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First hour: Dave Lindorff discusses the nukes of August—1945 and 1949. He is the author of “August 6 and 9, 1945: Two Days that Shook the World…and the Earth” (Counterpunch) and “One Brother Gave the Soviets the A-Bomb. The Other Got a Medal” (The Nation).
In 1945 the US infamously dropped nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). The massacres served no military purpose. They were designed to send a message to the USSR: stand up to us, and the same thing could happen to you.
Sure enough, the US then drew up plans to annihilate the USSR in a massive nuclear first strike. According to Dave Lindorff, that crime—the biggest mass murder in human history by orders of magnitude—would likely have happened if American physicist Ted Hall hadn’t passed on nuclear secrets to the Soviets, allowing them to build a nuclear deterrent, which was first tested on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.
Second hour: First 30 minutes: Rolf Lindgren voices outrage at the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and wonders about its real purpose. Was the FBI trying to prevent Trump from building a LEGO H-bomb in his basement? Or was the Deep State trying to deprive Trump of documents that could be useful in his Russiagate lawsuits against Hillary Clinton and others, as James Kunstler has argued?
Final 30 minutes: Jim Fetzer reports on being stripped of his intellectual property by a deranged Wisconsin judge. (For a different take on the Sandy Hook show trials, check out last week’s interview with Ron Unz.)
This Wednesday, August 17, Jim Fetzer’s motion for reconsideration of the June 29 taking order granting ownership of four domain names and four versions of the book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook to Leonard Posner was denied in Dane County Circuit Court.
What is puzzling about the taking order is that it (a) is allegedly intended to reduce a monetary judgment, but (b) cannot possibly reduce that judgment. It appears to be arbitrary, punitive, and utterly irrational.
I say this as someone who disagrees with Jim Fetzer’s take on Sandy Hook. When I first heard that Sandy Hook survivors were suing Jim Fetzer and Alex Jones for defamation, I expected Fetzer and Jones to lose, or at best to win by arguing that they never deliberately lied and that their erroneous statements did not reach the level of reckless disregard for truth. I expected trials would take place, defendants would make extensive use of discovery to challenge plaintiffs’ claims, but that ultimately the plaintiffs would prove to everyone’s satisfaction that the official version of Sandy Hook is true and that the strongest challenges to it cannot stand up in court.
But the trials that might have cleared up the Sandy Hook issue never happened. Despite the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to have disputed facts tried by jury in civil cases, the Fetzer and Jones lawsuits were summarily decided by judges who simply rubber-stamped the plaintiffs’ stories while muzzling the defendants. I witnessed Jim Fetzer’s Stalinist show trial in person and couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing.
So the legal strategies pursued by Pozner’s posse may have succeeded judicially, but at the price of undermining the credibility of the plaintiffs and the legal system.