Anniversary of Reagan shooting

One of the most overlooked attempted political assassinations is the Reagan shooting on March 30th in 1981.

Here follows excerpts from an interview with John Judge conducted by Dave Ratcliffe that is hosted in full here,

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/112600.html

Here are several videos of the event

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w6KPkv0vT8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kPUjuYKQeA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYlYSc9hAUA

In the period when Reagan came in, I believe Bush took over. He was vice president and rose to power, I believe, on March 31 1981 when Reagan was nearly assassinated. The person placed as the patsy, not the person that actually shot Reagan but the person placed as the patsy in the case, was John Hinkley. His family ties were to oil. Through that oil connection, Neil Bush — George Herbert Walker Bush’s son, who worked in oil — knew Scott Hinkley who also worked in oil. Neil had been involved with Scott in many oil operations — both working for oil speculation and oil companies. The two families lived close to each other. They knew each other socially and financially. When the Hinkley oil company started to fail in the sixties, Bush’s Zapata Oil financially bailed out Hinkley’s company. It went from being Vanderbilt Oil to Vanderbilt Energy or Vanderbilt Resources in the 60s after Bush intervened. The Hinkleys had been running an operation with six dead wells but then they were making several million dollars a year after the Bush bailout. I always thought this was some sort of a money-pass front where they were laundering money through on this phony oil operation but actually operating some type of an intelligence pay-off.

The father in that family, John W. Hinkley Sr., was also the president of the board for World Vision. World Vision is a far-right evangelical missionary operation that does missionary and “good work” operations in countries where there is a political purpose for it to be there. From it’s inception, it was rabidly anti-Communist and it focused on refugee populations of people running from countries that had been taken over by Communism. This was from the fifties on.

World Vision had a hand in the movement of the Cubans into the United States and other refugees of revolutionary regimes. When you’re a refugee you’re cut loose, basically, and pretty much fair game to be manipulated by whoever is willing to give you a hand because you don’t have a home or any place to stay and somebody has got to accept you.

World Vision was able to recruit out of these mercenary populations, people who could be politically turned to their intelligence purposes. World Vision served as a penetration force — not as visible as the military actually going in or the CIA going in — going in as missionaries and working among the people.

This link between missionary and intelligence for capitalistic infiltration operations goes way back. It was part of the internationalism with the Rockefellers. It’s talked about in a book called Thy Will Be Done^[4] about Rockefeller, Venezuela, and Latin American Oil, the Summer Linguistic Institute, World Vision and others. But they operated in this way for a long time.

They were paid by the CIA for a long time during the Vietnam war and went into SE Asia — Cambodia and Laos. Throughout Vietnam they were given U.S. military equipment to use. They still maintain a budget under USAID, which was just (Agency for International Development), which was just a pass-over in order to give the CIA more cover. They ran operations through USAID. The current cover replacing that is the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which is supposed to be how we’re exporting democracy around the world.

But of course, we’re exporting exactly the kind of corrupt democracy we have here, which is rigged and manipulated elections and press manipulation in order to keep in power or put in power the people that we want to be in those countries for the purpose of having our investments protected and milking what we can out of the resources and the labor available in any of those countries.

World Vision was part of that scheme and they did some nasty things. They ran the refugee camp in Sabra-Shatilla where the fascist Phalange were allowed in to kill the Palestinians. Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland syndicate mobster, had building operations and construction stuff going on in Miami that the anti-Castro Cubans were hired to take part in. They meld them in — and so they recruit from them, whoever they can.

They ran the Cuban and Thai refugee camps in the United States. Mark David Chapman — who eventually shot John Lennon — worked at the Thai refugee camps out in Arkansas that World Vision operated there. They ran these camps brutally, forcing people into political education against Castro, refusing to feed people, beating people — by many reports — and bringing in Alpha 66 and Omega 7 people (the worst of the killing teams — or murder squads — of the anti-Castro Cubans in the United States) to run the camps in Florida, Fort Chafey in Arkansas and other places where the Cuban exiles were. These people came in and there were eventually riots in the Cuban refugee camps against their treatment there. This according to legitimate refugee charity workers and organizations that I have spoken to.

Ratcliffe:

This is during what period?

Judge:

This is in the seventies, after the boat lift and all that. But they were in there trying to recruit a whole new batch of anti-Castro Cubans that could be used in, not only domestic, but international operations. It was anti-Castro Cubans that were used in the murder of Lumumba for instance, by the CIA. These people were interchangeable units but World Vision was part-and-parcel of running these camps and manipulating these refugees. At the same time doing a television presence that made them seem as if they were some sort of charitable Christian operation.

Their CIA funding and their background had been exposed over a long time. The chairman of the board for some period was John W. Hinkley Sr.. The son worked at Fort Chafey at the Thai refugee camps. There were pictures of him after the Reagan shooting running in his World Vision T-shirt around the edge of the camp. He was tied-in but he was not going along with the program at the same level as Scott was. Scott was already doing the wheeling and dealing and was tight with Neil Bush. Bush’s daughter was making the dating arrangements for Scott Hinkley and helping to set him up for dates.

They knew each other socially quite well. The press said that they were to have dinner — Scott Hinkley and Neil Bush were to have dinner on March 31 1981. But they cancelled the dinner after the news of the shooting. The press said that that was ironic. It gives a new meaning to the word `irony’. Because if Robert Oswald, Lee Harvey’s older brother and Lynda Bird Johnson were going to have dinner the night of the JFK assassination, somebody would figure out it meant something.

What it means is that Bush was part of the planning of the take over — and it was a take over, I believe. There were elements that matched the Kennedy assassination. Richard Bartholomew, a researcher in Texas, told me that he himself talked to Strategic Air Command bomber pilots who, like the pilots I talked to that were in the air the hour of the Kennedy assassination, told him that on March 31 they had no code books aboard.

The black box, the presidential communication box for national emergencies — the “nuclear football” as they call it, disappeared in Dallas after the Kennedy shooting and did not fly back on Airforce One with LBJ and didn’t get back to him for many hours.

Similarly, Rodriguez, an Army Colonel that was in charge of carrying it with the president, at the time of Reagan’s shooting, ducked, hit the ground during the shooting, got up and ran in the other direction and came back hours later with a Secret Service Agent trying to get the control card out of Reagan’s wallet that was under the control of the FBI. FBI Agents had taken his clothes as they were clipped off in the emergency room. At that point an FBI Agent called William Sessions, the Director. But he wasn’t at the Agency. He was in the situation room where the big fight had emerged between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists. Sessions told him to hold on to the card.

Ratcliffe:

Sessions told the guy who had taken the football with him?

Judge:

No, he told the FBI Agent who had the card. The nurses were taking Reagan’s clothes off, cutting them off, whatever they had to do and in his wallet was the card that activates the box. The FBI had control of that back at the hospital. The guy in control of the box itself ran off and came back with a Secret Service Agent trying to get the card, as well. The FBI guy said `Wait a minute. I have to call headquarters.’ Sessions told him `No, don’t give up the card.’ That’s the level at which the battle was going on.

Ratcliffe:

And Sessions would be with Bush or Reagan?

Judge:

Sessions would have been loyal to Reagan, I believe.

Ratcliffe:

Rodriguez was loyal to Reagan?

Judge:

Well, Rodriguez was obviously playing the other side. Rodriguez was running off with the box.

Ratcliffe:

He didn’t stay with the Commander-in-Chief?

Judge:

That’s right. He broke rank. And then, whoever in the Secret Service — the Secret Service helped to set-up Reagan too. Reagan was told not to wear his vest that day — his protective vest. I’ll bet he wore it after that. They did not call the procedure with the limousine. He should have come out the door and gone directly into the limousine. That’s how he arrived.

He came, the Secret Service formed two rows on either side of the back door, they opened the back door and he goes in. When you hire a limousine, they don’t go to the house down the street, they come to your door. When you’re the president, they’ll move it six inches to make sure that it’s in the right place. It was in the right place when he arrived. He got out and went in through the phalanx of the two rows of agents. He’s safe into the VIP entrance.

He comes out the same exit and where’s the car?’ It is nowhere near the door. It’s 40-50 feet down the pavement. So, he’s got to walk out into the open. What’s supposed to happen? The Secret Service is supposed to surround him like a diamond and protect him. One guy goes forward, McCarthy, to open the door for him. The rest don’t surround him. They all file out like a line of ducks off to the right and they leave Reagan walking in the open with Brady and these other guys. Then, the shooting happens.

The damage that was done there once the shooting started was quite extensive. Brady was hit which literally took a large chunk of his brain and knocked him on to the ground. A black cop was nicked in the neck, a big beefy cop, and he spun and hit the ground hard by the shot. McCarthy, 160 pounds, was lifted by the shot, that hit him in the groin at the back door of the car, and thrown through the air to the front bumper of the car. He himself says that was no 22.

All of the early press reports said that Hinkley was firing a 38 and that is much more consistent with these kinds of reactions. A 22 will hurt you, enter you and do damage inside you, but it’s not going to knock you over. A 38 is a much larger caliber of bullet. Hinkley purchased a 38 at a pawn shop on Elm Street in Dallas — the same street where Kennedy was assassinated.

All of this was to give us an early signal that this is one of their jobs. But at the same time none of Hinkley’s bullets hit Reagan and that was clear from Reagan’s lack of this kind of reaction. Reagan gets to the car still standing. He is pushed into the car by McCarthy. He’s got some pain in his rib, which he thinks McCarthy caused by pushing him in and eventually coughs up a little blood. But even when he finally gets down to G.W. [George Washington University] Hospital, he is still standing when comes in and walks into the hospital and they put him on the gurney. He’s not at all in the same shape as everyone else that’s hit by Hinkley’s 38.Then the official story changes after three or four hours and Hinkley supposedly had a 22. I went through the ABC footage and you can actually see the replacement of the 22 and the pick-up of the 38 by a Secret Service agent.

Ratcliffe:

How do you mean `see the replacement?’ — you can see it in watching the replay?

Judge:

In watching the footage, you can see a Secret Service agent at the outer edge of the crew. There’s a group that have sort of tackled Hinkley and they’re taking him in and you can see the gun is on the ground. Hinkley’s 38 is on the ground at the edge of the that crowd near the retaining wall. The Secret Service agent kind of sidles over to the wall, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, kneels down, like crouches, and lifts the gun up and puts it in his pocket.

Meanwhile, a DC cop in a slick yellow raincoat comes to the outer edge of the crowd — this is after they already have Hinkley subdued — and for no apparent reason he comes to the edge of the crowd and puts his hand out. He’s a motorcycle cop.

That motorcycle rentinue did not leave with Reagan’s limousine when he did leave. He has no escort when he goes. That is not explainable either, especially if there has just been an assassination attempt — why he would be put out there without escort. But he does, he goes without anybody.

This cop comes over, off of his motorcycle, spreads his arms and kind of moves back and forth in front of — at the edge of the crowd. He’s not serving any purpose but he’s there and after a moment the camera pans back and you can see at his feet, this 22, as if he’s dropped it. One of his hands goes in towards the center of his coat and then comes out and right after that, as the camera is panning all around, it pans right between his feet, and you can see this 22 that becomes the official weapon.

There is also a weapon near Brady’s head that one of the Secret Service guys drops. That’s how they explain the 38, saying that it was a confusion because it was really the Secret Service guy’s gun. I believe, Hinkley was firing a 38. Hinkley damaged everybody but Reagan, also put holes in the car and the building across the street. But he only had six rounds and each one of those is explained and then a seventh round has to explain the wound in Reagan.

Reagan’s wound is so minimal that it doesn’t match either a 22 or a 38. It is described as a little thin razor line when they finally get his clothes off. They think he’s having a heart attack — actually his lung had collapsed because of the thing penetrating him. Then finally a nurse sees a little line of blood underneath his left arm pit. She determines that something has gone in but it’s a little razor cut. They know what a bullet hole looks there in the emergency room at G.W.U.. They get them all the time.

They do poke around until they finally find this thing in the x-ray. They try three times to get it out and finally pull it out and it is a little disc, a flattened disc, that was described as `thin as a dime’ and `razor-edged.’ This fits the profile of these aerodynamic discs that are used by the intelligence agencies in weapons that the Church Committee showed during the time that they did their testimony. They are fired with a CO2 (carbon dioxide) cartridge, so they are relatively silent. They just make a little puff. They have an accuracy up to a great length. They can be fired out of a regular gun or even out of these little tubes with the CO2 cartridge at the back. They also can be loaded with toxins.

One of the uses they had for them was making them out of plastic and filling them with shellfish toxin which goes in and makes a razor split in the skin which wouldn’t be noticed during an autopsy. The x-ray won’t pull up the plastic and the shellfish toxin, once it gets into any part of the bloodstream, will cause a heart attack within 30 seconds. Very lethal — several milligrams of the shellfish toxin is enough of a dose. Whether this thing had a poison load in it or not, who knows? But it didn’t immediately kill him so if it did have such a load, it didn’t work. It didn’t shoot off.

It bounced off of his rib. It would have cut into his aorta but bounced on his rib and missed the aorta by a quarter of an inch and went into the lung instead. But they did finally get it out. The lung was collapsed from it but they got him stabilized.

Meanwhile, all night, there were people trying to move him back to the Bethesda. Because when the car takes off from the Hilton where the shooting happens, they’re screaming `Rawhide is okay’ into the radio. Rawhide is the code name for Reagan. They’re radioing back according to McCarthy, `Rawhide is okay, Rawhide is okay.’ But I don’t think he is supposed to be okay. I think he was supposed to have been killed there and they’ve got a problem.

So the car goes up to Connecticut Avenue and if they were going to go to G.W.U. Hospital, they needed to either go straight across down Florida to 21st and then (it’s close) around a little traffic circle. Or they could have gone left further down to M Street and then turned across M to 21st.

McCarthy’s story is that they went under the bridge at M Street and then he coughed up some blood and then they realized he’d been hit and they said `get to the nearest hospital.’ But they still didn’t even turn on M, which they could have easily done. They went all the way down to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue — four or five more blocks. Then they turned to the right from 17th over to 21st and then came back up to 21st until they hit G.W.U. Hospital, which is going along three sides of a triangle instead of just cutting across. So if you’re in a hurry — the president’s in an emergency — you take the quickest route.

But what McCarthy says in his book is that when the car went up to Connecticut Avenue, that they went right and went toward the White House. If you turn right on Connecticut off of T, where they were, you’re not going towards the White House, you’re headed north toward Bethesda Hospital and out Connecticut Ave.

That was confirmed for me later when ABC News had on the doctor who was the head of the trauma room after they had the press conference with the doctors. The head of the trauma room was there with the news anchor. The newscaster said `I understand that there were people that wanted to move President Reagan out to Bethesda Naval Hospital after he had come into your trauma room.’ And the doctor said, `Yes, there were people.’ There were reports that it was Secret Service up to as late as 6 a.m. the next morning, insisting to move him. But in fact, he wasn’t moved and it was because this trauma room doctor said, `When someone comes into my trauma room in that condition, I don’t care who they are — President of the United States or not — they are not going to be moved.’ He doesn’t understand that he saved Reagan’s life.

If they had gotten Reagan to Bethesda, they could have finished the job there and then done the same phony autopsy they did on John F. Kennedy at Bethesda Hospital. But instead, this trauma room doctor intervened and kept Reagan there and then Reagan recovered in relatively safety and security.

There was a strange incident that Mae Brussell noticed that they brought blood in to him. First, it is unusual for them to bring blood because the Secret Service already knows when they travel to a city what hospital has blood and what the closest one is. They make sure that the hospitals nearby where the president travels, and those DC hospitals, have enough blood of his type in storage. It was unusual, first, that they didn’t have enough and secondly, this vehicle that arrived to bring the blood wasn’t anything formal from the pictures. It looked like some kind of a van where somebody had painted a red cross on the back of it but it clearly was not an official vehicle. Mae thought that tainted blood might’ve been brought in and caused Reagan problems later with cancer or other things.Generally, his care there was certainly better than what would have happened to him. Interestingly enough, when the ABC News Anchor asked the doctor this and he said, `In my trauma room, they are going to stay there and we’re not going to move him.’ The response of the news anchor was, `No matter how much the Navy yells?’ The doctor said, `That’s right. No matter how much the Navy yells.’ The question that we have to ask, `What is the Navy yelling about moving the president for after he’s been shot?’

Meanwhile, Brady, who’s lying on the ground, and still on the ground five minutes after Reagan takes off, ends up getting to G.W.U. before Reagan does. Reagan’s on his way to Bethesda. Brady, who takes five extra minutes to even get the ambulance in to load him, gets to G.W.U. and is taken in on a stretcher surrounded by Secret Service agents. That became confused with Reagan. In the first hour, they said Reagan was shot, he wasn’t shot, he was dead, he wasn’t dead, Brady was shot, he wasn’t shot, he was dead, he wasn’t dead. The stories went back and forth on the news about who had been shot and who was alive or dead. Nothing was clear. And then that Reagan had gone in to the hospital on a stretcher and then another story that Reagan had walked in on his own.

The problem was that Reagan didn’t get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn’t shot to the extent that he can’t move. But that’s what confused the story as to what condition Reagan was in. At first, I wondered if they were buying time or what was happening.

But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration.

There was a clear split along those lines because Reagan represents the southern California (what they used to call) `Irish Mob Money’ out there and the southern rim economy — the military-industrial complex and Bush is somewhat of a cross-over coming out of Yale and the upper class schools but also having his money in the south. There are different loyalties. That was clear in a number of instances.

One was when Bush helped to get Haig appointed as Secretary of State. The entire Cabinet staff underneath him was already pre-appointed and he wasn’t allowed to pick or choose any of them, or fire any of them. So it was like he was a figure head put up at the head of this agency that he wasn’t really allowed to run. Then just a few days before the shooting of Reagan, there was a switch where Bush replaced Haig as the head of an emergency preparedness committee or unit that they had at the White House. The press was asking Bush right after he was appointed in place of Haig — this was just three days before the shooting — `What constitutes an emergency for the purpose of this special office?’ And Bush said, “The president will know it when he sees it.” I think he meant that he — Reagan — would know it when he saw it lying on the ground dying.

This I believe was a coup. The black box disappeared for several hours. There was an attempt to get the card that activated the black box by the Secret Service and Rodriguez — the guy that was carrying it, that took it away from the President as he wasn’t supposed to do — came back three hours later to get the activating card that the FBI had taken out of the pants they had cut off of Reagan in the emergency room. The FBI guy said `I’d better call the Director.’ Sessions was down in this big fight that they were having in the situation room and Sessions told him `no — hold onto the card.’

There was that kind of transition-of-power going on — who was actually going to control things and there were switch-overs about the Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, again, not having code books aboard on March 31, 81 like they didn’t on November 22, 63. This was a classic transition-of-power situation.

I think, the loyalists won the concession that Reagan will be allowed to stay alive but Bush would come into power and at that point Haig emerged from the situation room to the press and said, his famous quote, “Gentlemen, I am in charge here until the Vice-President returns.” That meant two things: number one, that they were going extra constitutional — beyond twenty-fifth amendment, a military take-over and Haig in this office of preparedness, prior to Bush and basically he’s taking charge. The press were questioning What does this mean? It’s not the twenty-fifth amendment which goes to the Speaker of the House or the Vice-President. What’s happening that Haig can come up and say this?

What they don’t understand is all that Constitution stuff is pushed aside once they declare National Emergencies. Then they go into FEMA and they have whole other orders of succession that have to do more with the military and the Pentagon than with any of the civilian sector.

So Haig is jumping into that breech. Haig has his own strange progress up the chain-of-command and at one point jumps over literally hundreds of other people that were in line to be promoted when Califono moves him up into these high positions to take over the White House for the removal of Richard Nixon. So Haig is part of their larger game.

The second thing Haig is saying is `until the Vice-President returns.’ Bush is said to be in a jovial mood on a flight between (of all places) Fort Worth and Dallas when he gets the news. There is no indication that his joviality diminished. He says that he’ll come back in a few hours. There is no rush to get back on his part. Again this lack of any emergency response indicates to me that the thing is planned, they knew it was going to happen, the only thing that didn’t work out right was that Reagan actually survived the shooting and survived this small disc going in under his arm.

They’ve got a patsy. But Hinkley, instead of being taken under civilian custody or even federal custody — he is in a military district in DC but he is also in several federal districts — he’s whisked off to Quantico Marine Base and that’s where he is held for questioning. I think that that was part of his debriefing and deprogramming. But he’s not taken under civilian control, he’s taken under military custody.

Then he’s moved from there for psychiatric evaluation to Fort Butner, South Carolina, which was the first prison that was developed where the cells (and the blueprints) were called labs. It was the first mind-control experimentation prison in the country. He spends his time down there. Again with a group of psychiatrists that are interlinked with other assassinations and then he is eventually brought to court and declared not guilty by reason of insanity for the assassination attempt.

It’s a convoluted story but the patterns are always the same. You have a patsy that takes the blame. You have a second gunman that never comes to light. And you have an ascendance of power. That’s what I think happened after that point: that Reagan was basically allowed to function but Bush was President.