The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
Skepticast #25: January 11th 2006 (Download MP3)
Topics:
Issue #1. Did Castro Kill JFK
Issue #2. Science or Fiction
Issue #3. Political Correctness vs Freedom of Speech
Issue #4. Iran Denies the Holocaust
Issue #5. Stem Cell Research Fraud in South Korea
Issue #1. News Items – Did Castro Kill JFK
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=11440
Newly Released Movie Pins Blame on Castro for JFK’s Assassination
by Jim Burns
Posted Jan , 2006
Another theory has arisen on to the death of America’s 35th President John F. Kennedy. A newly released film that explores JFK’s death is claiming that his accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was directed and paid to kill the president by Cuba’s Castro government.
A German documentary film entitled “Rendezvous with Death ---why Kennedy had to die” will be shown on German television on Friday. Journalist Wilfried Huismann, the filmmaker, says Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, traveled to Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination and met agents from Cuba's G-2 intelligence service.
Huismann told Germany’s Deutsche Welle radio, “We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962.”
“He (Oswald) was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy,” said Huismann. “It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.”
Several have said since the Kennedy assassination that Cuban intelligence officials contacted Oswald after he was alerted by the Soviets intelligence agency the KGB in 1962. He returned to the United States after living in the Soviet Union for several years. One source has told this writer that Oswald met in Mexico City with some Castro operatives’ just days before JFK died.
Huismann was asked why the United States did not pursue the Mexican lead.
“Kennedy and Castro were out to kill each other,” Huismann says.
“After Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963,” Huismann continued, “[President] Lyndon B. Johnson found out that the US had a secret, illegal murder program focused on Fidel Castro. He hadn't been informed before that.”
“He (Johnson) knew that Castro knew, and he was afraid that the discovery of these mutual assassination attempts could force him to carry out an invasion of Cuba, which he believed could result in a third -- nuclear -- world war. And as a conservative pragmatist, he (Johnson) decided within a few hours, in agreement with Robert Kennedy, to drop the whole thing and to ban FBI and CIA officials from pursuing the trail leading to Cuba,” said Huismann.
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig says in the film that President Johnson believed Cuba was to blame and feared a pronounced swing to the right if the truth were known that would keep the Democrats out of power for a long time.
Haig -- a US military adviser at the time -- said, "He (Johnson) said 'we must simply not allow the American people to believe Fidel Castro could have killed our president'.
"He (Johnson) was convinced Castro killed Kennedy and he took it to his grave," Haig concluded.
Before he left office in 1969, President Johnson had told ABC News commentator Howard K. Smith, “Kennedy was out to get Castro but Castro got him.
Meanwhile, BBC Radio quoted ex-Cuban agent Oscar Marino, as saying that Havana had “exploited” Lee Harvey Oswald, who was arrested but shot to death on live television before he was transported from the Dallas police jail to the Dallas County jail.
Conspiracy theories on the killing have variously accused Cuba, Russia and the US of acting alone or jointly.
However, an FBI officer sent to follow the Oswald's trail during a visit to Mexico was recalled after only three days and the investigation called off.
Laurence Keenan, now 81, told BBC that it was "perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in".
"I realized that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history," Keenan said.
Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine sharpshooter who worked in a book depository building that overlooked the assassination site. Oswald had a Russian wife, called himself a Communist and agitated on behalf of Castro's Cuba.
The film was five years in the making and will be shown on Germany's main ARD public TV station. It was funded by a series of German public broadcasters as well as Japan's NHK television network.
Huismann concluded, “It's history. Only people's awareness will change, the impression they have. And it will provide an answer to the question that has very much upset many million people over the years: Why did this horrible thing happen?”
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, over a year after he faced off with Castro and Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev over the placement of missiles in Cuba in what became known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” The Soviet Union removed those missiles even though in later years several people contended that many of those missiles were left behind.
Shortly after Kennedy’s death, President Johnson appointed a commission headed by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren to investigate the assassination. One of the commission members was then House Republican Leader and later President Gerald R. Ford.
The Warren report concluded that Oswald for Kennedy’s the assassination. The commission could not find any persuasive evidence of a conspiracy, either domestic or foreign involving any other persons, groups, or countries. The theory that Oswald acted alone is also informally called the lone gunman theory.
The commission also concluded that only three bullets were fired during the assassination, and that Lee Harvey Oswald fired all three bullets from the Texas School Book Depository behind the motorcade. It noted that three empty shells were found in the sixth floor sniper's nest in the book depository, and the rifle was found with one live cartridge left in its chamber on the sixth floor.
The commission released its report in 1964. Upon its release all commission files were sealed away from public view until 2039 by executive order of President Johnson. According to the 1992 Assassinations Records Review Board laws, other Kennedy all assassination related documents that have not been destroyed are scheduled to be released to the public by 2017.
Copyright © 2006 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.
Issue #2. Science or Fiction
Each week our host will come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious. He will challenge our panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake – and you can play along.
Theme for this week – black holes. Black holes are massive astronomical objects that are large dead suns compressed by their own gravity into a single point – called a singularity.
Item #1 – Scientists have discovered evidence that a massive black hole is actually warping space and time, as predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Item #2 – The lonely black hole: Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that appears to have been ejected from its home galaxy.
Item #3 – Astronomers have discovered a small black hole within our own solar system.
So...which one is false? Follow this link to find out.
Issue #3. Political Correctness vs Freedom of Speech
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/6655.html
Speech Code of the Month: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
by Samantha Harris
January 3, 2006, at 03:18 p.m.
FIRE announces its Speech Code of the Month for January 2006: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
The Student Handbook at Massachusetts College for Liberal Arts (MCLA), a public institution bound by the First Amendment, contains a Picketing Policy that provides as follows: “There shall be no interference with a demonstration on the grounds of content of speech, except for any speech or demonstration, which…victimizes others because the speech contains offensive language and/or is motivated by hate or bias.” That’s right: MCLA will not interfere with a student demonstration unless it offends somebody. This policy is both absurd and unconstitutional.
The policy could easily be used to suppress almost any student demonstration. People ordinarily picket and demonstrate to express their strongly held opinions on controversial matters. Demonstrators frequently use strongly worded signs and slogans to get their point across. This is the very nature of a demonstration, and it will often, if not always, offend people who hold opposing beliefs. Therefore, to permit interference with a demonstration because it contains “offensive language” is to permit interference with almost any demonstration imaginable. To cite just a few examples: a pro-Palestinian demonstration in which students refer to Israelis as “occupiers” will offend some Israeli students. An abortion rights demonstration in which protestors chant “keep your rosaries off my ovaries” will offend some anti-abortion students. An anti-war demonstration in which demonstrators carry “no blood for oil” signs will offend some war veterans and supporters. The notion that a university would suppress the expression of these ideas because they might “offend” other students is completely inconsistent with the role of colleges and universities as “vital centers for the Nation’s intellectual life.” Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 836 (1995).
The policy is also blatantly unconstitutional. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court, “[s]peech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest.” Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 4 (1949). In keeping with this principle, courts across the country have repeatedly stated that schools may not restrict speech simply because someone finds it offensive. A court in Pennsylvania held that there is “no question that the free speech clause protects a wide variety of speech that listeners may consider deeply offensive….” Saxe v. State College Area School District, 240 F.3d 200, 206 (3d Cir. 2001). Another court in Michigan wrote not only that “[i]t is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers,” but also that “[t]hese principles acquire a special significance in the University setting, where the free and unfettered interplay of competing views is essential to the institution's educational mission.” Doe v. University of Michigan, 721 F. Supp. 852, 863 (E.D. Mich.1989).
As a public university, MCLA is legally bound to uphold the constitutional rights of its students, and it has failed. In Terminiello v. Chicago, Justice Douglas wrote that “[t]he right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.” MCLA’s attempt to strip students of that right and to create a little totalitarian regime right in Massachusetts earns it the distinction of being our January 2006 Speech Code of the Month.
If you believe that your college or university should be a Speech Code of the Month, please email speechcodes@thefire.org with a link to the policy and a brief description of why you think attention should be drawn to this code.
Issue #4. Iran Denies the Holocaust
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.246551760&par=0
IRAN: HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE SOON IN TEHRAN
Tehran, 5 Jan. (AKI) - Iran has decided to rewrite and revise the history of the Holocaust. Following the repeated declarations by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other senior government officials on the need to re-examine the history of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, the association of Islamic Journalists of Iran has been tasked with quickly putting together an international conference on the Holocaust.
"President Ahmadinejad has placed at the centre of international attention, a very important question on the truthfulness of the version that Europe and the Zionists have imposed on the world on the murder of Jews during the years of the great war, and therefore we are of the opinion that it is useful and necessary to organise an international conference on that theme, where all the historians and researchers, even those that do not believe in the official version, will be able to express themselves freely," Mehdi Afzali, spokesperson of the Association of Islamic Journalists told Adnkronos International (AKI).
"We want to offer a free and democratic platform to the historians to examine in-depth this myth, seeing that in different European countries there exist laws against democracy and freedom that to do not allow intellectuals who believe in a version distinct from that which is officially pronounced on the Holocaust," added Afzali.
"We will invite those who believe in the imposed version as well as all those who have spent years of their lives in the study of documents related to the Holocaust and have come to the conclusion that the history books in schools and universities do not correspond to the truth," said Afzali, who however refused to supply the names of the revisionist historians who have been contacted to appear in the conference in Tehran. Revisionists are those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.
In Iran, books by the English historian, David Irving, currently in custody in an Austrian jail after having been accused of denying the Holocaust, are very popular.
Among the names of possible guests at the conference are the Israeli journalist lsrael Shamir, a convert to Christianity, and Horst Mahler from Germany, a former member of the the terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. Other revisionist scholars, such as the French Robert Faurisson and the American Arthur Butz, are also some of the other possible participants of the conference in Tehran.
Issue #5. Stem Cell Research Fraud
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10589085/