Posted on 03/27/2004 8:47:20 AM PST by Sabertooth
Yeah. NOW the guy gets a brain, lol.
Meantime, the whole things still smells fishy and makes no sense. There's no motive. Various publications have copies of the files, Bush's people can get them anytime they want, and, in fact, anybody else who wants to obtain the files through the FOIA can get them the same way Nicosia did.
I can't figure out if there is even a story here, but my first overriding suspicion is that this clown Nicosia, of San Fransicko, is trying to get his name in the news; make a name for himself. Nothing else makes sense.
Hmmmmm
Thanks for the other links, too. I see I missed some recent threads due to my concentrating more on the Richard Clarke brouhaha.
In the fall of 1971, tensions over the direction in which the organization was heading, as it spread out into various community activities and took on a more consciously anti-imperialist position, were becoming more evident. In November, an emergency meeting of the steering committee was held in Kansas City. This meeting was a result of the growing friction among members of the steering committee, and between new members and the old leadership.
[snip]
[Terry DuBose] TDB: That was also where there was actually some discussion of assassinating some senators during the Christmas holidays. They were people who I knew from the organization with hotheaded rhetoric.
They had a list of six senators ... Helms, John Tower, and I can't remember the others, who they wanted to assassinate when they adjourned for Christmas. They were the ones voting to fund the war. They approached me about assassinating John Tower because he was from Texas. The logic made a certain amount of sense because there's thousands of people dying in southeast Asia. We can shoot these six people and probably stop it. Some of us were willing to sabotage materials, but when it came to people ... I mean, there were a lot of angry people...
The following is from Gerald Nicosia's book, "Home To War," pp 221-223:
[Scott] Camil proposed VVAW return in force to Washington, D.C., and there apply pressure in every conceivable way to the legislators who were still voting to fund the war. After the assembly of coordinators defeated the plan, he was told it was “a closed issue at this point." Camil replied that such a tactic was "never a closed issue." He then made known an even more radical proposal, which he intended to submit to the coordinators for their approval. If undertaken, he claimed, it would guarantee the end of congressional support for the war. It was this proposal that nearly blew the Kansas City convention wide open, and which branded Camil as both dangerous and crazy for the remainder of his time in the organization.
What Camil sketched was so explosive that the coordinators feared lest government agents even hear of it. So they decamped to a church on the outskirts of town with the intention of debating the plan in complete privacy. When they got the church, however, they found that the government was already on to them; their "debugging expert" uncovered microphones hidden all over the place. An instantaneous decision was made to move again - to Common Ground, a Mennonite hall used by homeless vets as a "crash pad," on 77th Terrace. This time a vote was taken to exclude anyone but regional coordinators and members the national office. The rest of the members, even trusted leaders such as Randy Barnes and John Upton (who had earned their credibility in the mud and tears of Dewey Canvon III), were forced to wait outside on the grass, where messengers brought frequent word of what was going on inside. According to Barnes, everybody knew that the discussion in that hall "was grounds for criminal indictment of conspiracy."
"Whoever did this wanted to know something about John Kerry," Nicosia said.
Now who would fit Nicosia's description of such a suspect? I can't think of anyone who fits. If the Bush campaign wanted the information in those files, they could obtain it legitimately. Hillary Clinton--Kerry's only other major political rival at this point--would have Kerry's files already. If Kerry wanted his own files he could do an FOIA on them and get them legitimately; and besides that, Nicosia claims he was going to give Kerry the files to review later, anyway. So there is no motive for anyone who wants to know something about Kerry to steal these files. A motive that is more intuitively obvious and makes more sense is that someone wanted to conceal information about Kerry by stealing the files. But instead of entertaining this intuitively-obvious motive, Nicosia's response is to point the finger towards a hypothetical suspect who "wanted to know something about John Kerry". Nicosia's voicing of such counter-intuitive theorizing to the press points the finger of suspicion back towards himself as either the perpetrator of a staged theft or complicit in a staged theft, IMO.
Add to that the lack of evidence of forced entry, which again points to Nicosia as a suspect. Nicosia appears to have anticipated being questioned about this--or to have already been questioned about this by the police--for he tells the press:
"The police told me that burglars very easily could have come in through a sliding door without signs of a forced entry," he said.
Did the police really say that or believe it? Or did Nicosia himself come up with that explanation in anticipation of the police and the press questioning why there were no signs of forced entry? The more Nicosia talks, the more he sounds to me like someone trying to sell a pre-concocted alibi. My top guesses would be that either he's concealing the files on Kerry's behalf or he's doing this as a publicity stunt--the latter scenario having several possible variations depending on where Nicosia's political allegiance lies, whether he's being bribed or blackmailed, etc.
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