 18 miles shy of the local airport, at 9:40:15 p.m., the plane went into a steep vertical dive and crashed into the sea, killing all aboard.  Like a good detective, Hankey sinks his teeth into one very meaty bone and refuses to let go until he has extracted all the information it can possibly yield: a full 15+ hours pass between the time of the crash and the onset of a focused search for the missing airplane in the area where it was downed.  There are only two reasonable answers: the FAA/Air Force were unable to conduct a focused search for the downed plane with its VIP passengers until 15+ hours after the crash because they only learned the location of the crash site at that time; or, the delay served an operational function in the execution or cover-up of the murders (e.g., making sure everyone was dead, removing vital evidence of foul play).  Let’s see what kind of VIP treatment was extended to Kennedy and company.

 

At approximately 12:30 p.m. the following day, Petty Officer Todd Burgun of the Public Information Office of the Coast Guard made what for him was a routine press announcement that he had been advised by FAA that at 9:39 p.m. Kennedy’s plane was holding steady and contacted air traffic control at Martha’s Vineyard to clear for final descent.  Hankey does not ask you to take his word for what Burgun said, he plays the television interview with Burgun’s live report.  Kennedy made contact with the air traffic controllers at Martha’s Vineyard in preparation for landing.  There can be no doubt that Burgun’s source was FAA because (as three dimensional radar subsequently showed) at 9:38 p.m. Kennedy was adjusting his altitude to be above the required minimum to contact FAA for landing, and at 9:40 p.m. his plane was plunging into the sea.  Then, like a clarion cry of guilt by the perpetrators, Burgun’s announcement was disappeared from the media, the FAA and Coast Guard were silenced, and all press communication was taken over by the Pentagon under the pretext “because it’s an easily used facility.”

 

Why was Burgun’s report disappeared down the memory hole?  It is very simple. [11]  When a plane contacts the FAA, its radar blip is logged into the FAA system by its tail-number, in this case N529JK.  If that plane descends below 100 feet outside its normal landing area, an automatic alert is sounded and a search is launched at the point where the transponder-generated radar signal disappeared.  Furthermore, once a plane has contacted FAA and been cleared for landing, if that plane does not land within five minutes, a search is automatically launched.  Thus, because Kennedy made contact with the FAA tower in Martha’s Vineyard, there could be no viable explanation for the delay in the focused search, so the inconvenient fact of Kennedy’s contact with the tower was made to disappear.  The special VIP treatment extended to Kennedy was that no focused search was launched until 15+ hours later, and as Hankey reminds us, this special treatment was provided by the same institutional perpetrators of 911 – high-ranking bureaucrats in the FAA and leadership in the Air Force (General Richard Myers).

 

Instead, once the Pentagon took over, Lt. Colonel Steve Roark – Hankey repeatedly underscores the name in the tradition of The White Rose – tells the press, “I only know for sure that they did not talk to the tower at Martha’s Vineyard.”  We will return to Roark momentarily, but what is the Kennedy family doing while the plane is missing?  According to USCG Rear Admiral Richard Larrabee of the US Coast Guard, at 02:15 a.m. a family friend telephoned to report the plane missing and asked that a search and rescue effort be launched.  Hankey asks the right question – Why is this family friend, Carol Ratowell, calling the Coast Guard instead of the FAA?  Hankey’s well-documented answer is that because the FAA had by that time repeatedly stonewalled the family, Ratowell tried the Coast Guard as the last resort.  The Coast Guard, in turn, contacted the FAA who contacted the Air Force, which in turn told the Coast Guard that the Air Force was now in charge.  The Air Force ignored the precise data available to the FAA to locate the plane and instead sent the Coast Guard to search an area 100 miles distant from where the plane even might have crashed, but otherwise did nothing until being forced to do so. 

 

Ted Kennedy, understanding the murders of his brothers by the far right wing, and himself most likely almost their victim when he was the sole survivor of a small plane crash that broke his back, desperately called Chief of Staff Norman Podesta at 6:30 a.m., who in turn called Clinton at 7:00 a.m., who in turn ORDERED the Air Force to begin a search, which began “a wild goose chase” over a 20,000 square mile area with two planes and two helicopters. [12]  Don’t think that everyone who participates in the cover-up understands its purpose, or likes it: Roark is often clearly uncomfortable lying, but he had made his decision to follow orders, so the banality of evil, as usual, rears its slothful head.

 

The conscious role of the Air Force higher command controlling the deceitful “search” is underscored by the fact that by 5:00 a.m. conscientious FAA workers had constructed an N-Tap Radar Analysis that provides a three dimensional graph of the path of the Kennedy plane from point of departure to the crash site and provided it to the Air Force.  Hankey shows the 3-D radar graph, which depicts a normal horizontal flight path that abruptly changes into a vertical nose-dive, that shows exactly where the plane went down with well-marked latitude and longitude.  Despite having this radar graph, the Air Force continued to conduct its “search and rescue” mission by looking everywhere but the crash site.  Meanwhile, Lt. Colonel Steve Roark is explaining to reporters that the search is so broadly focused because the Air Force has “nothing that pinpoints one area rather than another.”  When Martha Raditch of ABC asks whether Roark is aware of the (N-Tap) Radar Analysis showing that Kennedy’s plane went down 18 miles west of Martha’s Vineyard, Roark lies, “The radar position is just a last possible position.”  This reporter, along with all the other reporters, is intimidated.  A murder and cover-up of a member of a prominent political family is taking place before their eyes, coordinated by the Air Force at the Pentagon.  No one can say, “You’re lying, the damn radar shows exactly where the plane crashed,” but a reporter makes an effort, saying “It didn’t look like a normal descent,” and Roark responds, “It didn’t look like anything unusual.”   Again, the radar graph shows a plane suddenly plummeting straight down.  Then, in a further perversion of reason, Roark remarks, “It can’t be confirmed it’s the aircraft we’re looking for” as though some other aircraft might have crashed just off Martha’s Vineyard!   Roark has offered up a double lie since the N-Tap radar graph was generated specifically for Kennedy’s plane based on his radar blip generated by the transponder code the FAA had given Kennedy when he first checked in with Air Traffic Control.  Here is the Power Lie with a vengeance: a lie so outrageous, so flagrantly false on its face that its intent is to declare the actual power relationships that exist and to convey just the posture of compliance and cooperation that the reporters had better offer if they ever want to work again.  But why doesn’t the American public see this lie for what it is and take action?  The general public did not know many of the facts that make this conclusion so clear to us, nor did all of the media.  In addition, the shroud of Orwellian “protective stupidity” descends to shelter the public mind from the truth about our rulers and our currently disempowered place within the empire.  Many of the reporters will know that something is up, but they won’t know what it is, especially a week later; it is too painful to put the pieces together and see the assembled puzzle with its implications.

 

Are we jumping to conclusions?  Perhaps Roark is an untrained bureaucratic novice?  No, Roark is the current Director of the USAF National Rescue School and the former director of the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center who has participated in over 1,000 search and rescue missions.  But it is worse than that: you or I could read that graph without any problem.  This is how the murder of a famous political figures and its cover-up are done directly in front of the US media despite many honest front-line reporters.

 

There’s more.  Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga was equipped with an emergency locator transmitter, a beacon that goes off after a crash and signals via satellite the location of the crash site within feet to the FAA.  Did the beacon fail?  No, because ABC news coverage has visuals of the precise location of the crash site as determined by the ELT, that the newscasters attributed to the ELT, with a little ELT logo to let you know the source of the data.  How does the Air Force – now Media Central – handle this?  The Air Force ignores the facts and announces that its dilatory broad-ranged search is happening and will continue because Kennedy failed to file a flight plan (which would give them his course on which to check) and never made contact with any FAA Air Traffic Controllers along his route, so the Air Force had to search blindly.  But Hankey has amassed documentation that shows that before this flight Kennedy always filed a flight plan and always checked in for safety reasons with FAA along his route, that he was a careful, cautious, extremely conscientious non-aggressive pilot.

 

So Why Did The Killers Need 15+ Hours to Find The Plane?

 

The dream of a petty criminal is to commit the perfect crime without leaving a clue, but the dream and the reality of the state criminal is to commit the perfect crime by having control of the crime scene to remove the incriminating evidence, and to have control of the investigation to eliminate any loose ends.  The murderers of John F. Kennedy, Jr. had control of the organs of state.  But what did they want to remove?  Some small things, and some larger things.

 

The Piper Saratoga is equipped with a flight voice recorder that records the last minute of voice communication from within the aircraft.  But when that recorder was recovered, the battery necessary to preserve its content was missing.

 

Kennedy always kept his Flight Log in an aquamarine duffle bag.  A newspaper report reproduced in the DVD gives photos of the duffle bag and the names of eyewitnesses who saw it found intact, but the Flight Log was reportedly not in the bag.

 

Removal of the Flight Log from the duffel bag would require being on the scene before the plane was officially found, and there is evidence strongly suggesting that is precisely what happened.  Lt. Colonel Richard Stanley of the Civil Air Patrol had initiated a search for the missing plane on dry land off Martha’s Vineyard by 7:30 a.m., and advised the news media that at that time – hours before the official focused search and discovery – he had seen Coast Guard helicopters circling the area; but the Coast Guard later advised that those were not their helicopters.  Hankey concludes reasonably that these were the killers’ helicopters. 

 

Why does the Flight Log matter?  Because the Flight Log contains a list of the passengers on that flight.  But don’t we know the passengers on that flight?  Not exactly.  When family friend Carol Ratowell phoned the Coast Guard at 2:15 a.m. she advised that there was a Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) on board, but his body was never found, and one of the seats of the aircraft also was missing.  Why does it matter whether a CFI was on board?  Because the NTSB would find that there had been no mechanical failure of the airplane, making the crash a matter of pilot error – Kennedy’s pilot error – a scenario that requires disappearing the CFI.  Thus, part of the cover-up was a smear supposedly leaked to the media by an anonymous Kennedy “family member” that Kennedy was the only pilot aboard and that Kennedy may not have been properly licensed to fly that plane, which he had purchased only two months before.  As Hankey skeptically remarks, this is just the kind of rumor that no real family member would ever leak to the media, hence we are hearing a planted story from the plotters.  So the big part of the clean-up operation was to find and remove the body of the CFI, passenger seat included, something that Hankey says took so long because the plane sank. 

 

Another media smear that Hankey deftly documents is a New York Post headline blaring “John Didn’t Want to Fly” leaked by a psychopathic liar and plagiarist in the service of the Mossad, C. David Heymann, as described by London Observer reporter Andrew Goldman and memorialized at http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/JFK_JR/goldman.html.[13]

 

Hankey mounts a persuasive argument that a CFI was on board using both circumstantial inference and direct historical precedent.  The three principal passengers had assembled by 7:30 p.m., yet they waited an additional 45 minutes to take off even though weather conditions were worsening, and even though Kennedy’s license was valid for clear-vision conditions but would not have been valid for hazy or stormy weather that compromised vision.  Kennedy made a phone call shortly before take-off, but the NTSB failed to investigate to whom it was made and what was discussed, contrary to standard procedures.  Kennedy could get a CFI at a moment’s notice even if the one scheduled failed to appear.  Kennedy was still getting used to his new plane and had never flown it without a flight instructor.  Kennedy had passed the written and hands-on tests for instrument certification that would permit him to fly it in any weather, and all he needed for the certification was to log additional hours with a CFI.  Kennedy, a stickler on rules and procedures, had made eight flights to Martha’s Vineyard in the prior month and on five of those occasions bad weather would have made his flying the plane without a CFI beyond the scope of his license, something he would have been very unlikely to risk with his wife and sister-in-law aboard.  Hankey offers additional arguments for the CFI’s presence that cumulatively are very powerful.  To be explicit, the force of the argument for the CFI is augmented within the context of the well-documented lies and cover-up to justify and explain the 15+ hour delay needed to assure the missing voice recorder battery, the missing flight log, and the missing CFI so that the crash could be blamed on pilot error.[14]

 

But What About the National Transportation Safety Board!?

 

Hankey’s subject matter includes the corruption and infiltration of the federal organs of state power by a criminal bureaucracy that is fascist at its core and that is fully capable of misinforming, intimidating, and controlling the innocent members of these institutions to do their bidding. [15]  The NTSB answers the question of whether or not Kennedy has a CFI with him firmly, authoritatively, and apparently decisively, seeming to put to rest such silliness as Hankey proposes.  In a January 27, 2000 investigative report, NTSB interviewer David Muzio quotes CFI Robert Merena, who had flown with Kennedy more than a dozen times, as speaking with Kennedy the day he died, July 16, 1999, and offering to fly with him.  Kennedy declined, saying, “I want to do it alone.”  The quote made headlines, and following as it did in the wake of a vast orchestra of lies and deceits, embedded the meme in the American public mind that the poor stupid careless lazy self-indulgent Kennedy got what he deserved, too bad about Caroline and Lauren; worse, this contemptuous opinion about Kennedy came to the average American as his own spontaneous idea. [16]

 

Of course, if the Kennedy crash were simple pilot error, there would have been no need for all the previously documented lies, so something is amiss, and Hankey performs with sure-handed humorous bravo in stripping this falsehood naked.  Gosh! mocks Hankey, too bad it took the NTSB six months to get around to interviewing Merena who had this crucial information.  Then he looks at the NTSB file and sees that Muzio had interviewed Merena earlier and in a July 21, 1999 report, dated just five days after the crash, stated, “The instructor [Merena] was not aware of the pilot [Kennedy] conducting any flights in the accident airplane without an instructor aboard.”  Gosh again, mocks Hankey, maybe Muzio and Merena never talked about Merena’s final words with Kennedy on the fatal day.  No, because the file contains a letter from Merena to the NTSB dated July 21, 1999 – apparently a letter that Merena wrote and brought to his interview with Muzio that day – that describes their final conversation.  Are we being asked to believe, asks Hankey rhetorically, that Merena offers to fly with John F. Kennedy, Jr. the very day that Kennedy crashes his plane, and that Kennedy declined, saying “No, I want to do it alone,” yet Merena neglects to mention this in his letter, and neglects to mention it to Muzio five days after the crash?  Are we to believe this even though Merena’s final conversation with Kennedy was discussed with Muzio five days after the crash?  Are we to believe that all that ever was said is that Merena was not aware of Kennedy flying in that plane alone on prior occasions?  We might as well believe that pigs can fly.

 

Like a good bloodhound, Hankey has the spoor of his quarry like a rotten stench overwhelming his nostrils.  He looks again at the final Muzio report dated six months later, and lo!  Hankey declares that the final report violates the first and fundamental rule of an NTSB interview – it fails to give the time, date and place of the supposed interview.  And it fails to have the interviewee sign the interview summary, as procedure requires – to illustrate this Hankey produces a report whose content is authenticated by another interviewee who signed an affirmation of its content at its end.[17]  Did Muzio, under orders or pressure, or perhaps as a USGIC operative, just invent that quote from thin air? 

 

What does the file say?  Look, there is a letter to the NTSB from Merena’s attorney, Peter V. Van Deventer, Jr. dated February 25, 2000.  Merena has his attorney address the issue of whether Merena said what Muzio now, belatedly, claims that Merena said.   Mr. Van Deventer’s letter states in pertinent part, that Mr. Merena and Kennedy had their conversation between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on the day in question. … “2) John F. Kennedy, Jr. never indicated at that time that he intended to depart on the day or evening in question.  3) Kennedy never expressed to Mr. Merena anything concerning a change in his plans.”  Ohmygod, there it is, quiet as can be, don’t make waves and hope they leave you alone, but Van Deventer, on behalf of Merena, is telling the NTSB that Muzio is fucking lying through his teeth as part of the cover-up.  I apologize for the bad language, some of us have better manners than others.

 

Unlike the web-surfers, Hankey does not stop, but instead goes to the source.  He calls Merena and finds one frightened witness who refuses to say anything except, “What I told the NTSB, that’s what happened.”  But Merena won’t tell Hankey what he told the NTSB.   Hankey calls Muzio, who refers Hankey to his boss, who refuses any answer by phone, email or letter.  And there we are, friends and comrades, at the end of a state murder and cover-up done in anticipation of 911 so that, on the practical end of anticipating and crushing even the potential capacity to resist the massive media lies about 911, the one high-profile media outlet not under the direct operational control of the USG Intelligence Community could be silenced. 

 

I would like simply to take my hat off to Hankey for this fine analysis of the NTSB but cannot, at least not yet.  If it is true that every NTSB interview report gives the time, date and place of the interview, and if the interviewee to authenticate it initials every such interview report, then surely Hankey has chosen the wrong example for illustrative purposes.  Surely the interviewee who authenticates his interview by signature should be Merena at the end of his first interview, not another person.  Furthermore, the interview reports by Muzio do have a time and date at the top of each of them.  If the interview took place at the NTSB, as the first one did, procedure may not require stating this, but if it did, the way to make the point is to show that this was done in the first interview of Merena.  All that Hankey needed to do was to show us how on the first Merena interview that presumably followed standard procedure the time and date and place of the interview appeared, but not on the final interview.  That would show that something was amiss with the latter report.  But in fact both interview reports show time and date in the very same place and a freeze-frame zoom of the first page of the first interview report by Muzio about Merena – and that is where the time, date, place of interview would be expected to appear – reveals its absence.  I am not disputing Hankey’s conclusion – and Van Deventer’s letter seems to stand on its own two feet – but his exposition and argument for that conclusion leave much to be desired.  I again regret that Mr. Hankey declined to clarify such matters.

 

Hankey’s hunch that “W” had to participate in the murder of Kennedy Jr. to earn a seat at the killer’s table may or may not be correct, and his account of the mechanics of how Kennedy Jr. was killed may or may not be correct – a matter discussed in the Appendix – but it does not matter.  What matters is that Hankey has given us a full-court satisfying proof that John Kennedy Jr. was murdered by a fascist ruling class in direct control of the Pentagon, FAA and subordinate governmental bureaucracies such as the NTSB, and with the media fully intimidated and controlled at its core by the owners and mangers who belong to the ruling class, and who keep at bay, largely by suasion, bluff and distraction the relevant and penetrating inquiries of the front-line reporters.   Linda Killian of People Magazine, who asked why it took so long for the Air Force to learn about the missing plane, knows not to force her way up the chain of command with, “The Pentagon is covering up!  You’ve got to let me work on this.”

 

One In A Series Aimed At a Tyrannical End State

 

The study of the state murders of JFK, X, MLK, and RFK; the USGIC domestic terror operations of WTC93, OKC and 911 is only partly about proving that they were inside jobs – they all reek and shout this truth once the facts are assembled.  Rather, such a study has as its proper subject the structure of political power within the United States ruling class, the plans that the rulers have for us and for this country’s future, and if possible stopping them and changing those plans.  The political assassinations of the 1960s, and the more recent ones, were to deprive the progressive and radical left of their singularly effective voices – it is no accident that COINTELPRO only swung into its full stride of frame-ups and murders after these voices were stilled.  The acts of domestic terror were to usher in the police state under the façade of fighting terrorism. 

 

Where does the fascism reaching out to embrace us come from?  Hankey’s answer, and mine, is that it has long been a part of the American landscape.  My answer, not Hankey’s, is the Old Left answer that fascism is simply monopoly capitalism in times of stress when the rights and welfare of a democratic working middle class must be smashed.  Presently, the destruction of these rights serves the vast enrichment of the ruling class at the expense of the poor and middle class, and also “shapes” the future by depriving the ruled of even the “potential capacity” to organize and resist as the advanced civilizations will too soon no longer be able to support and to pacify their populations into obedience because the benefits of abundant non-renewable energy and resources are now coming to an end.  Purist and pragmatic fascists here join hands.

 

Malcolm X famously said of the first Kennedy assassination “The chickens have come home to roost.”  Malcolm meant that it is impossible for a ruling class to cultivate a troop of murdering thugs to undermine and destroy democratic governments abroad without that same ruling class using those same murdering thugs to implement their political plans at home by destroying democracy.  Don’t take my word for it.  Hear it from the mouth of ruling class scribe Harrison Salisbury during a period in 1975 when he was particularly disaffected with the predations of the imperial war in Southeast Asia and the violations of its charter that the CIA routinely engaged in domestically. [18]   Salisbury, who later rose to become an associate editor of The New York Times, used to meet with Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to share useful intelligence acquired in pursuit of his trade, and Harrison would engage in elevated conversation with Dulles and a group of polished, well-educated, well-dressed and sophisticated intellectual gentlemen.

 

“There were no sharp edges—well almost no sharp edges.  Usually there would be one man in the small group who was silent throughout the polite talk.  His suit did not come from Brooks.  It came off the rack.  And his face did not come from the Ivy League.  It was not relaxed or handsome.  It was harsh-featured and there was likely the look of a weasel in it.   This man would sit through the whole conversation, his back to the wall, saying nothing, ignored by the others.  When the conversation was over and Allen Dulles was shaking hands and expressing his deep appreciation, the silent man would slide into the background, saying nothing, not offering to shake hands; as you were walking out, you would remember that he had never been introduced. 

 

[The style of the CIA has changed since its inception.]  But the fundamental question remains what it has been all along.  Which is the real face of the CIA—the clubbable avuncular face of Dulles, or the hawklike visage of the silent man with the ill-fitting clothes, suggestion of garlic breath, and deft hand with a short angle iron?” [19]

 

Salisbury’s essay leaves no doubt that to ask that very question is also to answer it.  Philip Agee, the former CIA officer whose efforts to stop the Agency’s predations abroad in the service of US ruling class imperialism moved Congress to stop him by means of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, also answers it explicitly.  Controlled dictatorships abroad are good for American business.  After quitting the Agency, Agee explains to a former colleague still with the CIA:

 

Goulart was President [of Brazil] as a result of democratic elections.  Did we care?  Hell no.  The Agency organized and financed so much turmoil the country seemed ungovernable, and that’s just what the military needed.  At the right moment they sent Goulart packing and set up their own government.  And what’s happening there today, after eight years of military rule?  Institutionalized torture by security services the Agency trained. (p.37) …

 

The Left [in Greece] had been the principal resistance movement during the Nazi occupation.  After the war first the British, then the Americans, intervened to install and sustain corrupt, conservative regimes.  Through savage political repression, just as in Chile, they tried to exterminate the Left.  The CIA was the main instrument, working through the police and security services.  They set up the Greek CIA, the KYP, trained its people and gave it money and equipment.  Then, when it looked like a moderately reformist government might come to power through elections, the [CIA-backed] “colonels” staged a coup using a sham “communist plot” as pretext.  Echoes of Latin America.  For the next seven years Greece lived under a fascist military regime, led almost to the end by the colonel who had been the KYP’s chief liaison officer with the CIA.  Thousands of Greeks went through that regime’s prisons and torture chambers, and thousand were forced to live in exile.  (pp. 130-131)

 

[And while on the run from the CIA in Italy, Agee sees that he is being followed and reflects.]  I started getting that feeling, like emotional choking.  Fuckin’ Italian services.  They’re even worse than the Spanish.  The Agency set them up after the war with the same officers that served Mussolini.  They just got a new name.  Still as fascist as ever, and up to their necks in right-wing bombings and assassinations.   And I’m all alone.  No witnesses.  What the Christ do I do now?  (p.135) [20]

 

Gentle reader, you may appreciate that these are no longer abstract or theoretical matters, even though the barbarism of the ruling class is being masked as such in learned society, trying to keep in place the mask of the tweedy academic rather than the garlic-breathed thug with the short angle iron.  Listen to the pertinent excerpt from a “debate” between the learned John Yoo, now a professor of law at the University of Berkeley, formerly one of the unholy coterie of legal fascists – notably David Addington and Alberto Gonzales – dedicated to undermining the US Constitution.  The debate occurs at Columbia University on December 1, 2005, regarding whether there are any legal or Constitutional constraints on the President’s authority to torture. 

 

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that. [21]

The reasons may be slight indeed, as Canadian citizen Maher Arar found out when he was detained in New York while on route to a Tunisia for vacation, and then rendered to Syria where he was systematically tortured for 10 months though he had no links to any terror organizations.  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were not apologetic.  Instead they circulated lies about Arar to justify their actions and were backed up by the USGIC-supported neo-fascist Howard government as well as the neo-fascist press of Canada’s ruling class who underscored not the danger of savaging civil rights, but the danger that a case like Arar’s might cause hesitation to do so:

Side by side with editorials critical of the RCMP, the Globe has published warnings from its political affairs columnist John Ibbitson [sic] that the Arar inquiry could result in “a culture of timidity in the RCMP” that would facilitate a terrorist attack. “A police force,” writes Ibbiston [sic], “where everyone plays strictly by the rules ... is a force that hands out nothing worse than traffic tickets.” [22]

What kind of systematic torture are we discussing?  Here is Michael Scheuer, chief architect of the CIA's rendition program, every bit the CIA’s new tweedy-man-turned-cosmopolitan-businessman explaining how the CIA operates by means of its friends abroad:

MICHAEL SCHEUER: We, as an intelligence service, because we are fortunate enough to have a large budget, can bring to the table, in dealing with third world intelligence services, money, modern computer equipment, armaments, other things that can attract their interest in working with us. All of those things are important, and they’re necessary to forge the relationship. But there are also elements which make you very cautious about the information you receive from those intelligence services. They are not going to want to give you, for example, information that might make you think the relationship isn't worth the money you’re investing in it.

And how does the torture of innocent men in fact proceed so that the friends of the Agency stay on its good side by showing that they are earning their keep?

BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] “I refused to talk in Karachi until they gave me a lawyer. I said it was my right to have a lawyer. The FBI said, ‘The law has changed, there are no lawyers. You can cooperate with us the easy way or the hard way.’ On the first day of the interrogation ‘Chuck’ said, ‘If you don’t talk to me you are going to Jordan. We can’t do what we want here. The Arabs will deal with you.’”

BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] “They would say, ‘There is this guy who would say you are a big man in Al Qaeda.’ I would say, ‘It is a lie.’ They would torture me. I would say, ‘OK it is true,’ they would say, ‘OK tell us more.’ I would say, ‘I don’t know more,’ they would torture me again. The guards would say, ‘America’s really pissed off at what happened, and they have said to the world, “either you are with us or against us.” We Moroccans say, “We are with you,” so we will do whatever they want.’”

BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] “They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was totally naked. They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut, maybe an inch. At first I just screamed. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make a cut. He did it once and then stood still for maybe a minute, watched my reaction. It was an agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress my feelings, but I was screaming. There was blood all over. ‘If I told you I was going to teach you – I told you I was going to teach you who is the man,’ ‘Marwan’ eventually said. They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as it would only breed terrorists. I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco. It became like a routine. They used to be very slow. Deliberately slow. One would cut me. They would take a rest. Then another would take his turn.

”In all 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors. When the Americans told me in Karachi, ‘Our friends the Arabs know how to deal with you,’ I didn’t really know what they were talking about. Now I understand why the Americans called the Moroccans ‘our Arab friends.’” [23]

The US Ruling class has made scores of such friends are world-wide and the pattern is almost always the same: to install a brutal dictator and equip him with a security force armed and trained by the USGIC, usually the CIA or its privatized mercenary forces.  Consider our friend the Shah of Iran, installed by the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt who overthrew the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh because he nationalized Iran’s oil to use its profits for the benefit of the Iranian people.  To ascend the throne, the Shah was required to sign a 25 year contract with British Petroleum, and then was himself overthrown by a combined British-US effort that used the Ayatollah as a proxy when the Shah refused to renew that contract and attempted to industrialize his country.  But in the meantime the Shah enjoyed the protection of the SAVAK, his USA-trained internal security forces.  Philip Agee shares his disgust at the uninformed Americans’ “let our people go” reaction after U.S. embassy hostages were seized:

[This righteous demand came] Not just from government leaders but overwhelmingly among ordinary people.  No question it was a tragedy for every one of the hostages, but nobody carrying out U.S. policy in Iran was an innocent bystander.

For god’s sake, I wondered, doesn’t anybody realize how dreadfully Iranians suffered under the Shah?  And how important U.S. Government  support, especially the CIA’s, was for him to stay in power all those years?  I thought of the scene on televison some months before when people discovered a secret torture center in Tehran.  It was a basement with steel beds that had horizontal wire mesh at different levels.  An Iranian was explaining that coal fires were started under the beds, and prisoners were strapped to the mesh, then gradually lowered until they were barbequed.  At the end he held up two severed, charred human hands that torturers left behind.  But that film… probably [was] never seen in the States.

Praise the power of the flag.  All those ordinary people in the States thinking that American working in that Embassy were representing them, doing jobs that were in their interest.  They seemed not to have a clue that American foreign policy, and those who execute it, serve first and foremost the interest of the small minority of people who run the country for corporate America.  Such delusion! [24]

I have used terms like “monopoly capitalism” and “imperialism” and “systematic torture.”  These terms tend to have a deadening effect, especially “imperialism” which seems to many Americans like a jolly good way to extend business abroad.  Capitalism is not necessary for imperialism, but capitalism makes imperialism all but inevitable, and has made possible sustained systemic torture as a typical tool of conquest used as casually as a dessert fork.  The deadening effect of such terms is to be countered by learning the nuts and bolts of capitalism and imperialism, something that may turn you against them if you still have a human heart. 

Imperialism proceeds by invading a foreign land for its resources while publicizing at home the resistance of its people as “terrorism” and suppressing the resistance through military might and that euphemistic “institutional torture” which must for the most part remain hidden from the people on whose behalf it is ostensibly practiced.  The purpose of torture is not to learn vital information to safeguard the homeland, but to terrorize the people of an invaded nation into submission.  If information is sought, it is the answer to the question, “Who else is trying to resist us and where can we find them?”  Here is a small sample of eyewitness accounts of how the British practiced it in Kenya in the 1950s after their noble “fight against fascism” during WWII:

[A British settler Kamiraru, nicknamed YY, and member of the Kenya Police Reserves arrives with two Mau Mau suspects.]  We saw Kamiraru [YY] pull up with two men.  They took the first man and hooked him up to the engine of the Land Rover while it was still running and his body just shook all over. …Kamiraru and some other Kikuyu Home Guard took him over to the generator that was in the back of the police station’s garage [and] hooked him up to this generator and electrocuted him.  After that, Kamiraru and Speaker [a nickname given to the assistant district officer because he could make anyone speak] turned to the other man, who was still standing there.  They tied him to the back of the Land Rover and made him run behind as they drove off.  He was running, and of course he falls.  They drove him until he died in pieces.  That was being done to really show people that if they didn’t confess and give up Mau Mau that that would be their fate.  (p.80) …

When the whole group of detainees was herded inside, they were told to remove all their clothes…Then the askaris [local Kenyans under British control] set on them, beating them indiscriminately with clubs and mattock handles, chasing them around the compound.  Those people were beaten and chased so badly, we kept saying to each other that they would only survive through a miracle.  Then Peterson, who was a fat man because he had formerly been a chief, became so dark in his complexion we thought he was going to die.  Then, the askaris brought in fire buckets full of water, and the detainees were called one by one, Peterson first.  The askaris then put his head in the bucket of water and lifted his legs high in the air so he was upside down.  That’s when Wagithudia, who was the painfully ugly guard from Tanganyika, started cramming sand in Peterson’s anus and stuffed it with a stick.  Then the other askaris would put water in, and then more sand, and Wagithudia kept cramming it in with a stick.  They kept doing this back and forth, alternating between the sand and the water, occasionally lifting Peterson so he could breathe.  Mapiga, the Mzungu officer in charge of the camp, was standing there the whole time ordering them to keep shoving the sand and water and stick in his anus.  Eventually, they finished with Peterson and carried him off, only to start on the next detainee in the compound.  (pp.156-157)…

Women suspected of continuing to feed the Mau Mau [resistance] were sometimes brought into the village and shot or hung as an example to the rest.  Sometimes they were beaten first with clubs and rifle butts, and sometimes raped.  On other occasions members of the security forces would take captured Mau Mau fighters, rope them to the back of Land Rovers, and drive them around the villages, leaving bits of bloody parts in their wake.  Young children were slaughtered and their remains skewered on spears and paraded around the village squares by the Home Guards.  Excrement-based torture was also widespread.  “The Johnnies would make us run around with toilet buckets on our heads,” recalled one woman.  “The contents would be running down our faces, and we would have to wipe it off and eat it, or else we were shot.  Even then, some people were killed anyway.”  (pp.246-247) …

At that time, some people who had refused to confess [to being Mau Mau] were being put in sacks, one covering the lower part of the their bodies while the other covered the upper part.  Then petrol or paraffin would be poured over the sacks, and those in charge would order them to be lit.  The people inside would die writhing in the flames. …And it was the people who refused to confess, even after all the bad things that were being done to them; they were always killed in order to instill fear into others who might think of concealing the truth.  (p.249) [25]

Not unimportantly, while the British colonialists savaged the Kenyan people, they proclaimed to the world at large and to the people at home the great success of their “civilizing mission” with its most altruistic of intentions.  Gentle reader, when you hear the euphemism of USG Intelligence Community, think of this “community” for what it is at bottom: trained thugs and torturers and their supporting staff, the men with the thumb-screws, angle irons, electric shocks and barbeque pits.

Bringing It All Back Home

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 formalizes, in disguised language, the power of an Imperial President, His Majesty the King, to imprison and torture at his pleasure and without legal recourse anyone that at his sole discretion He deems an “unlawful enemy combatant” or who in His opinion aids, abets, or in any way gives material support to such.  The President may delegate such discretion to others as he sees fit.  Its purpose is to terrify those of us who can read and think into appreciating the unlimited and arbitrary power of the state in the service of the Ruling Class.  The law has been passed by a Congress of the Ruling Class that stands against the people of the United States.  Federal judges are simultaneously being warned by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his Justice Department thugs that if they even attempt to exercise jurisdiction through habeas corpus issues they will be voicing mere “personal opinions” from the bench, making them subject to discipline and dismissal. [26]   

How could this happen in America?  In brief, the ruling class of the United States has been supporting and practicing terror abroad as policy to serve its own interests for a very long time while keeping the American people ignorant of it through its control, via the media, of public consciousness.  The hard-core fascist element – the original Du Ponts, Fords and their ideological peers and heirs – are now in almost full control of the organs of state, having wrested it from the softer Eastern Establishment who are themselves becoming hardened by the necessities required to maintain their power.  These rulers have never been our friends or protectors, however much their lower-level assets have been deluded into believing it, and now with an energy crisis looming and the US dollar rightfully threatened as the world’s reserve currency, they can no longer support and pacify us in the manner to which we have become accustomed. [27]   They are preparing well in advance for organized civil disruption, rebellion or revolt even while squeezing every economic benefit from us that they can. [28]   In times of crisis, monopoly or quasi-monopoly capitalism goes fascist; it’s the nature of the beast and under such circumstances it is inevitable, as Malcolm said, that the chickens will come home to roost.  By whatever means necessary, these chickens should be roasted abroad, and should not be welcomed home.

Copyright October 13, 2006

Michael B. Green, Ph.D.

Clinical Psychologist

Qualified Medical Examiner (1992-7/2006, retired)

Former Assistant Professor of Philosophy

          University of Texas, Austin

APPENDIX: HOW THE DEED WAS DONE

Hankey may well be correct about how Kennedy Jr. was killed, but his case for his conclusion is far weaker than his prior arguments, and it requires more knowledge and understanding of covert operations than a “respectable” reader is likely to bring to his presentation.  It may well turn off such a reader whom he should want to reach, just as I fear that his sledgehammer compression of history is likely to do.

Briefly, Hankey concludes that the missing CFI was under the control of a CIA Mind Control program, that said CFI grabbed the controls and plunged the plane into the sea and also turned the fuel selector valve to the OFF position, shutting off fuel to the plane’s engine.  The principal general difficulty in saying precisely how a USGIC covert operation was accomplished is that one seldom if ever knows what is in their bag of tricks.  For example, there may well be a means of knocking the plane out of control by an electromagnetic pulse, by small well placed explosives that leave little trace or whose trace was removed by the perpetrators before the NTSB, or in an unlikely worst-case scneario, removed and/or covered-up by the NTSB itself.  There may even be means of commandeering control of the plane itself and sending it into a dive.

CIA Mind Control programs are alive and well but the present crash is hardly a happy venue to introduce the uninitiated into their reality unless the evidence is clear and compelling, but here the evidence for mind control is suggestive at best.  Hankey makes much of the fact that the NTSB report stated that the fuel selector valve – the valve that allows the pilot to keep the plane balanced by selecting which gas tank is used – was found in the OFF position despite there being an idiot stop that must be defeated to put it in the OFF position.  Hankey offers as further evidence of mind control that Egypt Air 990 – ruled a suicide despite widespread disbelief – went down shortly after the Kennedy crash and within 50 miles of it and the NTSB found both its fuel selector valves in the OFF position.

Hankey fails to note the interesting connection with 911, viz., that one of the air traffic controllers who handled the EgyptAir 990 crash also handled the 911 terror attack, but leave that aside.  In the case of 990, the aircraft was equipped with both a voice recorder and a technical instruments recorder, and the latter showed that someone had indeed turned off both of the 990’s fuel selector valves – an act that causes a commercial airliner to plummet precipitously with little chance of recovery – moments before its fall or in the midst of its fatal descent.  Thus, there is no doubt that if the NTSB accurately reported the facts, somebody did turn off those valves and that someone is either a suicider or a mind control victim.

But as Hankey himself notes, in a lighter craft like a Piper Saratoga, cutting off the fuel selector valve does not cause the plane to plummet; it can still glide about two miles for every thousand feet of elevation.  Thus, cutting off the fuel selector valve would not crash the plane; the plane was crashed by some other means.  Since Hankey casts the CFI as a mind control victim who succeeds by controlling the yoke despite the presence of three other people in the plane, he does not need to turn off the fuel and having fuel will only help him crash quicker.  Thus, the fact that the fuel valve was found in the OFF position and there is no CFI aboard does not offer much if any support for the conclusion that the CFI turned off the fuel valve that he did not need to turn off to crash the plane, and which would not obviously have even helped him to crash the plane.  One can invent other reasons for turning off the fuel selector valve, but speculation is not evidence.

Because there is no technical instrument recorder on a Piper Saratoga, there is no dispositive account of how the fuel selector valve came to be in the OFF position.  It may have been put in that position by the covert operation clean-up crew to create a false mystery or, most likely, to create a scenario of pilot error that was exploited by other means.  It may have been jammed into that position by the crash itself – the NTSB report does not state whether the switching mechanism was in full working order.  Or, although the idiot stop prevents accidentally putting the valve into the OFF position during normal operations, action during the crash itself may have engaged the mechanism that bypassed that preventive measure. 

Furthermore, Hankey is not merely not at his best here, he also lets his prejudices show by confusing some of his speculations with his hard-earned facts and reasoning to the detriment of the latter.  Hankey displays a fuel selector valve, but he does not say that it is the type of valve that was on Kennedy’s plane.  In fact, for illustration purposes he uses the same fuel selector valve for both the Piper Saratoga and Egypt Air 990 though there are many brands and models of such valves and it is unlikely that they would be the same.  Furthermore, in his demonstration of how the idiot stop is normally bypassed, I suspect that he has confused the “idiot stop” with the disengagement mechanism that must be used to move the fuel selector past the idiot stop to the OFF position.   I have tried without success to have him respond to my emails to clarify this and other of his assertions. 

Perhaps the biggest hole in his reasoning comes from Hankey forgetting his own narrative.  If the fuel selector valve has been jammed into the OFF position by the force of the crash, its position is meaningless and perhaps that explains why the NTSB made no further mention of it.  But if the fuel selector valve switching mechanism is functioning properly, it being found in the OFF position means – on Hankey’s own account – that the clean-up crew that worked on the plane and removed the voice recorder's battery and the Flight Log decided to put it in that position or at least left it in that position, but this latter is hard to imagine.  On Hankey’s assumption that a crew was sent to remove the mind-controlled CFI who had switched the valve to OFF even though he didn’t need to do so, that same clean-up crew that wished to conceal all the traces of the CFI’s dastardly deed would have simply switched it to ON.  Hankey forgets the most important fact entailed by his own narrative: the persons in charge of the final position of the fuel selector valve were the clean-up crew of the perpetrators, so to assume that the position is some spectacular piece of evidence, let alone spectacular evidence of a mind-controlled CFI, has nothing to support it but hunch.  Hankey again forgets his major plot line: to kill Kennedy and make it look like a dumb-ass careless rich kid accident.  The NTSB ruled that there were no mechanical failures of the plane and Hankey states that there was good visibility, so for the smear to work there could not have been a competent CFI aboard.  That’s why the presumptive CFI’s body had to be recovered and removed.

The clearest example of prejudice is that Hankey ignores the NTSB’s description of the fuel selector valve, a description entirely consistent with its being found in the OFF position due to trauma or jamming in the wake of the crash.  Hankey does a dishonest sleight-of-hand here, supposedly reading the report to you the viewer but in fact reading only the boldfaced text and offering a still frame with only the underlined portion emphasized.  The viewer must freeze-frame and zoom the DVD to read the following description of the fuel selector valve in the NTSB report of which Hankey highlights only “the valve itself was found in the OFF position”:

The fuel selector valve was recovered and examined.  The bottom of the fuel selector valve was missing.  All 3 fuel lines connections were broken off.  The valve was separated from the fuselage attachment points and was impact damaged.  The selector valve linkage was deformed, and the valve itself was found in the OFF position.

One must trick the DVD to learn how badly damaged the fuel selector valve was and how readily it could have been found damaged with the switch jammed into the OFF position.  By failing to do good, honest, dispassionate forensic work and reasoning on this point, Hankey has invited himself to be labeled a “conspiracy nut” for the far-out mind-control scenario with little to support it but his intuitions.  My enthusiasm for his work would be gone if it were shown, as I do not believe it can be shown, that he was similarly careless or biased in the main arguments presented above.