Declassified memos show agency's leadership argued there was "criminal intent" in Puzzle Palace author's public records requests

Declassified documents in the Central Intelligence Agency's archives show that while the CIA was looking to include the Freedom Of Information Act in its war on leaks, the National Security Agency was seriously considering using the Espionage Act to target target Puzzle Palace author James Bamford for using FOIA.

While Bamford has briefly discussed this on a handful of occasions, the declassified memos and briefings from NSA confirm that this was more than just an intimidation tactic or a passing thought - the NSA had truly wanted to jail a journalist for his use of public records. When the Agency determined that this was unlikely to happen, they moved on to exploring other legal avenues which could be used to punish Bamford for his FOIA work.

Dear Ms. May,

I was in London for a summer visit a few years back. After a long day, I headed to Pret for a cup of coffee and a falafel wrap. A few minutes in, and as I was about to tuck into my wrap, a man seated next to me started a conversation with me about the weather. As we got to the part of the conversation where I told him that I'm in London just for a visit, he asked me where I was from. "Palestinian" I said.

"I like Palestinians," he responded. "But do you know what's wrong with the Palestinians?" he followed up.

"What?", I answered, curious as to what he is about to share.

"The problem is that the Palestinians can't move on. What happened has happened, but what are you going to do next, and when will you start looking towards the future, instead of continuing to be stuck in the past." I didn't respond to him then, but promised him that I would give what he said a thought.

I never thought back to that exchange until recently. Actually, specifically until four days ago. See, Ms. May, this past October 30 marked the 69th anniversary of the fall of my small village in Palestine - Suhmata- at the hands of the Golani brigade. With a little over 1300 inhabitants at the time, a mosque, a church and two schools, the village was aerially bombarded at first. Shortly after, Suhmata was captured by the Golani infantry brigade. They killed some of the villagers - maternal relatives of mine - and gave a choice to the remaining people to either stay and get killed or leave.

Scientists have discovered a secret, giant void hiding inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Located above the pyramid's Grand Gallery, the 30-meter-long void inside Khufu's Pyramid remains a mystery.

Its size suggests it plays an important role in the tomb's structure. It's the first discovery of its kind since the 19th century.

"These results constitute a breakthrough for the understanding of Khufu's Pyramid and its internal structure," the scientists explained in a journal published in Nature.

A team of archaeologists has discovered a vast array of pre-European conquest artwork from a lost civilization in a series of tiny caves on an uninhabited island in the Caribbean.

Some of the artwork was already known to archaeologists but had been misidentified as far more recent than it actually was. The Taíno people, a forgotten civilization that were wiped out following the conquests of Christopher Columbus, who mistook them for Indians, etched and painted a series of pictograms of animal-human hybrids and complex geometric designs.

"For the millions of indigenous peoples living in the Caribbean before European arrival, caves represented portals into a spiritual realm, and therefore these new discoveries of the artists at work within them captures, the essence of their belief systems and the building blocks of their cultural identity," said researcher Jago Cooper from the British Museum, as cited by Science Alert.

In the Taíno religion, for example, both the sun and moon emerged from caves, making them a key feature of their religious canon. "Most of the precolonial pictographs are in very narrow spaces deep in the caves," says Victor Serrano from the University of Leicester as cited by The University of Leicester Press, where the team's findings were published.

Most Americans don't know anything about the two significant events involving the famous Zapruder film of President Kennedy's Assassination that took place back-to-back, on successive nights, at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) - in Washington, D.C. - on the weekend immediately following JFK's assassination. But anyone evenly remotely interested in what is perhaps the key piece of film evidence in the Kennedy assassination - what for decades was viewed as the "bedrock evidence" in the case, the "closest thing to ground truth" - needs to become acquainted with what happened to Abraham Zapruder's home movie of JFK's assassination during the three days immediately following President Kennedy's death. Why? Because the hottest debate raging within the JFK research community for the past several years is about whether the Zapruder film in the National Archives is an authentic film from which sound, scientific conclusions regarding JFK's assassination can be divined, or whether it is an altered film indicative of a government cover-up, which yields tainted and suspect information, and leads us to false conclusions, about what happened in Dealey Plaza. The resolution of this debate hinges on the answers to two essential questions: First, is the film's chain of custody immediately after the assassination what it has been purported to be for many years, or is it, in reality, quite different? Second, are there visual indications within the film's imagery which prove it has been tampered with, i.e., altered? If the film's chain of custody has been misrepresented for decades, and if the opportunity and means existed that weekend to alter the film, then suspect imagery within the film takes on a crucial new level of importance, and is not simply of academic interest.

Independence, Missouri - I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency - CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

The Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series on Vietnam, currently airing on PBS, skates very lightly over one of the war's most contentious questions: Did John F. Kennedy intend to pursue the fight or to pull out?

The second program alludes almost in passing to a withdrawal plan in 1962, conditioned on a then-optimistic assessment of how the war was going. But it also reports Kennedy's qualms, expressed to a friend, as "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can't give up that territory to the communists and get the American people to re-elect me." From this point, the program moves quickly to events in Saigon, to the November 1, 1963 South Vietnamese coup, and to Kennedy's own assassination three weeks later.

But this presentation is highly misleading. In fact, Kennedy's feelings about Vietnam went beyond mere qualms: he had already reached a decision and acted on it. In National Security Action Memorandum 263, dated October 11, 1963, Kennedy articulated his decision to withdraw all US military forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965 - with the withdrawal to be completed after the 1964 election. This was the formal policy of the United States government on the day he died.

Two partial archaic human skulls, from the Lingjing site, Xuchang, central China, provide a new window into the biology and populations patterns of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia.

Securely dated to about 100,000 years ago, the Xuchang fossils present a mosaic of features.

• With late archaic (and early modern) humans across the Old World, they share a large brain size and lightly built cranial vaults with modest brow ridges.
• With earlier (Middle Pleistocene) eastern Eurasian humans, they share a low and broad braincase, one that rounds onto the inferior skull.
• With western Eurasian Neandertals, they share two distinct features - the configuration of their semicircular canals and the detailed arrangement of the rear of the skull.

"The biological nature of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia has been poorly known from the human fossil record," said Erik Trinkaus, a corresponding author for the study and professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. "The discovery of these skulls of late archaic humans, from Xuchang, substantially increases our knowledge of these people."

More importantly, he noted: "The features of these fossils reinforce a pattern of regional population continuity in eastern Eurasia, combined with shared long-terms trends in human biology and populational connections across Eurasia. They reinforce the unity and dynamic nature of human evolution leading up to modern human emergence."

Ancient ruins in the middle of the Pacific ocean could be the remnants of a legendary race or dare we say....Atlantis.

Clips from the Science Channel series What on Earth? reveal images of a mysterious location just off the coast of the tiny nation of Micronesia.

The remote island of Pohnpei is home to the archaeological site of Nan Madol, yet very little is known about the area and the ruins that reside there.

"Tsarist Russia was this superstitious land of icons and cockroaches with Cossacks on thot patrol with nagaikas in hand - and it was absolutely horrific!" - Liberals, Marxists.

"Tsarist Russia was this superstitious land of icons and cockroaches with Cossacks on thot patrol with nagaikas in hand - and it was absolutely great!" - Neoreactionaries.

Reality: It was in many respects socially liberal even by the standards of Western Europe.

Law

Yes, Stolypin's neckties and all that. What Communist propagandists don't like to mention as much is that just during the three years 1904-1907 some 4,500 Tsarist officials were murdered by what would today be classified as Far Left terrorist groups. In contrast, there were just 6,321 executions from 1825 to 1917. This is basically a rounding error by the standards of the Bolsheviks' multicultural Coalition of the Fringes, including during their "progressive" Trotskyist phase that Western leftist academics and journalists love to laud so much. It doesn't even compare unfavorably with the 16,000 or so executions in the US since 1700.