It would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers

Saturday, July 12th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill (author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) came to see Vincent Bugliosi (author of Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders and DA on the case) as his nemesis:

I’ve already mentioned Mary Neiswender, the reporter who told me that Bugliosi was “terribly dangerous”: he’d sent an emissary warning that he knew where her kids went to school and implied that “it would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers.”

[…]

In 1968, Bugliosi fell into a scandal kept under wraps by the DA’s office until ’72, when he was running for district attorney of Los Angeles. (He lost the election.) He’d stalked and terrorized someone he was convinced had carried on an affair with his wife and fathered his first-born child, Vincent Jr. As clichéd as it sounds, Bugliosi suspected his milkman, Herbert Weisel, who was married with two children.

Weisel had left his job in 1965, eight months before Vincent Jr. was born. Bugliosi was sure that Weisel had quit because of his transgression—the evidence must’ve been in Weisel’s personnel file at the dairy. He made anonymous phone calls to Weisel’s wife and then to Weisel himself, demanding him to release his files. The couple began to notice “strange cars” circling their block after dark. They changed their phone number, which was already unlisted. Two days later, they got a typed letter postmarked from L.A. “You shouldn’t have changed your phone number,” it said. “That wasn’t nice.”

Eventually, Bugliosi’s wife, Gail, approached the Weisels, revealing her identity in the hopes that she could arrange a détente. The Weisels told her that her husband should be getting psychiatric help. “She told us that she’d tried many times, but that he wouldn’t do it,” they later testified in a civil deposition. She’d taken paternity and lie-detector tests to prove the child was his, but he still harbored doubts. “I know he’s sick,” she said. “He’s got a mental problem.”

The couple became so frightened that they stopped allowing their children to take the bus to school. They hired a lawyer and, after a mediation, Bugliosi agreed to stop harassing them and to pay them $ 100 for their silence. They refused the money. In ’72, with Bugliosi on the ballot, they decided it was their civic duty to go public—their tormentor aspired to the most powerful law enforcement job in the city. They told the papers of his yearlong harassment and intimidation campaign.

Enlisting his well-documented talent for fabrication, Bugliosi retaliated, telling the press that Weisel had stolen money from his kitchen table seven years earlier. Weisel sued him for slander and defamation. It wasn’t a tough case to win. In depositions, Bugliosi and his wife swore they’d only been worried about the alleged robbery of their home. The Weisels proved otherwise, bringing in witnesses who exposed the Bugliosis as perjurers. Soon it came out that Bugliosi had twice used an investigator in the DA’s office—his office—to get confidential information about Weisel, claiming he was a material witness in a murder case. Fearing the disclosure would cost him his job, Bugliosi settled out of court, paying the Weisels $ 12,500. He paid in cash, on the condition that they sign a confidentiality agreement and turn over the deposition tapes.

No sooner was the milkman imbroglio resolved than Bugliosi fell into another fiasco, again abusing his connection to the criminal justice system to straighten it out. His mistress, Virginia Cardwell, the single mother of a five-year-old, told him she was pregnant. It was his. With visions of public office still dancing in his mind, and Helter Skelter on the eve of publication, he ordered Cardwell, a Catholic, to get an abortion. She refused, but after Bugliosi threatened her and gave her money for the procedure, she lied and said she’d done it. He wasn’t about to take her word for it. He got her doctor’s name, called him, and learned that she’d never been to see him, after which he headed to her apartment and beat her so savagely that she suffered a miscarriage. He choked her, struck her in the face several times with his fists, threw her onto the floor, pulled her up by her hair, and threatened to kill her if she had the baby, saying she wouldn’t leave the apartment alive if she lied to him: “I will break every bone in your body—this will ruin my career.” Bruised and battered, Cardwell gathered herself and went to the Santa Monica Police Department, where she filed a criminal complaint. The cops photographed her bruises and then, evidently, did nothing.

That evening, an eagle-eyed reporter spotted the incident on the police blotter and wrote about it in the next day’s paper. Bugliosi returned to Cardwell’s apartment that morning, this time with his secretary. The pair held her hostage for four hours until she agreed to tell the police she’d filed a false complaint the previous day. Bugliosi assured her he’d use his contacts in the DA’s office to make sure she was never brought to trial for the false report. He and his secretary used Cardwell’s typewriter to forge a backdated bill for legal services, telling her to show it to the police. He listened in on an extension as she called to turn herself in. The dispatcher said they’d send a patrol car to get her. He vigorously shook his head, and Cardwell told the dispatcher she’d be fine getting in on her own.

The dispatcher sent a car anyway. One of the detectives who’d seen Cardwell that day, Michael Landis, told me Bugliosi and “a couple of his associates” answered the door “and tried to discourage us from talking to her. We were persistent and we did see her—and she was pretty well banged up.” Cardwell claimed that the bruises were from an accident: her son had hit her in the face with a baseball bat. She’d only blamed Bugliosi because she was angry that he’d overcharged her for legal advice concerning her divorce. “This outrageous charge, even though false, can be extremely harmful,” Bugliosi told police.

Cardwell’s brother persuaded her to file a lawsuit against Bugliosi. Bugliosi’s story fell apart before the suit was even filed, and he settled with Cardwell in exchange for her confidentiality—ensuring, he hoped, that his lies to the police, fabrication of evidence, and obstruction of justice would never see the light of day. He was wrong. The Virginia Cardwell story hit the papers in 1974, when his primary opponent in the California state attorney general’s race, William Norris, caught wind of it. (Bugliosi lost that election, too.) Because of his clout in the DA’s office, he was never prosecuted for assaulting Cardwell. Landis, the detective, called him “a whiney, sniveley little bastard,” saying, “I wanted to prosecute the son of a bitch.”

Posted in Crime | No Comments »

Pinpointing the exact firing location is a job for the drones

Friday, July 11th, 2025

Headlines early on in the invasion of Ukraine warned about the sheer power of Russian artillery, with advances following massive ‘fire curtain’ barrages, but, David Hamblin explains, Ukraine has been successful at countering Russian artillery:

Any gun firing can be spotted by counter-artillery radar, like the U.S. -made AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder, which tracks shells in flight and calculates their source. New Ukrainian-made acoustic detectors which recently went into mass production are likely to figure increasingly.

“The radar is typically the first step. It can detect the approximate area of a firing position, but it’s not precise,” says Michael. “Depending on distance and terrain, it may narrow the location down to a 200-by-200-meter area, which is too broad for a direct strike.”

Pinpointing the exact firing location is a job for the drones.

“Drones are essential for confirming the exact location of artillery,” says Michael. “We use fixed-wing drones, some with real-time video, others capturing high-resolution photos, for wide-area reconnaissance. These platforms allow us to assess whether the artillery is still in position and provide up-to-date imagery.”

[…]

“Artillery is easiest to spot when it’s firing — muzzle flashes, smoke, or movement of the crew make it visible,” says Michael. “Also, we can identify the artillery by its silhouette, even if it’s partially hidden somewhere in the trees or buildings. In covered areas, we look for signs like tracks, disturbed ground, or heat if thermal optics are available.”

[…]

“FPV drones, both quadcopters and fixed-wing types, have become more effective than traditional artillery in terms of precision engagement,” says Michael. “A high-quality FPV drone for now is the most effective way to destroy the artillery system.”

Several different types are used depending on the range, with fixed-wing FPVs typically having longer reach.

Surprisingly, drones are preferred because they are faster. It is highly counter-intuitive that 100 mph drone will reach a target quicker than a 700-mph artillery shell, but what counts is how long it takes to hit the target.

[…]

Dynamic conditions may mean a situation where a self-propelled gun fires off a few rounds and speeds away down a track. An artillery shell arriving after thirty seconds will miss by hundreds of meters. A drone which arrives later can spot the vehicle, follow it, and carry out a precision strike.

Towed guns are less likely to get away. But they are harder targets because they are not packed with fuel and ammunition like self-propelled guns.

[…]

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi says Russia’s long-range striking power has been halved, but on the front line there are still plenty of shells coming down.

Posted in War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAt the Battle of Friedland, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the French obtained a decisive victory and routed much of the Russian army:

When Ney’s exhausted corps began to fall back, Sénarmont divided his thirty guns into two batteries of fifteen each, with 300 rounds per cannon and 220 per howitzer. Sounding ‘Action Front’ on his bugles, his teams galloped forward, unlimbered and fired first at 600 yards, then at 300, then at 150, and finally, with nothing but canister-shot, at 60. The Russian Ismailovsky Guards and the Pavlovsky Grenadiers tried to attack the batteries, but some 4,000 men fell to their fire in about twenty-five minutes. An entire cavalry charge was destroyed with two volleys of canister. The Russian left was utterly destroyed, and trapped against the Alle river. Sénarmont’s action became famous in military textbooks as an ‘artillery charge’, although his gunners suffered 50 per cent casualties.

[…]

Heat, exhaustion, nightfall and the pillaging of the town for food have all been advanced as explanations for why there was no Jena-style pursuit of the Russians after Friedland. It is also possible that Napoleon felt a wholesale massacre might have made it harder for Alexander to come to terms, and by then he very much wanted peace.

‘Their soldiers in general are good,’ he told Cambacérès, something he had hitherto not recognized, and which he would have done well to remember five years later.

For sheer concentration of effort, Friedland was Napoleon’s most impressive victory after Austerlitz and Ulm. At the cost of 11,500 killed, wounded and missing, he had utterly routed the Russians, whose losses have been estimated at around 20,000–or 43 per cent of their total–though only around twenty guns.

Percy’s hundred surgeons had to work through the night, and a general later recalled ‘meadows covered with limbs severed from their bodies, those frightful places of mutilation and dissection which the army called ambulances’.

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Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants

Sunday, July 6th, 2025

A Sinaloa drug cartel hacker was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday:

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”

The report said “the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

Posted in Crime, Technology, War | 3 Comments »

Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done

Saturday, July 5th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillAs Tom O’Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) flipped through “Jolly” West’s papers, he found signs that the CIA psychiatrist was associated with the JFK assassination:

According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.”

On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.”

Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public.

[…]

Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.)

[…]

West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.”

In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”

West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.”

From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.”

The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.”

That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. “The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.”

[…]

But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.

“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not… Jolly had a real streak of—I guess you’d call it patriotism. If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.”

“Even if it meant distorting American history?”

“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

[…]

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director. Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms, soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except, presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset” trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important witness.”

In June 1964, Earl Warren and others from the group flew to Dallas to give Ruby a hearing in the interrogation room of the county jail. The bulk of his testimony was a morass of paranoid rambling. He begged Warren to get him out of Dallas. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he warned. “I know I won’t live to see you another time… Do I sound sort of screwy?” He demanded to speak with a Jew, whispering frantically, “You have to get me to Washington! They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso!”

[…]

The group was required to investigate the CIA as a routine suspect in the assassination of a sitting president. Neither Dulles nor Helms ever reported their knowledge of West’s employment by the CIA.

[…]

If the CIA wanted to shut Ruby up, what was it that he had on it? Burt Griffin, an attorney for the Warren Commission, appeared before the HSCA to say that he and his partner had nearly confirmed Ruby’s ties to gunrunning schemes by anti-Castro Cubans, who were shipping arms from the United States to Cuba in hopes of deposing the dictator.

At the time, Griffin had no idea that the CIA sponsored these gunrunning schemes. In March 1964—when Ruby was weeks away from his “examination” by Jolly West—Griffin and his partner approached Richard Helms, requesting all the information the CIA had on Ruby. They believed it was possible “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald.”

Helms offered only a curt reply: “The CIA would be very limited in its possibility of assisting.” Griffin was baffled—this was someone who was supposed to be helping him. He appealed again. By the time Helms mustered a response, months had passed, and West had long since paid his fateful visit to Ruby. “An examination of Agency files,” Helms wrote, “has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”

As for Jolly West, he also did his part to keep Ruby untainted from any whiff of conspiracy. As the Warren Commission tried to divine Ruby’s motive, West sent a confidential letter to Earl Warren himself, a copy of which I discovered in the HSCA’s files. Dated June 23, 1964, and addressed to “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” West’s note contends that his “examinations” of Ruby gave him unique insight into the man’s “motivations for the murder.” (This despite the fact that West had said Ruby was “positively insane.”) He was confident that Ruby had acted in an “irrational and unpremeditated” manner when he shot Oswald, “wanting to prove that the Jews—through himself—loved their President and were not cowards.” Moreover, West asserted that Ruby “had never seen [Oswald] in his life” before his involvement in the Kennedy assassination broke. Without consent from his patient or his patient’s lawyers, West was offering confidential medical assessments tailored to political ends. “Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do to be of assistance,” he added.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Science | No Comments »

The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy

Thursday, July 3rd, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsThe Grande Armée had been battered so badly at Eylau, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), that it could not follow up the victory, as it had after Jena:

Soult’s aide-de-camp Colonel Alfred de Saint-Chamans recalled after the battle, ‘The Emperor was passing in front of the troops; in the middle of cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” I heard many soldiers cry “Vive la paix!”, others “Vive la paix et la France!”, others even shouted “Pain et paix!” [Bread and peace!]’ It was the first time he had seen the morale of the army ‘a bit shaken’, which he put down to ‘the butchery of Eylau’.

The day after the battle, Napoleon announced in a bulletin that an eagle had been lost, and said, ‘The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy.’ The reason the unit wasn’t named was that in fact five eagles had been lost.

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Running away from it with equipment and weapons is a virtually impossible task

Monday, June 30th, 2025

Russian mil-bloggers have laid out basic counter-FPV tactics:

When encountering an enemy FPV drone, it is important to clearly understand that running away from it with equipment and weapons is a virtually impossible task, because an FPV drone can reach speeds of over 100 km/h.

Counter-FPV Tactics

When spotting an enemy FPV drone, it is important to first open fire with single shots. If there are bushes nearby that can be reached with one dash, it is imperative to use them as cover. FPV drones cannot overcome such an obstacle, clinging to the branches of a bush and falling, which, in turn, does not always lead to the detonation of the FPV drone’s warhead.

In the absence of bushes, another slightly less priority cover can be a tree trunk (also located at a distance of one dash), which can be used as a support when firing [Image 2 above].

It is important to remember that if an enemy FPV drone is hit, you must quickly leave the “drone meeting place”, moving as far away as possible and then taking up reliable cover, since the enemy will definitely send several more drones to the place where the previous one was shot down. If your legs are injured, without being able to take the necessary position behind cover [Images 1 and 2 above], you must also fight off the attacking (approaching) FPV drone using the nearest bush or tree trunk (leaning [images 3 and 4] your back on the tree trunk). Attempts to freeze, lie down and pretend to be dead will not help, since drones can hit both the wounded and the bodies of the dead.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

Saddam Hussein feared a U.S. nuclear strike during the Gulf War

Sunday, June 29th, 2025

Saddam Hussein feared a U.S. nuclear strike during the Gulf War — and not without reason:

Washington indeed hinted that nukes were on the table.

“I know if the going gets hard, then the Americans or the British will use the atomic weapons against me, and so will Israel,” Hussein told his advisors one month before his troops stormed into Kuwait, according to analysis of hours of audio tape by the Conflicts Records Research Center.

“The only thing I have are chemical and biological weapons, and I shall have to use them,” Hussein added. “I have no alternative.”

Ironically, Hussein’s willingness to even consider deploying his non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction was the major reason the Americans raised the prospect of deploying their own WMDs.

In April 1990, the Iraqi dictator had openly threatened to “burn half of Israel” with his chemical weapons in the event of an Israeli attack on Iraq.

Hussein had also prepared to target Saudi and Israeli cities with his country’s arsenal of Scud missiles. All of the missiles were armed with conventional explosive warheads.

According to internal Iraqi discussions that CCRC documented and translated, Hussein responded to an inquiry about potentially fitting some of the Scuds with chemical payloads. “Only in case we are obliged and there is a great necessity to put them into action,” Hussein consented.

Before the coalition launched its campaign to liberate Kuwait on Jan. 17, 1991, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker warned Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz against using biological or chemical weapons. Baker reminded Aziz that the United States had the “means to exact” vengeance and eliminate the Iraqi regime.

[…]

In destroying Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons infrastructure by conventional means—albeit at high cost—the coalition deprived Hussein of his main rationale for ever deploying the weapons of mass destruction.

It helped that Hussein clearly feared the Americans could use their own WMDs against Iraq if Iraq introduced chemical and biological weapons to the conflict.

In May 2010, Baker declined to state clearly that he had meant to imply to Aziz that America might nuke Iraq. “Of course, the warning was broad enough to include the use of all types of weapons that America possessed.”

Still, the vague threat worked. “Years later, when Saddam Hussein was captured, de-briefed and asked why he had not used his chemical weapons, he recalled the substance of my statement to Aziz in Geneva,” Baker said.

“It was not wise to use such weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy,” Aziz told PBS in 1996. The interviewer asked if Aziz meant to imply that America could have dropped an atomic bomb on Iraq. “You can … make your own conclusions.”

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

The Curious Case of Jimmy Shaver

Saturday, June 28th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill explores (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) the curious case of Jimmy Shaver:

After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies arrested the man.

His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried, with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10: 30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it.

Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.

While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to “deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.

Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime, and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others believe his demeanor is real.” West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was never named.

Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was made of the base hospital where West had conducted his MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.

Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”

“I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.

The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”

West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.

For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it. When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.

“In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview, “that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—hypnotism was not part of the protocol.

He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.

“We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”

West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.

Posted in Crime | 3 Comments »

As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, casualty rates in battles increased

Thursday, June 26th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAs the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the casualty rates in battles increased:

At Fleurus they were 6% of the total number of men engaged, at Austerlitz 15%, at Eylau 26%, at Borodino 31% and at Waterloo 45%.

This was partly because with ever-larger armies being raised, battles tended to last longer — Eylau was Napoleon’s first two-day engagement since Arcole; Eggmühl, Aspern-Essling and Wagram in 1809, Dresden in 1813 were also two and Leipzig in 1813 went on for three — but mainly because of the huge increase in the numbers of cannon present. At Austerlitz the ratio was two guns per thousand men, but by Eylau this had leapt to nearly 4, and at Borodino there were 4.5. Eylau therefore represented a new kind of battle of the Napoleonic Wars, best summed up by Ney at its close: ‘What a massacre! And without any result!’

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

They have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared

Monday, June 23rd, 2025

Dominic Cummings discusses some theories of regime change and civil war:

Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Was it possible that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong?

Saturday, June 21st, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillWith Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, Tom O’Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) laid out a circumstantial case linking “Jolly” West to Charles Manson:

Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.”

In the back of my mind was the most confounding passage in Helter Skelter—one that I’d underlined, highlighted, and finally torn out and taped above my computer. “The most puzzling question of all,” Bugliosi wrote, was how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseless killers. Even with the LSD, the sex, the isolation, the sleep deprivation, the social abandonment, there had to be “some intangible quality… It may be something that he learned from others.” Something that he learned from others. Those had become the six most pivotal words in the book for me.

Posted in Crime, Science | 1 Comment »

International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that Napoleon assumed it to be

Thursday, June 19th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsOn Friday, November 21, 1806, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon signed into law the Berlin Decrees:

These were designed to force Great Britain to the negotiating table, but instead were to lead — once he tried to impose them by force on Portugal, Spain and Russia — to his own downfall. The ‘Continental System’ created by the Berlin Decrees (and their successors the Milan and Fontainebleau Decrees of 1807 and 1810) was what Napoleon called ‘a retaliation’ against the British Order-in-Council of May 16, 1806, which had imposed a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the Elbe.

[…]

Since one-third of Britain’s direct exports and three-quarters of her re-exports went to continental Europe, Napoleon intended the decrees to put huge political pressure on the British government to restart the peace negotiations broken off in August.

[…]

International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that, with his crude Colbertism, Napoleon assumed it to be

[…]

The Continental System damaged precisely those people who had done well from Napoleon’s regime and had hitherto been his strongest supporters: the middle classes, tradesmen, merchants and better-off peasantry, the acquirers of biens nationaux property he had always sought to help.

[…]

All American trade with France was therefore blocked unless the United States’ ships bought a licence in a British port for a substantial fee. Along with the British practice of ‘impressing’ (i.e. kidnapping) thousands of Americans for service in the Royal Navy, the November 1807 Orders-in-Council were the primary cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.

[…]

One major problem with the Continental System was that it could not be imposed universally. In 1807, for example, because Hamburg and the Hanseatic towns such as Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Stralsund and Bremen couldn’t manufacture the 200,000 pairs of shoes, 50,000 greatcoats, 37,000 vests and so on that the Grande Armée required, their governors were forced to buy them from British manufacturers under special licences allowing them through the blockade. Many of Napoleon’s soldiers in the coming battles of the Polish campaign wore uniforms made in Halifax and Leeds, and British ministers boasted in the House of Commons that Napoleon couldn’t even provide the insignia stitched onto his officers’ uniforms except by resort to British manufacturers.

[…]

By 1811 there were 840 vessels plying their often night-time trade between Malta and southern Mediterranean ports. Once landed, coffee and sugar were smuggled across borders despite the penalty of ten years’ penal servitude and branding, and after 1808 the death penalty on occasion for repeat offenders.

[…]

(Britain had imposed the death penalty for smuggling in 1736, which was regularly enforced.)

[…]

When French customs officials did capture contraband a proportion of it was often returnable for a bribe, and in due course it became possible to take out insurance against seizures at Lloyd’s of London.

[…]

Meanwhile, French imperial customs revenues collapsed from 51 million francs in 1806 to 11.5 million in 1809, when Napoleon allowed the export of grain to the British at high price when their harvest was weak – some 74 per cent of all British imported wheat came from France that year – in order to deplete British bullion reserves.

[…]

The Continental System failed to work because merchants continued to accept British bills-of-exchange, so London continued to see net capital inflows.

[…]

Much to Napoleon’s frustration, the British currency depreciated against European currencies by 15 per cent between 1808 and 1810, making British exports cheaper.

[…]

The Continental System also forced British merchants to become more flexible and to diversify, investing in Asia, Africa, the Near East and Latin America much more than before, so exports that had been running at an average of £25.4 million per annum between 1800 and 1809 rose to £35 million between 1810 and 1819.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 8 Comments »

Tactical nuclear war, Wykeham-Barnes concluded, favored the aggressor

Monday, June 16th, 2025

In the early years of the Atomic Age, most people only dimly understood the consequences of tactical nuclear war:

It wasn’t until nearly a decade into the superpower contest that Europe’s nightmare gained a vivid, terrifying clarity.

That clarity came in 1955 from Carte Blanche, NATO’s first major exercise to simulate what a nuclear exchange with the Soviets on the continent would look like.

[…]

The exercise was mostly an air war, spread out over six days in the summer of 1955. Organizers distributed roughly 2,500 planes between the sides, giving the pretend Soviets slightly more aircraft.

Exercise referees moderated the pace of the conflict, telling air base inhabitants when they’d been hit by a nuclear bomb, the distance it had landed from them and the damage it had done.

British Air Commodore Peter Wykeham-Barnes, Chief of Staff of Allied Air Forces in Europe, briefed the press on the results of Carte Blanch. Tactical nuclear war, Wykeham-Barnes concluded, favored the aggressor—in this case, the mock-Soviets of Northland.

Nonetheless, “in an all-out atomic war, there would be no winners and no losers and little left to asses,” he said. Any similar conflict would be “short and horrible.”

Someone leaked details to West Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper. According to the leaked info, targets in West Germany had borne the theoretical brunt of the exercise, with 268 of the 335 mock nuclear weapons detonating inside the country.

Exercise officials calculated 1.7 million dead.

The public was understandably frightened … and outraged. Polls showed increases in domestic opposition to nuclear weapons.

I can understand the West German public being opposed to Soviet nuclear weapons, but it doesn’t sound like a lack of American nuclear weapons would protect them.

Posted in War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign

Thursday, June 12th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon was at Bamberg, waiting to see what the Prussians intended, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when the Prussian declaration of war arrived:

‘He threw it away contempt­uously,’ recalled Rapp, and said of Frederick William, ‘Does he think himself in Champagne?’ — a reference to the Prussian victories of 1792. ‘Really, I pity Prussia. I feel for William. He is not aware what rhapsodies he is made to write. This is too ridiculous.’

His reply:

Your Majesty will be defeated, you will compromise your repose and the existence of your subjects without the shadow of a pretext. Prussia is today intact, and can treat with me in a manner suitable to her dignity; in a month’s time she will be in a very different position. You are still in a position to save your subjects from the ravages and misfortunes of war. It has barely started, you could stop it, and Europe would be grateful to you.

He had his reasons for being confident:

Although Prussia had a potentially very large army of 225,000 troops, 90,000 of them were tied up garrisoning fortresses. No immediate help could be expected from Russia or Britain, and although some of her commanders had fought under Frederick the Great, none had seen a battlefield in a decade. Her commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, was a septuagenarian and her other senior commander, General Joachim von Möllendorf, an octogenarian. Moreover, Brunswick and the general in charge of the left wing of the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich von Hohenlohe, had rival strategies and hated each other, so councils of war could take up to three ill-tempered days to reach a conclusion. Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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