Who Killed E. Howard Hunt?

Yesterday, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt died mysteriously. He was only 88. President Nixon once called Hunt the man who "knows too damn much" and there were certainly many people who wanted to shut him up. Although his family is making the unlikely claim that he died of pneumonia, this is no doubt a cover story they have come up with while investigators track down the conspirators behind his murder. There certainly are a number of unanswered questions about his death, which may never be resolved.

Hunt was involved in some of the most important and sensitive missions ever carried out by the U.S. government and his theory of executive power, which was once controversial, is now accepted as standard operating procedure in the Bush Administration. "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," he told People magazine back in 1974.

Although best known for masterminding the Watergate break-in, Hunt was also involved in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, the Bay of Pigs, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, and, some claim, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His modus operandi was to make each of the missions he was involved with only seem like fiascos, instead of the great accomplishments they actually were, which was why Presidents continually sought out his expertise. During the last years of his life Hunt was ostensibly working on a memoir, which is coming out in March, but there are many aspects of the War in Iraq that seem to have the hallmarks of a Hunt mission. We may subsequently discover that the War in Iraq was his last and greatest mission.

E. Howard Hunt was a real-life Jack Bauer who uncomplainingly did what needed to be done while giving plausible deniability to the Presidents he worked for. In 1954 he helped plan the coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, which led to 40 years of military dictatorship, protecting that country from Communism. Although 200,000 people died in the civil war that followed, Hunt was always proud of the fact that he was able to save Arbenz from assassination, just one of the many humanitarian acts he performed. Asked to comment by Slate in 2004 on the other 200,000 people he was not able to save, Hunt said "Deaths? What deaths?"

In 1961 he helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which did not go quite as well. Although it did not succeed in its goal of toppling Fidel Castro immediately, it did destabilize his regime, and the effects of the invasion are slowly but surely beginning to come to fruition. If Castro's government does fall in the next few years, as many predict, we can thank Hunt for the work he did in helping set Castro's fall in motion.

Hunt was always bitter that President Kennedy got cold feet at the last moment and pulled out his support for the Bay of Pigs invasion. This has led some to speculate that Hunt may have been involved in the Kennedy's assassination. Although Hunt modestly claimed he was in Washington, D.C., at the time of the assassination, some believe that he was actually one of the men photographed on the Grassy Knoll or was one of the "tramps" arrested after the assassination, along with Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson's father, and Frank Sturgis. When asked if he was involved in the assassination by Slate in the 2004 interview, he coyly said, "No comment." In his new book he claims that Lyndon Johnson was actually behind the assassination, but Hunt was a man who often shied away from taking credit for his deeds.

In 1970 Hunt left the CIA but that did not end his service to our country. Hunt brought the skills he had learned in overseas missions to the homefront. As a member of President Nixon's "Plumbers" he helped neutralize dissent that was damaging the war effort in Vietnam. To get dirt on Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, Hunt broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. When antiwar candidate George McGovern threatened to take over the country by manipulating the electorate to vote for him, Hunt masterminded the Watergate break-in to find information that would expose McGovern as a Communist mole.

Unfortunately, back in the pre-9/11 era of the early 1970s spying on American citizens was frowned upon. Like 24's Jack Bauer, Hunt was used as a scapegoat by the politicians he served and never got the appreciation he deserved. For his service to our country, Hunt spent 33 months in jail. In 1972 his wife was killed in a mysterious plane crash. She was carrying $10,000 in cash in her handbag. The official investigation blamed "pilot error" although many believe that Hunt was being sent a message.

Just as we may never get to the bottom of the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, we may never learn who killed E. Howard Hunt. Hunt had many enemies and it is a testament to his survival skills that he was able to stay alive as long as he did. President Bush should use all the means at his disposal to investigate Hunt's mysterious death -- breaking into psychiatrist's offices, planting bugs, destabilizing governments that may have been involved in the conspiracy to assassinate him, rounding up suspects and subjecting them to harsh interrogations -- methods that Hunt himself pioneered. There would be no greater tribute to Hunt than to use the tools he helped develop to break the conspiracy against him.

I don't know who had Hunt killed, but I do know that his enemies are America's enemies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the announcement of his death was just a clever ruse to give President Bush an excuse to expose our enemies. It may turn out that Hunt is not really dead at all but has in fact gone into deeper cover.

Update: Howard Hunt's son, David Hunt, responds: Mr. Swift, As intriguing and romantic as an assassination plot to kill Howard Hunt would be ... I can assure you he died of old age and the complications of pneumonia. I was with him until his death and would never allow anything to happen to my father. He had an incredible life and above and beyond anything he was a true patriot. His loyalty to the president cost him everything dear to him. God Bless. David Hunt

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Jon Swift, E Howard Hunt, CIA, Kennedy, Bush, Cuba, Nixon, Watergate, Castro, Iraq, Vietnam, Politics, Foreign Policy

What Loaded Questions Should We Ask About Barack Obama?

Many people are tired of the media's focus in recent Presidential elections on petty personal attacks. They want to hear substantive personal attacks on the candidates. They don't want to hear irrelevant trivialities about the men and women running for President; they want to hear about trivialities that affect their lives. That is why the coverage of Barack Obama, who just announced that he is forming a Presidential exploratory committee, thus far has been so inspiring.

The media's job is to raise important questions about the candidates not provide simplistic answers. The American people can provide the simplistic answers on their own. So far the media has raised a lot of important questions about Barack Obama. Who is Barack Obama? Why is his middle name Hussein? Is he secretly a Muslim? Does he smoke? Does he work out? What is he wearing? If he were a tree, what kind of a tree would he be?

No one knows very much about Barack Obama. He has written only two books, which no one has ever read, and given very few interviews. Newsweek's Howard Fineman, in his remarkably insightful column comparing the Presidential race to a high school election, calls him the Mysterious Newcomer. "Presidential elections are high school writ large," says Fineman (his use of the word "writ" cluing you in to the seriousness of his metaphor; Pulitzer Prize judges, take note). As everyone knows about high school elections, the candidates with the least amount of gossip about them wins.

The fact that we know so little about Obama is very suspicious. Ever since the docudrama The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, presidential candidates have had to go through rigorous screening to prevent our enemies from slipping someone into the presidency and taking over the country. In the 1968 Presidential election, the first Manchurian Candidate, George Romney, accidentally revealed himself when he remarked that he had been "brainwashed" about the Vietnam War and subsequently turned against the war. Luckily, he was drummed out of the race. But this year there are several potential Manchurian Candidates. There is Romney's son Mitt, who may be trying to carry on the legacy of his father. Apparently, he was "brainwashed" about gay rights. Then there is John McCain, who lost his last Presidential race when patriotic Vietnam War veterans accused him of being brainwashed when he was a POW because he led efforts to make peace with Vietnam. He has since undergone some sort of treatment and is now a patriotic American again, but there are still some who have doubts. The most likely Manchurian Candidate, however, is Barack Obama.

Debbie Schlussel, who fights Muslims with the same passion she brings to her battles against unauthorized use of the airbrushed photo she uses on her website, has publicly accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim Manchurian Candidate. "Is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?"

Although some of Schlussel's critics say that she is not the expert on Islam she claims to be and may, in fact, be mentally unstable, at least when she is not taking her medication, a chain email circulating around the Internet confirms her conclusions. Although Obama says he is a Christian and that his father was not even a practicing Muslim, the email reveals that "Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim while admitting that he was once a Muslim…. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim, which, ideologically, he remains today." Although Obama denies that he once admitted that he was Muslim or that he is one today, most people are more likely to trust an email than a Presidential candidate.

The mainstream media, which increasingly is taking cues from bloggers and chain emails, has begun to jump on the story of Obama's secret Muslim identity. Insight Magazine, which is owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, a religion that is not trying to take over the United States, as far as we know, has raised more suspicions that Obama is secretly a Muslim and attended a madrassa when he was young. It has also accused Hillary Clinton's campaign of trying to plant those rumors by quoting unnamed campaign "sources," which as any journalist knows are the most reliable sources of all. With this story Insight cleverly made two candidates look bad, Obama and Clinton, without having to actually prove anything.

Unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media are still operating under the old rules of journalism, which requires two unnamed sources with axes to grind before a story can be printed. So they have had to rely on insinuating that Obama is not one of us by bending facts that are known. Many have pointed out that Obama's middle name is Hussein, which just begs the question, What kind of a person would let his parents name him Hussein? Most of our early Presidents didn't even have middle names. It has only been in the last century that most of our Presidents had middle names, but most of these were good American-sounding middle names like Gamaliel, Delano, Fitzgerald, Baines and Milhous. Two of our Presidents just had the middle initial S, which didn't stand for anything controversial at all.

CNN's Jeff Greenfield expanded on suspicions about Obama by pointing out that he often wears a jacket without a tie, which is the same uniform Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wears. Greenfield then claimed it was a "joke," which makes sense because Greenfield was an alumnus of Harvard Lampoon during the time when it stopped being funny. By making his "joke" about Obama, Greenfield was able to get out the information about Obama's possibly being traitor without having to say it. CNN was following a similar strategy when it "accidentally" mixed up Obama's name with Osama Bin Laden's.

Of course, CNN is not the only mainstream media outfit trying to spread important innuendo about Obama. Fox News, which quickly picked up the Insight story and ran with it, recently asked, "Would you vote for a smoker as President?" It turns out that Obama is also secretly a cigarette smoker though he has never been photographed publicly with a cigarette just as Franklin Roosevelt was never photographed in his wheelchair. Both liberals and conservatives agree that smoking is un-American, which is why we are trying to drive smokers out of their offices and homes. It is no coincidence that countries with the highest number of smokers just happen to be countries that are our enemies.

In the coming months I am sure there will be many other important questions raised about Obama. Do we really want a President who has lived in another country, or even traveled to one, especially a Muslim country? Is Obama too pretty to be President? Does being black make Obama too angry to be President? What negative information is there about his wife? What kind of underwear does he wear? If the hard-hitting reporting we have already had on Barack Obama is any indication, the 2008 Presidential election is shaping up to be the most substantive and rigorous examination of candidates yet.

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Jon Swift, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Manchurian Candidate, Islam, Christianity, Howard Fineman, CNN, Fox News, Debbie Schlussel, Jeff Greenfield, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Smoking, Journalism, Politics, Pundits, Foreign Policy

Donald Rumsfeld - Best Defense Secretary Since Robert McNamara

President Bush made a surprise announcement the day after the election that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was resigning to be replaced by Robert Gates. Although the President had told the press last week that Rumsfeld would stay until the end of his term, he explained that he had to engage in this bit of misdirection because he didn't want to influence the election, which showed an admirable sense of fair play on his part. Many voters would have been extremely upset by such a shocking announcement before the election and may even have been too disheartened to go out and vote if they had known about his resignation beforehand because Donald Rumsfeld has been one of our greatest Defense Secretaries. He is perhaps the best Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara, who presided over the Vietnam War. Not only did Rumsfeld serve in the office longer than anyone except McNamara, the two men have much in common.

Unfortunately, misconceptions about the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq have led some to criticize McNamara and Rumsfeld, but I think history will show that while they made all the right decisions, the generals and soldiers on the ground did a poor job executing many of their directives so they really shouldn't be blamed. They also would have done better if they didn't have to contend with being second-guessed by the liberal media. Rumsfeld revealed some of his irritation at having to be judged by people who are a lot less intelligent than he is when he said at yesterday's press conference that the War in Iraq is "complex for people to comprehend." But I don't think the fact that they had to deal with so many people who just weren't as smart as they are should be held against them.

Both McNamara and Rumsfeld subscribed to the doctrine of "underwhelming force," that is, using as few resources as possible in prosecuting a war in order to lose less. That is why Rumsfeld and McNamara both overruled their generals, who believed that more troops were needed, in favor of smaller, nimbler fighting forces. Rumsfeld also didn't believe in expending a lot of scarce Pentagon funds on such equipment as body armor or armored vehicles, which would just have drained the funds available for sophisticated weapons systems.

Both McNamara and Rumsfeld came to office vowing to restructure the Pentagon bureaucracy and reassert civilian control, which is probably why they get bad-mouthed by a lot of military men. They both brought a mathematical precision to their decision making since each has a background in mathematics and finance. McNamara pioneered the use of mathematical and financial analysis in military planning and served as the head of the Ford Motor Company before coming to the Pentagon under Kennedy. Rumsfeld has an MBA and has served as the CEO of a number of corporations. Because of their backgrounds they were able to make decisions unswayed by emotion or political considerations. Instead of seeing troops as individuals, they saw them as statistics on a spreadsheet, which made it a lot easier for them to make the tough decisions that were necessary. Numbers don't lie, unlike people, which is why they didn't listen to what people were telling them if the numbers didn't back them up.

In fact, McNamara and Rumsfeld both had a remarkable ability to stay focused and not get distracted by a lot of advice and criticism. Once they made up their minds they could not be diverted no matter how many people questioned their strategy. As former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, "McNamara was a guy who was absolutely convinced that he was right, even when 99 percent of the world was telling him that he was wrong.... I don't know whether you'd characterize that as intellectual arrogance. What they say about Henry Kissinger was that he was not burdened by a great deal of self-doubt. I think that's true of Don Rumsfeld; that he thinks it through, and he arrives at a point of view, and he will execute to that point of view and get it done. Once he's made his mind up, that's it."

There is one important difference between the two men, however. Unfortunately, toward the end of his service, McNamara did begin to have doubts about the Vietnam War. He was troubled when a war protester immolated himself outside the window of his Pentagon office. He began to suffer from stomach ulcers as his concern about the war mounted. These doubts affected his ability to conduct the war and Lyndon Johnson eventually had to replace him. In recent years he has written books and appeared in a documentary, The Fog of War, detailing the mistakes he thinks were made, believing that future generations could learn from these mistakes. On the other hand Rumsfeld, who has probably not read any of McNamara's books, has never had any doubt about anything he did, and it is unlikely we will be seeing any books of mea culpas from him. It is perhaps this quality that puts him a notch above McNamara and makes him the greatest Secretary of Defense we have ever had.

Yet Rumsfeld's greatness may not be recogized by historians for many years to come. Unfortunately, you sometimes have to go with the legacy you have, not the legacy you want.

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Jon Swift, Iraq, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McNamara, Vietnam, Politics, Foreign Policy