As the New York Times reports,

Large batches of e-mail records from the Justice Department lawyers who worked on the 2002 legal opinions justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation techniques are missing, and the Justice Department told lawmakers Friday that it would try to trace the disappearance. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the panel, angrily demanded to know what had happened to the e-mail files, and he noted that the destruction of government records, including official e-mail messages, was a criminal offense.

The disappearance of harmful documentation and related amnesia is a leitmotif of the George W. Bush administration, but also of his father’s political career. Just to remind of a few instances:

-Under George W. Bush, the CIA destroyed tapes of its officers engaged in activities tantamount to torture.

-Email records of Karl Rove and his associates went missing-emails that might have shed light on improper political pressures applied to US Attorneys. (The Obama Administration says it will try to recover some of them from a specific time period, though others are lost and gone for good.)

-Many of George W. Bush’s military records are missing; the accidental destruction of microfilm, a fire at a records facility and other mishaps were blamed.

-Bush’s father has at various points in his career claimed not to remember where he was or not to remember participating in crucial meetings at which illegal activities were discussed-such as the diversion of weapons for an unauthorized war in Nicaragua. (See my book, Family of Secrets, for more on the father in this regard.)

The government and media exhibited great zeal in examining tempests involving Bill Clinton-from purported misuse of the White House travel office to an unprofitable land deal called Whitewater to the consensual if tawdry affair involving Monica Lewinsky. Surely, by comparison or on its own merits, the ongoing suppression of documentation pertaining to massive tampering with the overarching democratic mechanism warrants a thorough and muscular inquiry.

My experience is that the biggest potential stories are simply too big for the major organs of daily journalism. That’s the lesson I learned writing my book, Family of Secrets. That’s also why I started www.WhoWhatWhy.com.  Where we do find the really explosive material, it often pops up in the seemingly least-likely places. So it is that we must turn to the Men’s fashion magazine, GQ, for a bracing look by freelancer Chris Ketcham at the field of radiation that is now everywhere, thanks to those nifty and now essential cell phones and handheld devices that dominate our lives. Read this and quake.
 
Here are a few snippets:

It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem-maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem-is like saying our shoes might be killing us. Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do-a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world….

 Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to “brain aging,” brain damage, early-onset Alz­heimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.”

Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor-specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone-goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.

You may have heard bits and pieces of this, but Ketcham brings more of it together in a more persuasive manner than I’ve seen before. Time to discuss.

Traditional journalism organizations as a matter of practice eschew and even sometimes demonize the work of independent journalists who document apparent high-level collusion against the broader public interest.  ”Conspiracy theory,” they sniff. Yet with the fast-changing media landscape, even the most cautious enterprises are suddenly suffused with the spirit of the muckrakers, who were unafraid to routinely document the extent to which the playing field was tilted against the public. With the New York Times, we see increasing examples of this bracing wind, typically but not exclusively in columns and “analysis” pieces. One such example is Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “advice” to the new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission looking into what the heck went so badly wrong these last few years. Here’s a taste:

Mr. Blankfein, your firm [Goldman Sachs], and others, created and sold bundles of mortgages known as collateralized debt obligations that it simultaneously sold short, or bet against. These C.D.O.’s turned out to be bad investments for the people who bought them, but your short bets paid off for Goldman Sachs. In the process of selling them to institutional investors, however, your firm lobbied ratings agencies to assign them high ratings as solid bets - even as your firm planned on shorting them. Could you explain how Goldman bet against these C.D.O.’s while simultaneously trying to persuade ratings agencies and investors that they were good investments?…should we continue to allow transactions in which you’re betting against what you’re also selling?…

This one is for the entire group. All of your firms are involved in some form of proprietary trading, or using your own capital to make financial bets, not unlike hedge funds and other private investors. As the recent crisis has shown, these bets can go catastrophically wrong and endanger the global financial system. Given that the government sent a clear signal in the crisis that it would not let the biggest firms fail, why should taxpayers guarantee this sort of trading? Why should the government backstop what amounts to giant hedge funds inside the walls of your firms? How is such trading helpful to the broader financial system?….

Again, for the group: Over the last year, your firms have actively used the Federal Reserve’s discount window to exchange various investments (including C.D.O.’s) for cash. You probably have a better idea than most about what those assets now sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet are worth. Given the growing calls for regular audits of the Fed (an idea being resisted by the likes of the chairman, Ben Bernanke), do you think the demands for such audits are warranted?…

This question is for Mr. Mack [John Mack of Morgan Stanley]. In November, in a surprisingly candid moment, you publicly declared, “Regulators have to be much more involved.” You then added, “We cannot control ourselves.” Can you elaborate on those comments? Is Wall Street inherently incapable of policing itself - a view contrary to what most of your peers have argued?….

Mr. Blankfein. Your firm, like other banks on this panel, was paid in full by the American International Group on various financial contracts, thanks to the government’s bailout. You can understand how this has whipped up no small amount of fury and questions over why A.I.G. and the government did not try to renegotiate those contracts. Because your firm was the largest beneficiary of the government’s decision, did you or any of your employees lobby the Fed, Treasury or any other government agency for this “100 cents on a dollar” payout? If so, enlighten us about those conversations….

It’s a safe bet, based on past such inquiries, that the commission will not unearth the full dimensions of the problem, nor propose sufficiently bold solutions. And if it does, it is likely to be ignored. Journalism itself is far better equipped to get to the bottom of things-and to stay on the case until meaningful changes come to pass. Here at WhoWhatWhy, as we ramp up into a full-blown investigative news organization, we’re eager to get onto this particular trail.

Here in the United States, we are regularly warned by the media and the pundits not to subscribe to wacky “conspiracy theories.”  (For more on this theme, see my book, Family of Secrets.)  Even a suggestion that figures tied to our intelligence services might have participated in something seriously untoward on our own shores – is pooh-poohed.  This, notwithstanding well-documented thuggery by our fellow citizens elsewhere.

Now, in the New York Times, comes a chilling story from Chile:

A judge in Santiago ruled Monday that a former Chilean president, Eduardo Frei Montalva, had been poisoned and charged three people connected with the Pinochet dictatorship with murder in the 28-year-old case. Alejandro Madrid, a judge with the Court of Appeals, said there was evidence that Mr. Frei, who was president of Chile from 1964 to 1970, was poisoned with low doses of mustard gas and thallium in the months before his death on Jan. 22, 1982. The poisoning at the Santa María Clinic in Chile’s capital compromised Mr. Frei’s immune system, the indictment said, and made him too weak to survive surgery for a stomach ailment, which the original autopsy had ruled as the cause of death. The indictment charged six people in connection with the killing. A doctor connected to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s army, a former intelligence agent under the general and Mr. Frei’s driver were charged with murder. Two doctors who were alleged to have falsified the autopsy report were charged with covering up the killing, and a third was charged as an accomplice.”

In case people have forgotten, Pinochet was our guy—we helped remove the democratically elected person who he replaced, and our military and spy services had close relationships with Pinochet’s. Taught them quite a few tricks, in fact. Worth keeping in mind when we say that such dastardly things could never happen here at home. As for the doctors who falsified an autopsy report, it’s worth revisiting the JFK assassination if you haven’t paid the subject attention lately.