UN chief's plane was shot down

"New evidence has emerged in one of the most enduring mysteries of United Nations and African history, suggesting that the plane carrying the UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, was shot down over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) 50 years ago, and the murder covered up by British colonial authorities.

A British-run commission of inquiry blamed the 1961 crash on pilot error and a later UN investigation largely rubber-stamped its findings. They ignored or downplayed witness testimony of villagers near the crash site which suggested foul play."

The event illustrates "US and British anger at an abortive UN military operation that the secretary general ordered on behalf of the Congolese government against a rebellion backed by western mining companies and mercenaries in the mineral-rich Katanga region.

Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had, by then, enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation, but support from developing countries meant his re-election as secretary general would have been virtually guaranteed if he had lived until the general assembly vote due weeks later." More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/17/dag-hammarskjold-un-secretary-general-crash/print

Harry truman said: "Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, 'when they killed him'."

JFK called Dag Hammarskjöld the "greatest statesman of our century."

Humanitarian Assassination

"Britain's intelligence services carried out assassinations and did 'some very bad things' during the Cold War, according to the former spy and novelist John Le Carre.

Le Carre - real name David Cornwell - worked for both MI5 and MI6 during the 1950s and 1960s.

His revelations come in the same week that the body of MI6 worker Gareth Williams was discovered in a holdall in his London flat.

But the former secret agent, who is about to have his 22nd book published, insisted that Western intelligence agencies operated very differently from their Soviet Bloc counterparts.

He said: 'Even when quite ruthless operations were being contemplated (in the West) the process of democratic consultation was still relatively intact and decent humanitarian instincts came into play.

'Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable.'"

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JFK assassination, witnesses and odds of dying

In the three-year period which followed the murder of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, 18 material witnesses died - six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks and two from natural causes.

An actuary, engaged by the "London Sunday Times," concluded that on November 22, 1963, the odds against these witnesses being dead by February 1967, were one hundred thousand trillion to one. The above comment on the deaths of assassination witnesses was published in a tabloid companion piece to the movie "Executive Action," released in 1973. By that time, part of the mythology of the Kennedy assassination included the mysterious deaths of people who were connected with it. By the mid-1960s, people in Dallas already were whispering about the number of persons who died under strange or questionable circumstances.

Well into the 1980s, witnesses and others were hesitant to come forward with information because of the stories of strange and sudden death which seemed visit anyone with information about the assassination. READ MORE

Are we going to find out what really happened to JFK?

Who killed JFK

In today's Washington Post:

The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.

You know the day is coming when the file on JFK assassination is supposed to be open?

You know what's in it?

I quote what I've been told by an old-timer from the spy world, an intel officer from the WWII and beyond:

"You know what they will find when they open the file on JFK? Nothing. There will be nothing in it."

Remember this.