ROCKWELL: I always think of the FBI as the American secret police. And if you called them that, then when you see this sort of thing going on, it seems to me you ought to take things with maybe not a grain of salt but a cup of salt.
BAKER: You know, I've reported all over the world. I was one of the first reporters into East Germany before the wall came down; Romania when Ceausescu was overthrown. I've been in so many societies where there was totalitarianism or authoritarianism. And these kinds of organizations -- you do need police, you do need investigative agencies but, unfortunately, the abuses are just rampant. And anybody who is listening to this who thinks that that is unfair, I invite you to read any of dozens, maybe scores of books about J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for half a century, and to see that he ran it like a personal fiefdom, basically, like a mobster, and everybody in the agency was terrified of him. There were constant cover-ups in there. You understood you could lose your job in a second if you asked any questions at all. Some of these books are by scholars. Others are by people who worked in the FBI itself.
And so I have to agree with you. I mean, in some respect, of course, one wants an agency like the FBI to be there, but that doesn't mean we have to apologize for the grave structural, philosophical and other problems with it. The FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, local police, all of these institutions are absolutely riddled with problems. And, you know, my attitude as a journalist is many institutions are riddled with problems, many aspects of the federal government, but also private industry, big corporations, riddled with problems, abuses and so forth. And it is not our job as journalists, and I don't think it's our jobs as citizens, to just accept what anybody tells us and to just blindly trust when they say, whether it's the FBI or it's your bank.
ROCKWELL: tell us what happened in the alleged fire or bomb or whatever the heck it was at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.
BAKER: You know, that's a strange one, because we were told that that happened almost at the same time of the marathon bombing, within a short time of that, on the same day. We still haven't gotten a straight answer on what happened. I've been doing a little bit in the way of inquiries and, I have to say, I have questions about that. I don't think that the authorities are being forthcoming. And even more disturbing than the bombing itself, the potential damage there or attempted damage to priceless research materials that people like I need to continue to investigate what happened to John F. Kennedy, what happened to American 50 years ago, and how it's impacting us today, which I believe it is. The past certainly is prologue. But not only am I concerned about that but, you know, there was no coverag -- the media dropped it. Go and Google this thing, you'll see zero, almost. I mean, nothing from the local Boston media or the national media. I mean, WhoWhatWhy is a little, tiny non-profit and we're looking into it. And these giant news organizations have nobody asking these questions.
I find the Boston bombing story absolutely rife with weird messaging. And it could all be coincidental; it may be coincidental; probably a lot of it is. I'll give you an example. The shooting of Officer Collier was almost a dead ringer for the shooting of Officer Tippet in the Lee Harvey Oswald/John F. Kennedy saga. Lee Harvey Oswald wouldn't even have been a real suspect in the Kennedy assassination had not a police officer been shot shortly after Kennedy was killed, because Oswald was just one of many people who worked in that building. Nobody said that they saw him with a rifle. He only became really a suspect when this police officer was shot and then the description of the man who shot him matched Oswald. So here you see a very, very similar thing where it's a police officer goes down right after this other event and plays a role essentially in tying them, making these non-suspects suspects, and making them very, very guilty. So that was one thing.
The second thing is this thing at the library on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. There are many, many disturbing parallels. You've got, in both of those stories, the suspects had recently been in Russia. Remember that? They both had been in Russia.
[LAUGHTER]Strange families. Both the Tsarnaevs and Lee Harvey Oswald had been being monitored by the FBI. Both of them had relatives, or other people they were associated, with ties to the CIA. I mean, is this all coincidental? Does somebody have a particularly sophisticated and sick sense of humor? I mean, what are we looking at here? Of course, you're not even allowed to ask these questions.
Another story going up probably today is how The New York Times, instead of investigating any of these things, they quickly have somebody roll out a story talking about conspiracy theorists and how anybody who has questions about things basically is sort of mentally ill, which is a very, very important contradiction. If you ask any questions and you don't accept the conventional narrative that everything is just fine, there is something really, really wrong with you.
But, you know, my continuing efforts to look into these giant traumas, what happened to Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Walter Reuther, you know, union leaders who died in a strange plane crashes and so on, there's so much of this, and it is disproportionately reformers who get taken out. Very, very few corporate-cozy conservative politicians, who also, by the way, fly in private planes all the time, never seem to have an accident. But this stuff we need to look at.
Now, you were talking about the KGB and putting people into mental hospitals but, you know, that happens in the United States all the time. And just one example is there was an Army sergeant by the name of Dinkin, who was intercepting cables and big top-secret stuff at a military base in 1963, and he divined from his own monitoring of cable traffic that there was an assassination plot against JFK. And he divined that that assassination plot was going to involve right wingers and members of the military and some foreign assassins, and that it was going to take place in Dallas in November of 1963. And when he tried to say what he knew, they put him into a mental hospital and they began injections and they began essentially doing mind-control things with him. And eventually, he was forced to say, oh, no, the reason I said those things -- and he gave some other explanation that was totally benign. And that was the only way that this man could get out of basically the gulag. So if you think that these things only go on in the Soviet Union, you're wrong.
ROCKWELL: Russ, before we go, I want you, to the extent you can, tell us about the book you're working on now.
BAKER: Well, you know, I generally don't talk too much about what I'm working on. But I will say this. In terms of subjects and major interests to me, I continue to be very interested in the John F. Kennedy assassination. Would have loved to have something out on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, but that story is so layered and so complicated, some people believe we could never get to the bottom of it. I think we can. I think we can put enough pieces of the things together to figure out what happened. And I think that solving that is absolutely essential for us to understand what kind of society we really live in, to kind of wake up. And you know, people say, though, "This is so depressing, I don't want to hear about it," but that is not a way to empower yourself. You empower yourself by educating yourself, by having your eyes open, by understanding how things work. And that is really the beginning to go about and correct these things, because this country has always -- and Franklin Roosevelt said this and Woodrow Wilson said it. They always warned us that they didn't really run the country. Franklin Roosevelt very famously said in a letter to somebody, he said, as you and I both know, the real power in this country resides in the financial circles on Wall Street. And that's true. And I'm continuing to look at Obama and how people like that get to the top and people like Hillary Clinton, and who are behind them, and why it is that, whether we have a Democrat or a Republican, even though there are real substantive differences, primarily on social issues, when it comes to the big global issues and the big financial issues, essentially, we see very, very similar policies and appointments made. What is really going on in this country? Why is it that we actually seem to live under a kind of a one-party state? And that is what my continuing efforts, my books, and, most importantly, my work at WhoWhatWhy.com, which really is the main focus of my efforts in my life today. It's to build a meaningful journalistic institution that can train a whole new generation of journalists, funded entirely by the public, with no corporate influence or government influence, asking questions with neither fear, nor favor, and doing what we're supposed to be doing, really, as journalists.
Dear Readers: If we expect to regain the liberty bestowed upon us by the Bill of Rights, we must turn a deaf ear to Washington's lies. Washington's agenda is divorced from the agendas of the American people. Washington's agenda is war and more debt for taxpayers to service even though a majority cannot pay their bills except with mounting credit card debt, and a police state in place to control the population as jobs offshoring eliminates the middle class buffer that suppresses class war between the poor and the rich.
Any American who has read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States knows that government in America has not served the interests of the people but the agendas of the rich and powerful.
War and "security" make large claims on the US budget and on civil liberties. Having established the precedent of locking down a major city in order to search for one suspect, this power was used recently to lock down New York because of a snow storm. People in northeastern US certainly know how to deal with snow, but suddenly they are told they cannot leave their homes or be on the streets because of snow.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
6
5
4
