After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional amendments were passed which aided newly freed slaves in being equally treated under the law, or so the story goes. The fact of the matter is that slavery was- and still is- completely legal in the United States and not only that, but it took on a much different form. The institution of slavery changed as instead of having the direct enslavement of blacks with an entire apparatus that had to be created to keep slaves in their condition, elements of the state apparatus were used to enslave blacks, namely the legal and prison systems. Yet, the enslavement itself was changed as black convicts were no longer slaves to individual masters, but rather they were enslaved to the companies which they were leased out to. To create this system there not only had to be the involvement of the Southern judicial system and individual Northern and Southern elites, but also the involvement of the corporation and reinstitution of slavery within a corporate context.
The 13th Amendment
To attain a full understanding of the convict lease system, there must first be a reexamination of the 13th amendment. It has been stated in history books and in classrooms across America that this amendment ended slavery, yet this is quite false. The 13th Amendment states “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [1] (emphasis added) Thus, slavery is completely and totally legal if it is part (or the whole) of a punishment for someone who was convicted of a crime.
In 2009, I believed I had discovered new evidence in the JFK assassination never reported by anyone else: convincing photography of the through-and-through bullet hole in the windshield of the JFK limousine that had been reported by six credible witnesses. I revisited that evidence today, and am more convinced than ever that the bullet hole in the limousine windshield is what I am looking at in those images. But the readers of this piece don't have to take my word for it – you can examine the images yourself, and make up your own minds. The evidence is contained in one of the banned, suppressed episodes of Nigel Turner's The Men Who Killed Kennedy – episode 7 in the series, called “The Smoking Guns,” which was aired in 2003, and then removed from circulation by The History Channel in response to intense political pressure by former LBJ aides Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers.
I'll tell you about the stunning evidence I have found in that episode at the end of this article, but first we need to set the stage by reviewing the eyewitness testimony about the damage to the windshield observed the day of JFK's assassination, on Friday, November 22nd, 1963; as well as three days later, on Monday, November 25th, 1963.
Introduction
Before I reveal the details about the “new” photographic evidence I am talking about here, let's review the Big Picture, the “evidentiary landscape” on this issue (see pages 1439-1450 of Volume V of my book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, for full details):
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs report circulating in the Kremlin today states that United States President Obama has undertaken a campaign to “crush” the nation of Poland after its government this past week officially banned the planting of Monsanto’s MON810, a genetically-modified (GM) variety of maize (corn) that produces its own built-in Bt insecticide in every kernel and is held to be responsible for the global collapse of bee populations and the catastrophic killing of all bat species in North America.
President Obama knows that agribusiness cannot be trusted with the policy and regulatory powers of government. On the campaign trail in 2007, he promised:
But, starting with his choice for USDA Secretary, the pro-biotech former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack(who in a stunning reversal greenlighted Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa without testing), Obama has let Monsanto, DuPont and the other pesticide and genetic engineering companies know they'll have plenty of friends and supporters within his administration.
President Obama has taken his team of food and farming leaders directly from the biotech companies and their lobbying, research, and philanthropic arms.
Phi Beta Iota: What is so pathetic about all this is that governments have learned nothing in the quarter century since Winn Schwartau, Bill Caelli, Jim Anderson, Robert Steele, and a handful of others sounded the alarm. 25 years of dereliction of duty.
Charlie has always insisted that he never filled out the loan document — his mortgage broker did it, and he was actually a victim of mortgage fraud. (The broker later pleaded guilty to another mortgage fraud.) Indeed, according to a recent court filing by Charlie’s lawyer, the government failed to turn over exculpatory evidence that could have helped Charlie prove his innocence. For whatever inexplicable reason, prosecutors really wanted to nail Charlie Engle. And they did.
Second, though, it seemed incredible to me that with all the fraud that took place during the housing bubble, the Justice Department was focusing not on the banks that had issued the fraudulent loans, but rather on those who had taken out the loans, which invariably went sour when housing prices fell.
As I would later learn, Charlie Engle was no aberration. The current meme — argued most recently by Charles Ferguson, in his new book “Predator Nation” — is that not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. And that is true enough.
But what is also true, and which is every bit as corrosive to our belief in the rule of law, is that the Justice Department has instead taken after the smallest of small fry — and then trumpeted those prosecutions as proof of how tough it is on mortgage fraud. It is a shameful way for the government to act.
Phi Beta Iota: We have learned that the technical term for an out of control government in league with white collar criminals at the top of Wall Street and Main Street is “control fraud.” The Department of Justice has always been lax on white collar criminals, but under the Obama Administration it has become their de facto protector to the point of treason against the public interest.
Thank you, Tom, for that introduction. It was almost exactly a year ago today that my former boss, Secretary Gates, spoke to you on the eve of his departure as Secretary of Defense. In looking back on his tenure as Secretary, he chose to highlight two major themes. The first was his effort to turn the tide in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He spoke to you about his laser-like focus on delivering urgent battlefield needs to the warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Secretary Gates first hired me in 2009, he told me that the “country’s at war, Ash, but the Pentagon is not.” My job, he explained, was to help him get the Pentagon onto a war footing, especially in acquisition technology and logistics, the part that I was about to take over.
And that has been my focus as well as his, first as AT&L and now as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Under his leadership, we set up a fast lane to get urgent requirements onto the battlefield unhindered by the bureaucracy. We needed better persistent ISR, he said, as did General Petraeus, General Mattis, General McChrystal, General Austin, General Allen. So we worked hard to deliver capabilities like Aerostats with wide-area lenses, and more UAVs, including small UAVs that could be operated by a patrol along their line of march.
