I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air –
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

 

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath –
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

 

God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Butch Burroughs, who witnessed Oswald’s arrest, startled me in his interview by saying he saw a second arrest occur in the Texas Theater only “three or four minutes later.” He said the Dallas Police then arrested “an Oswald lookalike.” Burroughs said the second man “looked almost like Oswald, like he was his brother or something.” When I questioned the comparison by asking, “Could you see the second man as well as you could see Oswald?” he said, “Yes, I could see both of them. They looked alike.” After the officers half-carried and half-dragged Oswald to the police car in front of the theater, within a space of three or four minutes, Burroughs saw the second Oswald placed under arrest and handcuffed. The Oswald look-alike, however, was taken by police not out the front but out the back of the theater.
    What happened next we can learn from another neglected witness, Bernard Haire.
    Bernard J. Haire was the owner of Bernie’s Hobby House, just two doors east of the Texas Theater. Haire went outside his store when he saw police cars congregating in front of the theater. When he couldn’t see what was happening because of the crowd, he went back through his store into the alley out back. It, too, was full of police cars, but there were fewer spectators. Haire walked up the alley. When he stopped opposite the rear door of the theater, he witnessed what he would think for decades was the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald.
    “Police brought a young white man out,” Haire told an interviewer. “The man was dressed in a pullover shirt and slacks. He seemed to be flushed, as if he’d been in a struggle. Police put the man in a police car and drove off.”
    When Haire was told in 1987 that Lee Harvey Oswald had been brought out the front of the theater by police, he was shocked.
    “I don’t know who I saw arrested,” he said in bewilderment.
    Butch Burroughs and Bernard Haire are complementary witnesses. From their perspectives both inside and outside the Texas Theater, they saw an Oswald double arrested and taken to a police car in the back alley only minutes after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald. Burroughs’s and Haire’s independent, converging testimonies provide critical insight into the mechanics of the plot. In a comprehensive intelligence scenario for Kennedy’s and Tippit’s murders, the plan culminated in Oswald’s Friday arrest and Sunday murder (probably a fallback from his being set up to be killed in the Texas Theater by the police).
    There is a hint of the second Oswald’s arrest in the Dallas police records. According to the Dallas Police Department’s official Homicide Report on J. D. Tippit, “Suspect was later arrested in the balcony of the Texas theatre at 231 W. Jefferson.”
    Dallas Police detective L. D. Stringfellow also reported to Captain W. P. Gannaway, “Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the balcony of the Texas Theater.”
    To whom are the Homicide Report and Detective Stringfellow referring? Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the orchestra, not the balcony. Are these documents referring to the Dallas Police Department’s second arrest at the Texas Theater that afternoon? Was Butch Burroughs witnessing an arrest of the Oswald look-alike that actually began in the balcony? That would have likely been the double’s hiding place, after he entered the theater without paying, thereby drawing attention to himself and leading the police to the apprehension of his likeness, Lee Harvey Oswald (who was already inside). As Butch Burroughs pointed out, anyone coming in the front of the theater could head immediately up the stairs to the balcony without being seen from the concession stand.
    The Oswald double, after having been put in the police car in the alley, must have been driven a short distance and released on higher intelligence orders. Unfortunately for the plotters, he was seen again soon. With the scapegoat, Lee Harvey Oswald, now safely in custody, we can presume that the double was not supposed to be seen again in Dallas—or anywhere else. Had he not been seen, the CIA’s double-Oswald strategy in an Oak Cliff shell game might have eluded independent investigators forever. But thanks to other key witnesses who have emerged, we now have detailed evidence that the double was seen again—not just once but twice.
    At 2:00 P.M., as Lee Harvey Oswald sat handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car boxed in by police officers on his way to jail, Oswald knew what final role had been chosen for him in the assassination scenario. That night, while being led through police headquarters, he would shout out to the press, “I’m just a patsy!”
    Also at about 2:00 P.M., a man identified as Oswald was seen in a car eight blocks away from the Texas Theater, still very much at large and keeping a low profile. A sharp-eyed auto mechanic spotted him.
    T. F. White was a sixty-year-old, longtime employee of Mack Pate’s Garage in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. While White worked on an automobile the afternoon of the assassination, he could hear police sirens screaming up and down Davis Street only a block away. He also heard radio reports describing a suspect then thought to be in Oak Cliff. The mechanic looked out the open doors of the garage. He watched as a red 1961 Falcon drove into the parking lot of the EI Chico restaurant across the street. The Falcon parked in an odd position after going a few feet into the lot. The driver remained seated in the car. White said later, “The man in the car appeared to be hiding.” White kept his eye on the man in the Falcon.
    When Mack Pate returned from his lunch break a few minutes later, T. F. White pointed out to his boss the oddly parked Falcon with its waiting driver who seemed to be hiding. Pate told White to watch the car carefully, reminding him of earlier news reports they had heard about a possible assassination attempt against President Kennedy in Houston the day before involving a red Falcon.
    T. F. White walked across the street to investigate. He halted about ten to fifteen yards from the car. He could see the driver was wearing a white t-shirt. The man turned toward White and looked at him full face. White stared back at him. Not wanting to provoke a possible assassin, White began a retreat to the garage. However, he paused, took a scrap of paper from his coveralls pocket, and wrote down the Texas license plate of the car: PP 4537.
    That night, while T. F. White was watching television with his wife, he recognized the Dallas Police Department’s prisoner, Lee Harvey Oswald, as the man he had seen in the red Falcon in EI Chico’s parking lot. White was unfazed by what he did not yet know—that at the same time he had seen one Oswald sitting freely in the Falcon, the other Oswald was sitting handcuffed in a Dallas police car on his way to jail. Mrs. White, fearing the encompassing arms of a conspiracy, talked her husband out of reporting his information to the authorities. Thus, the Oswald sighted in the parking lot might have escaped history, but for the fact White was confronted by an alert reporter. . . .
    At the end of our conversation, Mayor Wise reflected for a moment on the question posed by Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence elsewhere at the same time as T. F. White saw him in El Chico’s parking lot (in a car whose license plate could now be traced, thanks to the scrupulous note-taking of White and Wise, to the employee of a major CIA contractor).
    “Well,” he said, “You’re aware of the idea of two Oswalds, I guess?”
    I was especially aware of “the idea of two Oswalds” from the testimony of U.S. Air Force sergeant Robert G. Vinson of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Vinson not only saw the second Oswald on the afternoon of November 22 soon after T. F. White did. He actually witnessed the Oswald double escaping from Dallas in a CIA plane. Sergeant Vinson was already on the CIA getaway plane when the second Oswald boarded it. Vinson also got off the plane at the same CIA base as Oswald’s double did, a few moments after him. Robert Vinson is a unique witness to the CIA’s secret movement of an Oswald double out of Dallas on the afternoon of the assassination. . . . FULL STORY

Investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King over the past decade has been pilgrimage into martyrdom. From that journey I have learned, first of all, how naïve I was about systemic evil. While there is nothing new about prophets being murdered by the system, I was not aware of how well our own system carries out such murders—and why.
    I said such murders. Plural. I discovered Martin’s assassination was intertwined with that of Malcolm X, who was also set up and murdered by our national security state. In his case, U.S. intelligence agencies manipulated National of Islam intermediaries for Malcolm’s execution on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.
    Two and one half weeks before his assassination, Malcolm was in Selma, Alabama, hoping to meet with Martin. The paths of the two prophets were converging. After leaving the Nation of Islam the year before, Malcolm had embraced a universal vision of peace at Mecca. He had also spent four months in Africa meeting with the heads of its newly liberated states to organize a human rights campaign to put the United States on trial in the United Nations for its racist policies toward its own black citizens. By moving from civil rights to human rights, Malcolm was a step ahead of Martin, who was watching his work closely. However, they were unable to meet in Selma, because Martin had been arrested and jailed, and Malcolm had to leave for speaking in Europe before a jail visit with Martin could be arranged.
    It is well documented that both Malcolm and Martin had been placed under exhaustive government surveillance. The FBI and CIA were monitoring their every move. The government knew it was only a matter of time before they would get together. That would not be allowed to happen. The long-simmering plot to kill Malcolm was heated up, resulting in his murder at the Audubon Ballroom after his return from Europe.
    A key to the untold history of our domestic assassinations is the fact that our government was the first to develop and use nuclear weapons. The democratic principles this country professes were, from the beginning, in conflict with such weapons and our reluctance to submit them to international control. Nuclear weapons and civil liberties don’t go together. Nuclear weapons and life don’t go together. The rise of our national security state after World War Two, as justified by the Cold War that our nuclear weapons created, was the effective end of democracy in the USA. That history of a national security state replacing a democracy was climaxed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that foreshadows the martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin.
    A nuclear weapons state that maintains the myth of being a democracy requires what our newspeak language calls “intelligence agencies,” which specialize in covert action, assassinations, and propaganda whose targets include U.S. citizens. The CIA and its related covert action/propaganda agencies have evolved into what we today, with more newspeak (and a verbal surrender to our former World War Two enemies), call “Homeland Security.” I believe the reason why Malcolm’s and Martin’s assassinations by our own government can still shock many of us is that we are in denial of the fact that our government, by embracing nuclear weapons, became a national security state.
    Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, each in his own unique way, challenged that system to be true to its democratic origins, as did John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert. The four of them offered a combined witness to a process of justice, peace, and nuclear disarmament through which the people of this country could achieve a truly democratic government. Until we turn in that direction, I believe what Martin said remains true in a more terrible sense than ever: The greatest purveyor of terrorism in the world today is my own government....
     For about twelve years now, I have known with constantly increasing detail how Martin Luther King was killed. I keep learning more all the time. However, I am also aware that what I know about this systemic murder is very little, compared to what there is to know.
     I have met extraordinary people on this pilgrimage into darkness, witnesses to the truth who have great courage, like Dr. King’s. The witnesses who have seen the unspeakable truth of his martyrdom, and who have dared to speak its truth, are themselves martyrs—witnesses who have been threatened, persecuted, committed by the government to mental institutions, and killed.
     The truth of the assassination of Martin Luther King is one issue on which the system will never retreat, any more than it would retreat from its lies on the interrelated assassinations of Malcolm X and the Kennedys.
     Just as Jesus says in John, that truth of the cross would destroy it. That truth of the cross, absorbed by us in widening circles of nonviolent commitment, would drive our evil system out of this country and the world. The transforming truth of King’s martyrdom is the truth of our cross and resurrection as a people. It is not beyond our reach, but the system would be driven out if we did reach it.
     My hardest task in learning the beginning truth about King’s cross has to do with what Jesus, and Martin as his disciple, have taught us to do to be truly human—love the enemy. I have had to realize how profoundly naïve I have been about evil, even when living with Shelley and our son Tom for years in a house at the end of the line where our extended Agape Community would regularly block trains carrying enough nuclear weapons to destroy whole continents, perhaps all life on earth. But as terrible as that concrete realization of evil was and is, it was less overwhelming for me than what I feel now from Dr. King’s murder. The systemic way in which this prophet of compassion and transformation for our world was stalked, set up, and executed by our government takes my breath away. The cover-up to this day is no less elaborate.
     So I have a hard time loving the enemies who are most responsible for this crime against us all, this attempt to assassinate hope that has succeeded to the extent we as a people have allowed it to do so. Our scene has become more desperate in many ways since April 4, 1968, or on that previous April 4 at Riverside Church. The terrible widening of evil that King envisioned beyond Vietnam forty years ago tonight, we have seen happen.
     So it is hard to love the unseen enemies who work so feverishly and systematically to murder voices of hope, as they continue to do, covering their tracks all the way.
     In the summer of 1961, a white student from Union Theological Seminary named Gurdon Brewster worked with Dr. King and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Brewster was forced to confront a racist system made flesh for him in a group of white men who, in a parking lot one night, almost took his life for working with the Kings. The morning after that encounter, Brewster marched into Dr. King’s office and demanded of the prophet of nonviolence, “How do you love those people, anyway? How do you love the enemy, when all those people do such violent things to you? How do you still love them?”
     Martin Luther King looked at him, sat still, and thought. King’s phone was ringing, and his secretary was rapping on his door, calling out that the Justice Department wanted to talk to him. Brewster waited for an answer to his question.
     Finally King said softly, “You’ve got to reach deeper until you are transformed by your suffering. With your suffering and your love, you must cut the chains of hate. You’ve got to reach down deeper until your suffering and your love draw you closer to God.”
     At the trial held in Memphis for King’s assassination, one of his assassins was present in the courtroom as a defendant—Loyd Jowers.... I watched from a few feet away from Jowers when Coretta Scott King entered the courtroom to be a witness in the trial. She walked up to Loyd Jowers, who in a state of confusion rose from his chair. She looked into his eyes and shook his hand.
     Yes, we can cut the chains of hate.
     But we must reach down deeper until our suffering and our love draw us closer to God. . . . FULL STORY

Long-lived radionuclides such as Cesium-137 are something new to us as a species. They did not exist on Earth in any appreciable quantities during the entire evolution of complex life. Although they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They cause cancer, leukemia, genetic mutations, birth defects, malformations, and abortions at concentrations almost below human recognition and comprehension. They are lethal at the atomic or molecular level.
    They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy that we might compare to fire, because radiation burns and destroys human tissue. But unlike the fire of fossil fuels, the nuclear fire that issues forth from radioactive elements cannot be extinguished. It is not a fire that can be scattered or suffocated because it burns at the atomic level—it comes from the disintegration of single atoms.
    Thus, radioactivity is a term which indicates how many radioactive atoms are disintegrating in a time period. We measure the intensity of radioactivity by the rate of the disintegrations and the energy they produce....
    The International Commission on Radiological Protection [ICRP] states in this document [Source: ICRP, 2009. Application of the Commission’s Recommendations to the Protection of People Living in Long-term Contaminated Areas After a Nuclear Accident or a Radiation Emergency. ICRP Publication 111. Ann. ICRP 39 (3).] that a whole body activity of 1400 Becquerels is equivalent to an exposure of one-tenth a millisievert per year. In other words, the radiation models used by radiation biologists that convert this level of internal absorbed dose to “effective dose,” do not predict serious health risks from such exposures. In fact they state that it is safe to have 10 times this exposure level.
    There is however strong evidence that the ingestion of these levels of so-called “low-dose” radiation are, in fact, particularly injurious to children. Research done by Dr. Yuri Bandazhevsky, and his colleagues and students, in Belarus during the period 1991 through 1999, correlated whole body radiation levels of 10 to 30 Becquerels per kilogram of whole body weight with abnormal heart rhythms and levels of 50 Becquerels per kilogram of body weight with irreversible damage to the tissues of the heart and other vital organs.
    One of the key discoveries made by Bandazhevsky was that Cesium-137 bioconcentrates in the endocrine and heart tissues, as well as the pancreas, kidneys and intestines. This goes completely against one of the primary assumptions used by the ICRP

This is an open letter to leaders and groups in the religious community in the United States inviting participation to expand a campaign currently being mounted to divest from fossil fuel companies to also include the nuclear power industry as well. There are good reasons for this expanded action. In addition to the astronomical releases of radioactive isotopes from such calamities as Chernobyl and Fukushima, there are also the medical and public health consequences of all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. Long-lived radionuclides being generated in nuclear reactors did not exist on Earth, in any appreciable quantities, during the entire evolution of complex life. There is no safe dose or exposure to radiation. It is not humanly possible to achieve 100% containment of these man-made radioactive particles that burn at the atomic level. An expanding campaign directed by elements of the religious community to divest from the nuclear power industry – which necessarily includes nuclear weapons since their production derives from radioactive materials generated in nuclear reactors – embodies a moral, life-affirming imperative of the highest order. It is an action for both peace and greater equity: safer energy sources and more efficient products and lifestyles will bring multiple advantages, for us now and for the planet and its climate we leave for future generations. . . . FULL STORY

from the Executive Summary:
    According to UNSCEAR between 12,000 and 83,000 children were born with congenital deformations in the region of Chernobyl, and around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children worldwide. Only 10% of the overall expected damage can be seen in the first generation....
    A paper by Kristina Voigt, Hagen Scherb also showed that after 1986, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, around 800,000 fewer children were born in Europe than one might have expected. Scherb estimated that, as the paper did not cover all countries, the overall number of “missing” children after Chernobyl could be about one million. Similar effects were also observed following above-ground nuclear weapons tests....
    Up until today, there has unfortunately been no conclusive overview of the changes in the health condition of the whole of the affected population in the region of Chernobyl, not to mention the lack of an overview of the catastrophe for the people in the Northern hemisphere. The numbers referred to here may seem on the one hand to be terribly high, on the other hand rather low. But it has to be taken into account that nearly all of the collated studies dealt with relatively small sections of the population. Even supposedly slight changes in rates of sickness can signify serious health damage and a large extent of human suffering when they are extrapolated onto a larger population group....
from 4. Genetic and teratogenic damage (malformations), 4.1 The Chernobyl region:
    Scientists from the Universities of Moscow and Leicester examined blood samples from 79 families, the parents of which had been living within a 300-kilometre radius of the reactor. The scientists were surprised by the fact that in those children born between February and September 1994 cases of mutations had doubled. The genetic scientists reasoned, that as the examined children were only two years old this was due to genetic changes in the parental germ cells. Professor David Hillis from the University of Texas in Austin drew attention to the correlation

with measurement results from field mice that had lived off highly contaminated food in the area around the Chernobyl sarcophagus: “The rate of mutation amongst the field mice is one hundred thousand times higher than normal”.[92]....
from 6. All cancers and leukaemia:
    The estimated whole-body doses for the affected population in the area around Chernobyl ranged from 0-1.5 Gy. At the same time, it must be noted that an increasing number of Chernobyl studies from the three countries affected have come to the conclusion that the risk of cancer due to chronic low-level radiation is higher in comparison with the results from studies on atomic bomb survivors. The multi-centre study that was carried out on nuclear industry workers in 15 countries shows that the risk for all cancers, except leukaemia and lung cancer, is approximately 3-times higher than for the atomic bomb survivors. It must therefore be ascertained that the results of studies carried out on atomic bomb survivors cannot be applied to the Chernobyl population, as they systematically underestimate the risk.[168]....
from the Executive Summary:
    By 2050 thousands more cases of illnesses will be diagnosed that will have been caused by the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. The delay between cause and noticeable physical reaction is insidious. Chernobyl is far from over.
    Particularly tragic is the fate of the thousands of children who were born dead or died in infancy, who were born with malformations and hereditary diseases, or who are forced to live with diseases they would not have developed under normal circumstances.
    The genetic defects caused by Chernobyl will continue to trouble the world for a long time to come – most of the effects will not become apparent until the second or third generation.
    Even if the extent of the health effects is not yet clear, it can still be predicted that the suffering brought about by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima is, and will be, of a similar magnitude. . . . . FULL TEXT