The US is getting the shaft in war making.
Two invasions and two bloody, nasty quagmires.

Rare is the Maureen Dowd column that is more than pancake face powder, or a shoe-horned turn at national politics, and rare still is a piece with insight into the US’ two beleaguered faraway wars.
In her column this morning, Dowd touches upon the deathly maze of Afghanistan and how the US is up against some terrible and experienced fighters.
The money graph:

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing.
And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work.
Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

Along with the IEDs, the savage car bombs and a wicked, back-stabbing insurgency, is a shitload of cruel corruption, a corruption so deep, the the majority of Afghans would take the Taliban over the supposedly
legitimate government in Kabul.
Indeed, the culture of corruption is a way of life, according to some of those 92,000 documents leaked Sunday by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks.

Why is the US there?
There have been 1,207 US military deaths in Afghanistan and to fuel the conflict there requires gasoline at $85 a gallon — enough said.
The US needs to do a quick shit out of dodge, eagle pull before the situation gets worse.

One really mind-boggling particular nowadays is the continual use of hypocritical-irony; creating a two-faced lie through the clenched-teeth of a smile.

Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers.
For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through their voice while truly trying to claim they’re not upset, it would not be verbal irony by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony).
But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that they were upset by claiming they were not, the utterance would be verbal irony.
This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves.
There are examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic.

We’re living and walking around in an age of horrifying and catastrophic irony.

A terrible case in point: Nimble-minded George Jr. arrogantly blubbered to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001:

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

And the irony of it all:

Americans are asking “Why do they hate us?”
They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

(Illustration found here).

The then-spawned The Global War on Terror coupled with the creation of the huge, bungling Department of Homeland Security reproduced what it supposedly sought to eradicate — an example would best be described in the old reflective-adage of pouring JP4 jet fuel on a small, charcoal brazier in order to smother the fire.

This morning from Al Jazeera English:

Extremists held in a US-run detention centre in Iraq were allowed to teach fellow detainees how to use explosives and become suicide bombers, a former inmate has told Al Jazeera.
Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.
“Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,” Mohammed said.
“For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].”
Adel, who was held for four years without charge at Camp Bucca, said that extremists were allowed to speak freely to fellow inmates.
“In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority,” he said.
“He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees – they became extremists like him.”

And those five young, naive Americans arrested last week week in Pakistan has created a good scare about homegrown jihad, and the fabled wide, wide world-war on terror has doubled back on itself, feeding off its own entrails, as it were, to make matters far, far worse.
Those lost souls from Virginia were nabbed only after one of the guys’ daddy, Khalid Farooq, called authorities — and after his son and the others were arrested, and just to be on the safe-terror side: Police said they’d also detained Khalid Farooq as a precautionary measure.
One never knows the mystery of jihad.
Read a good view on the mythology of the US-led terror war here.

And this past week, the current US president, Barack Obama, reached far into the cosmic-ironic heavens to pluck a few words to whitewash the total-irony of  being both a Nobel peace-prize winner and a war escalator.

(Illustration found here).

Although Obama claimed he was “most surprised and deeply humbled” by the Nobel prize in October, he popped some hawkish-spin into the peace mix last week in Oslo, Norway:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
…
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their (Gandhi and King) examples alone.
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.
For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.
Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

But what about change?
And what about reality vs bullshit?

A situation stated best via a letter to the editor, published Friday in the New York Times: The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.

Obama, therefore, has produced verbal irony using both the situational and dramatic ironies — Pain is just weakness leaving the body!

“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903

Writing in this modern age is still the same as in Twain’s day, only quicker and with a lot more adjectives, a word-group the Huck-n-Tom author found abhorrent.
However, we much-so live in an multi-adjective world (notice the much-used hyphen modifiers) as the data and information availability defies the imagination — the red links in this post testifies, but whether any kind of truth is at those links so poses the real question.

Truth is in the eye of the reader and should be in the mind of the writer — even authentic, good fiction is just truth self-created.

(Illustration found here).

Nowadays, writing takes two forms — no longer just the piece of paper/book held in one’s hand, but there’s also a virtual version, found only online.
And having now performed in newspapers and online, the latter is the more personal, especially since no financial compensation is part of the literary mix and no deadlines other than the inherent, obsessive desire to write and have at least one dumb-ass read it, but sadly, has no newsroom — blogging is most likely the equivalent of a professional diary in the form of journalism practiced under the auspices of some-type literature.
Of course, I speak of real writing/journalism/literature — anyone can get a blog, currently there must be a hundred-quadrillion blogs with even a blog for bloggers — but there’s a fairly-insufficient, short-list (how about that for adjective-hyphenated modifiers) of readable blogs where there’s decent writing and good journalism.
If one seeks current events in a somewhat fervent way, there’s only about a dozen blogs or so to be visited on a daily basis and maybe twice that number on a semi-regular basis — I tend to favor those sites with an emphasis on reality, which are few in number.
The MSM has to be verified and most of the time, that’s found strictly online (one extremely-glaring example is the New York Times Pentagon pundit story, on which the MSM’s TV side performed a near-complete black-out).

Blogging is what I do — and it fits.
According to that most-massive of information sites, Wikipedia: Blogging is not a full-time job for most bloggers, nor is it their main source of income. A blogger can also be a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer or a musician, and thus bloggers typically maintain a variety of professions for which the act of blogging is their communicative outlet with the public.
My “full-time job” in this so-called “variety of professions” is with a northern California liquor store and currently I’m in a kind of the OJTing manager — our long-time manager suffered a stroke and I was tapped to take her job.
She’s doing fine and recuperating well, but not coming back.
Hence not many blog posts the past two weeks — way-too tired to do much more than surf the major news sites.
And, of course, since there’s not many visitors here, not a great crowd has been disappointed when they arrive at Compatible Creatures and it’s the same old shit.
But what the heck?
I’m a freakin’ blogger!
From Andrew Sullivan in a September 2004 piece in  Time magazine:

The critics of blogs cite their lack of professionalism. Piffle. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it isn’t really a profession. It’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience, and you’re all set. You get better at it merely by doing it — which is why fancy journalism schools are, to my mind, such a waste of time.

Indeed.
Although a graduate of the fairly-prestigious University of Florida’s J-school (In 1974, supposedly listed second behind number-one Columbia), I OJTed my first journalism job as police reporter — J-school didn’t really teach real-life and the only thing I got from UF was the sheepskin.
One doesn’t really need a telephone to be a good journalist (either print or online), but you sure-as-shit require “a conscience.”

Journalism movies are rare, and those portraying a conscience, rarer still — at least one, Shattered Glass, displayed none at all.

And just last night, I watched a DVD version of the newest, State of Play, a real-enjoyable twisting thriller set in a big-time MSM newsroom with a kind of subtext of new media vs old — and in this case ending happily, the veteran print journalist leaving a late-night, on-deadline newsroom nearly hand-in-hand with the newbie blogger.
Damn-good film, fun to watch and kind of neat to see a reporter as a character in what is way-more an action movie, or shoot-’em-up whodunit then the rigid journalism-first kind of flick, such as, All the President’s Men, or Good Night, and Good Luck.
Read a review of “State of Play” from HuffPost if you wish.

Print guy and blogger gal: Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams

One disappointment in “State of Play” was lack of any kind of detail in the actual professional working-together of blogger and print journalist — a most-valid point if the newspaper is to survive into the Internet age.
McAdams’ blogger character seems more on site just as a tag-along to Crowe’s version of ace newspaper reporter — spunky for the newsroom — and in a near-final sequence, allows the blogger to click “send” on the big story.
Yippe do da!
The movie also seems to view blogs (and supposedly the Internet at large) as more for trash, tabloid-fueled gossip then any serious presentation of current events — wrong!
The conscience of “State of Play” is that newspaper guys, print journalists, want the last thread in the needlework of a story to be all laid bare — the end is worth what it took to get there.

And what would Mark Twain say about all this media?
He’d most-likely have viewed it as weird, but inevitable.
From 1880′s A Telephonic Conversation:

Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer.
You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return.
You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay.
You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.

Extra! Extra!
Now everyone is the other end of the wire.

In one of the most outlandish public elections in recent memory, the government of Afghanistan has re-installed itself on a pile of criminal corruption so putrid even an idiot can smell it a mile away.
Despite all the cuddling, a hard-serious fact remains: “Right now 85 percent of the government is corrupt,” said Ahmed Shah Lumar, a businessman in the southern city of Kandahar. He said bribery, extortion and other corrupt practices extend “from the very small person” in government to the very top.

And US GIs — along with troops from all over the world — are getting blown to bits to keep this pile of shit in office.

(Illustration found here).

And Hamid Karzai, supposedly just re-elected to a joyous second term as Afghan president, has apparently learned the trade-craft of bullshit, memory-lapse gall from a master: George Jr.
If you can’t beat ‘em, lie about it, then throw up a pious smoke-and-mirrors, holier-than-thou stream of consciousness.
From Al Jazeera English just this morning:

“Over the last few days some political and diplomatic circles and propaganda agencies of certain foreign countries have intervened in Afghanistan’s internal affairs by issuing instructions concerning the composition of Afghan government organs and political policy of Afghanistan,” the foreign ministry statement said on Saturday.
“Such instructions have violated respect for Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.”

In the past few days just about everybody that’s anybody has trashed Karzai’s government.
In the words of the UK’s Gordon Brown, who is catching bad flak for the Brits dying in the Afghan killing fields, the war there is bad news: “Sadly, the government of Afghanistan had become a byword for corruption,” Mr. Brown said in a speech to defense experts. “And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption.”

And as President Obama contemplates troops increases (or not), he should have some sense, he should think about more than the politics — get the US out of Afghanistan.

The trouble: No one will leave.
The UK’s turd-knuckle Brown in the same breath as the above quote said it for all the bullshit political-talking assholes on the planet: “We cannot, must not and will not walk away.”

Oh, but they will, they surely will, but it won’t be pretty — just ask Alex the Great, (Brown should study his own British history) and the Soviets.

Instead of George Jr.’s arrogant rant: “I want justice,” he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ “
We should follow Andy Borowitz’s reporting:

In a bold new strategy designed to locate the world’s most wanted man, the United States today dispatched a team of paparazzi to find Osama bin Laden.
“If these people can find George Clooney when he’s vacationing on Lake Como, they can find Osama,” one intelligence insider said.

(Illustration found here).

In the face of Dick Cheney’s insanely-ironic blast last month that President Obama was “dithering” on Afghanistan, dickhead and George Jr. more than dithered in December 2001 in letting Osama and his boys slip out of the east Afghan mountains of  Tora Bora and flee to Pakistan, a move directly connected and a root-cause of the shit-mess now in the Af-Pak region.
Read a good, comprehensive report on the entire Tora Bora muck-up here.

Late to the game: US military/intelligence — pushed by the Bush White House — total dithered in adapting to the new (though very, very ancient) method of “asymmetrical warfare” (although Don Rumsfeld called for a study [pdf] of such tactics and strategy in 2002), which all insurgency/guerrilla groups practice and continue to this very day, and instead relied on a pure power, “shock and awe,” style, something akin to randomly swinging around a large shovel to combat a mosquito in a crowded theater lobby.
Most-likely scenario — the mosquito will vanish amidst the carnage inflicted on all those innocent-bystander theater patrons.

And Osama has been a weird, terror-like guy a long time.
One of his sons, Omar, has penned a ‘Dearest Mommy’-type memoir that paints a picture of a crazy person from the get-go — war against the infidal above all things, even from being a daddy.
From Time magazine’s review of “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” (St. Martin’s Press):

The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the U.S., but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later, when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks.
“That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”
…
Still, ever the dutiful Saudi son, Omar couldn’t bring himself to break with his family until the day that his father asked his sons to volunteer for suicide missions.
When Omar protested, Osama replied, “You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons.” Omar writes, “I finally knew exactly where I stood.
My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

Another view inside the infamous bin Laden family can be found here, which concluded: One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”

Osama bin Laden, however (apparently the .01 of the “evil variety”), has become the most-wanted person on the planet and just about everybody on the planet can recognize his mug — and the group he founded, al-Qaeda, is now listed along with Nazis and child rapists as bad, bad bogeymen of history.
Bill Moyers Journal has a good history on Osama and al-Qaeda in campaigns against the West, and especially the US, culminating with those attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
And nowadays, despite all the manpower, firepower, unmanned drones and satellite images, Osama is still at large, causing some to question whether the guy’s still alive (read this), although a lot of horrific shit is still taking place in al-Qaeda’s name.
In Iraq, the group claimed responsibility for the horrific car bombing a couple of weeks ago in Baghdad, which killed 160 people and wounded more than 500, and this despite all kinds of smack-down operations.
This analysis last week from CNN‘s veteran war reporter Michael Ware:

While al Qaeda in Iraq has been gutted from within, principally by Sunni insurgents turning on them and assassinating them over recent years, the network still exists.
Al Qaeda, an organization built with the expectation of loss, has endured and will continue to do so until Iraq’s slated January election and beyond.
…
Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the network it once was, it’s not able to deliver multiple suicide bombings on an almost daily basis.
When I was last in Baghdad nationalist insurgents told me there were but a handful of operational al Qaeda cells in the city.
Nonetheless, they warned five committed al Qaeda members can “wreak havoc.”

Yes indeed.

From Al Jazeera English:

The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.
In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.
Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.

Also at the link is an most-excellent video on the subject.

In Afghanistan, the US appears to have driven out the group, as top dog Gen. Stan McNasty (oops,sorry) McChrystal told reporters in September: “I do not see indications of a large al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan now.”
So why does the US then continue its presence there?

Matthew Hoh has been in the news lately — he’s the US State Department official who resigned in September in protest over the Afghan war strategy — and this week he was on CNN to discuss the issue, which also included some words about al-Qaeda.

Crooks and Liars had this partial transcript:

ZAKARIA: Do you think  –  the top military brass have all endorsed General McChrystal’s report and request. Do you think that down on the ground there is a very different feeling?
HOH: Oh, yes. Yes, there is. I think on the ground  –  and the perspective is that, what is the strategic value of what we’re doing here. Why are we doing this? What are we getting out of it?
It’s not going to defeat al Qaeda. It’s not going to — if you take our two goals as being the defeat of al Qaeda, and then, because of its nuclear weapons and because of the relationship with India, the stabilization of the government in Islamabad, 60,000 troops taking 50, 60 dead a month in this country, and how many wounded and killing how many Afghans, as well, it doesn’t accomplish either of those goals.
ZAKARIA: Why doesn’t it defeat al Qaeda?
HOH: My belief is that, after 2001, al Qaeda evolved. They became, as I like to say, an ideological cloud. It exists on the Internet. They don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan. They’ve got safe havens in five, six, seven other countries.

In this respect, should the US invade and occupy those “five, six, seven other countries” where Osama’s boys have been operating?
One would hope the obvious is apparent — the fight in Afghanistan, no matter how long and cruel, will not yield Osama bin Laden or any of his boys: Asked whether he would give up bin Laden, Mullah Omar explained in a September 21, 2001, interview with the Voice of America that “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims . . . that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again.”

The moral: When trying to kill a mosquito, much less anything as vaporous and crazy as an ideological cloud, don’t use a big shovel in a small, crowded room.

One wonders what is bubbling up in George Jr.’s brain fluids and what makes the guy so blind he can’t see the huge, out-stretched, multi-layered hand about to slap his freakin’ face.
Either he’s so dumb to be believed, or he just don’t give a fat-rat’s ass.
Most-likely a strange, biological combination of both.

On Saturday, the former president (I write that with a heavy heart) told a leadership conference in New Delhi, India, the war in Afghanistan should be escalated beyond the boiling point as apparently the conflict is the linchpin for the freedom of the planet.

The boy hasn’t lost his touch for irony and unmitigated gall.

(Illustration found here).

Via Agence France-Presse:

“If the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and their extremist allies were allowed to take over Afghanistan again, they would have a safe haven and the Afghan people, particularly the Afghan women, would face a return to a brutal tyranny.”
“This region and the world would face serious threats,” he added.

The former buck-stops-here Big Decider guy steered clear of offering direct advice to President Obama, who is currently figuring out what to with George Jr.’s Afghan debacle — more troops and how many — but that didn’t plug his face-hole, however:

“…the work is hard and I hope we don’t abandon the people of Afghanistan.”

The asshole has a memory lapse — George Jr. abandoned the country in December 2001 when he started prep work on the Iraq invasion — and even after it became apparent the Taliban was re-emerging years later, denied a troop increase (due to the Iraqi front going to shit in a wire basket).
And he punked the Indians with the continuing line that extremists want to destroy us simply because they just plain loath our way of life.

Bush said both the United States and India were “involved in an ideological struggle against extremists who murder the innocent to advance a dark vision of extremism and control.”
“They attack political, financial and diplomatic targets because they hate our way of life and they hate our vision for freedom and human rights and human dignity and prosperity and peace,” Bush told the conference.

This is also the same George Jr. who waxed poetic nearly two years ago  about the sweet-fiction of war: “I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.”

For what, you lying, freakin’ freak!

Nearly 50 years have passed since that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, and now some new insights have surfaced into those few precious moments in the abrupt transition of presidential power — and it ain’t macho.

In a new book on the November 1963 event, The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President, by Steven Gillon, paints LBJ as near the break-down point.

(Illustration found here).

Reportedly, JFK’s military aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, could not find LBJ on Air Force One after people had told him Johnson was on board — everyone figured he had departed already on Air Force Two as Kennedy and Johnson arrived in Dallas on separate aircraft — until the general checked the shitter in the presidential bedroom.

Via a piece by Gillon at HuffPost:

What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking.
“I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled.
He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978.
“McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee.
Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”
Author Christopher Anderson claimed that McHugh shared a similar, although slightly more dramatic, version of this story when he interviewed the General for his book Jackie after Jack, published in 1998.

In complete contrast to LBJ’s blubberings, Jackie Kennedy was stoic and strong, seemingly in control despite the horror blowing around her.
She was only 34 then, the youngest First Lady in US presidential history.

In an interview (pdf) with historian Theodore White about a week after the shooting (Nov. 29, 1963), Jackie had this to say about the chaos on-board Air Force One, spinning the tale “one brief shinning moment that was known as Camelot”:

“…History…, everybody kept saying to me put a cold towel around my head” (and wipe the blood off: she is referring to the swearing-in scene at the plane, when Johnson is sworn in at the plant at Love Field and she was beside him)… “later, I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face spattered with blood and hair…I wiped it off with Kleenex.
History. I thought no one really wants me there.
Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off?
I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done…If I’d just had blood and caked hair when” (they took pictures of swearing in).
“Then later I said to Bobby what’s the line between histrionics and drama.
I should have left the blood on.”

In 1995, a year after Jackie’s death, The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston released the interview notes.

Another strange, little-known incident that day — US District Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Johnson, and JFK’s Bible and a three-by-five-inch file card containing the oath.
According to the National Archives:

Judge Hughes, in the process of stepping down the boarding steps, was hailed by a self-assured man who inquired if she wanted the two items she held in her hand.
Assuming he was a security man and because the items did not belong to her, Judge Hughes transferred to the man the file card and the President’s Bible, neither of which were ever located.

Kennedy’s assassination will always be clouded in conspiracy, pity and…romance.