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warren commission
A Commission to Investigate Presidential Crimes is a Terrible Idea
History shows Rep. Swalwell’s proposal would hinder justice rather than render it.
Aug 22, 2020
On August 15, Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California proposed, through the medium of (what else?) Twitter, that after the election a "Presidential Crimes Commission" should be created to investigate the manifold derelictions of Donald J. Trump, including "[s]abotaging the mail to win an election." He evidently regards this idea as a bold and meaningful innovation: "I don't say this lightly."
Why is this a bad idea?
Swalwell appears to be an able and articulate House member and has managed to snare at least his share of TV time on the cable news shows. A congressman since 2012, he is not a neophyte, and his membership on the intelligence and judiciary committees ought to make him knowledgeable about possible law-breaking by Trump.
But a commission? That is a half-step stronger than demanding that someone conduct a study. I don't question Swalwell's motives, but I think that somewhere along the line this sort of action would result in the usual suspects subverting the commission's intent. Based on my own experience in government, the preferred modus operandi of high-profile commissions is to contain public anger and distress rather than get at the truth.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the art form of the classic Washington commission is this: create a ballyhoo through public relations, appoint grave and unimpeachably bipartisan grey eminences as commission members, count on said members, who really don't want to upset the system, to conduct a coverup disguised as an expose, replete with stern warnings over the small details of skullduggery that divert attention from the greater misdeeds they ignore.
Maybe it doesn't have to be that way, but it generally is, as exemplified by three of the more famous commissions in the last several decades: the Warren Commission, the Tower Commission, and the 9/11 Commission.
The Warren Commission is, of course the granddaddy of all modern commissions, as well as their prototype. We now know that Lyndon Johnson, who proposed the commission, never intended it to uncover the truth, wherever it might lead, about John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. He planned for it to squelch any popular belief that the Soviet Union or other powerful entities might have played a role.
The chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, was not particularly enthusiastic about his task. Neither was Senator Richard Russell (D-GA), who demonstrated his reluctance to the president strongly enough that Johnson gave him "the treatment" (LBJ's patented application of pleading, cajoling, and bullying) to make him say yes.
But for another member, recently fired CIA director Allen Dulles, there was no such reluctance. To say that Dulles was a fox in the hen house is an understatement: more like a ravenous Bengal tiger.
Hence the Warren Report: its conclusion, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter and acted alone, was almost certainly true on the first count and very likely true on the second. But it ill-served the public with its refusal to say anything substantive about the manifest failure of the government to prevent the assassination.
If these sorry precedents are not enough, the very concept of a commission handling what should be a judicial proceeding is a fundamental indictment of equal justice on America.It glossed over the incompetence of the Secret Service, whose agents were out getting drunk the evening before the assassination rather than taking steps to secure Kennedy's route through town. And it was silent about the CIA's contacts with Oswald. Even worse, Dulles' presence ensured that the quarrel between the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which amounted to a vicious subterranean war, remained buried. This crippling of intelligence-sharing over bureaucratic turf may have helped lead to Kennedy's death, certainly ill-served the public, and the CIA-FBI rivalry later blew up into a subplot of the Watergate scandal.
It wasn't long before the report's incompleteness fed, rather than prevented, the same conspiracy theories that LBJ hoped to squelch; the presence of Dulles alone would guarantee that. In the ensuing decades the Kennedy assassination spawned a cottage industry of "buffs" who theorized that the assassins were Cubans, Soviets, the CIA, the Chicago mafia, Texas oil men, the Corsican mob - anybody but Oswald! Critiques of the report became the gateway drug for conspiracy-obsessed paranoiacs to this day, culminating in QAnon. (and not just symbolically: the QAnon faithful believe Kennedy's son did not die in a 1999 plane crash, but is living in Pennsylvania and is a Trump supporter).
The Tower Commission of 1986-1987, named after its chairman, former Senator John Tower (R-TX), was supposed to investigate the covert arms sales to Iran and transfer of the proceeds to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Bear in mind that selling armaments to Iran (including TOW antitank missiles, a state-of-the-art guided weapon at the time) was a serious breach of the Iran embargo, and the delivery of arms to the Contras was a flagrant violation of the Boland Amendment. As such, both were impeachable offenses, and Ronald Reagan's presidency was in jeopardy.
The commission opted for what has become a classic commission gambit. Rather than report on potential law-breaking, they focused their stern, admonitory language on bureaucratic process. Like processed cheese, a "process"-oriented commission means you're not getting the real thing. The members professed to be stunned that "no one was in charge," and recommended a rewired White House with a reformed National Security Council and a new presidential chief of staff.
It was designed to get Reagan off the hook for the price of a couple of staff sacrificial lambs. But even if it were true that Reagan was unaware of the arms deal, it still meant he was incapable of seeing that the laws were faithfully executed. Such negligence is in itself impeachable. But as we know, Reagan skated, and the parallel joint congressional Iran-Contra committee was as feckless as the Tower Commission. They both helped establish the precedent for institutional tolerance of a lawless presidency -- the very thing that concerns Mr. Swalwell.
Last, the 9/11 Commission. For it, the powers-that-be hauled Lee Hamilton, a retired congressman, out of mothballs to be co-chairman with ex-New Jersey governor Thomas Kean. By an uncanny coincidence, fifteen years before, he had been co-chair of the Iran-Contra committee. If that suggests something was rigged, it was confirmed by the resignation from the commission of former senator Max Cleland (D-GA), who maintained that the White House was stonewalling and the commission itself was compromised.
And so it was. As a national security staffer on Capitol Hill at the time, it was my job to minutely examine the proceedings. I remain convinced that at least two high administration officials perjured themselves blatantly enough that the commission should have referred them for possible prosecution. The commission did no such thing.
Instead, it wrote a masterful report in riveting language that had everybody looking in the wrong direction. Once again, it was a process issue: the intelligence agencies didn't talk to each other, nobody pushed the warning up high enough, and so on. So they recommended the reorganization of the intelligence community and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
As several former DHS employees have told me with some bitterness, the agency is a bureaucratic nightmare that was less than the sum of the predecessor agencies that went into forming it. We now waste tens of billions per year as an alibi: a flimsy excuse to disguise a failure of policy at the top as a failure of the intelligence process.
For the failure was at the top. As his administration began, George W. Bush and his cronies, like Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, were basically bored with terrorism, and chose to set their sights on a peer competitor like China. Thus the multiple occasions that the subject of al Qaeda was brought up to Bush and senior officials but ignored, culminating in the now-infamous August 6, 2001 president's daily intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." Bush would rather cut brush and go golfing than attend to his duties.
The tragedy extends beyond the lives needlessly lost in the attack, and even beyond the countless casualties, both our own and others, wrought by our idiotic revenge in the form of an attack on the wrong country. It created a veritable deluge of conspiracy stories about the attacks being an inside job by the U.S. government itself, each more lurid than the last. Given the report's conclusions, this probably was inevitable.
A lot of ordinary people thought something smelled fishy. And they were right. By failing to highlight malfeasance at the very top (which amounted to a grossly negligent failure to protect the American people, itself potentially impeachable), the 9/11 Commission not only hung the millstone of DHS around our necks but also opened the door for "alternative" explanations that seemed more psychologically satisfying than re-wiring an organizational chart. As such, 9/11 and its "official" explanation represented another milestone in America's descent into lunacy.
Hence bizarre conspiracy theories involving everything from the conjecture that the airliners people "saw" hit the Trade Center were actually a laser-projected image, to "proof" that the Boeing 757 that slammed into the Pentagon was a cruise missile. A year ago, one conspiracy buff at a political dinner got so animated explaining the melting point of the steel in the Trade Center's girders to me (an involuntary listener), that she spilled a glass of red wine on my suit.
If these sorry precedents are not enough, the very concept of a commission handling what should be a judicial proceeding is a fundamental indictment of equal justice on America.
I have argued elsewhere that there are three tiers of law in America. The majority of us, the middle class, receive the letter of the law. Thus we do not skate free, but generally, we are not railroaded, either. The downside, of course, is the exorbitant cost of the American legal racket: average salary-earners may exhaust all their financial assets obtaining counsel sufficient to find vindication. How is that functionally different from a third-world country where one must pay a hefty bribe?
The George Floyd case brought home to us that the poor and designated out-groups are frequently beneath the law. Here the Wild West prevails, with legal safeguards hardly above the level of foreign nationals in proximity to one of our overseas drone strikes. If persons driving with a broken taillight are pulled over and must consider the small but non-negligible odds that they might not survive the incident, law ceases to have meaning.
The rich? The well-connected? Occasionally one gets bagged for PR purposes (think Martha Stewart as a scapegoat for the complete impunity of Wall Street), but this is vanishingly rare. They can afford the best counsel, can always make bail, and are in any case more indulgently treated, particularly for corporate crimes. In case of conviction, there is usually monitored home detention, which sure beats Riker's Island.
And for the ultra high-ups, there is the commission, which allows them to avoid the actual legal proceedings the rest of us face, because after a mandate of months or years and the commission's bogus "verdict," the psychological steam has dissipated from any desire to prosecute. That is, if there ever was any desire: The Justice Department's guideline for not indicting a sitting president has no standing in law, but prosecutors obey it with the same reverence as a New Guinea highlander observes a taboo. Any day now, I expect the guideline to sprout a penumbra declaring that former presidents cannot be indicted, either.
Commissions cannot solve the reluctance of the establishment to bring high-level criminals to book; they are a diversion from this fact. Mr. Swalwell may have the best intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.
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Redacting Democracy
What you can’t see can hurt you
May 14, 2019
The Nobel Prize-winning Czech author Milan Kundera began his 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by describing two photographs. In the first, two men are standing side by side, a Czech nationalist later executed for his views and the country's Communist ruler. In the second, the dissenter is gone, airbrushed out. Just the dictator remains. Today, if Kundera hadn't written that opening to his book, only someone with a long memory or a penchant for research would know that the two men had ever shared a podium or that, on that long-gone day, the dissident had placed his fur hat on the dictator's cold head. Today, in the world of Donald Trump and Robert Mueller, we might say that the dissident was redacted from the photo. For Kundera, embarking on a novel about memory and forgetting, that erasure in the historical record was tantamount to a crime against both the country and time itself.
In the Soviet Union, such photographic airbrushing became a political art form. Today, however, when it comes to repeated acts meant to erase reality's record and memory, it wouldn't be Eastern Europe or Russia that came to mind but the United States. With the release of the Mueller report, the word "redaction" is once again in the news, though for those of us who follow such things, it seems but an echo of so many other redactions, airbrushings, and disappearances from history that have become a way of life in Washington since the onset of the Global War on Terror.
In the 448 pages of the Mueller report, there are nearly 1,000 redactions. They appear on 40% of its pages, some adding up to only a few words (or possibly names), others blacking out whole pages. Attorney General William Barr warned House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler about the need to classify parts of the report and when Barr released it, the Wall Street Journal suggested that the thousand unreadable passages included "few major redactions." On the other hand, House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey was typical of congressional Democrats in suggesting that the speed -- less than 48 hours -- of Barr's initial review of the document was "more suspicious than impressive." Still, on the whole, while there was some fierce criticism of the redacted nature of the report, it proved less than might have been anticipated, perhaps because in this century Americans have grown used to living in an age of redactions.
Such complacency should be cause for concern. For while redactions can be necessary and classification is undoubtedly a part of modern government life, the aura of secrecy that invariably accompanies such acts inevitably redacts democracy as well.
Airbrushing Washington
Redaction, like its sibling deletion, is anything but an unprecedented phenomenon when it comes to making U.S. government documents public. My generation, after all, received the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with significant redactions in the very records on which it was based. And who among us could forget that infamous 18-and-a-half minute gap in the tapes President Richard Nixon secretly used to record Oval Office conversations? That particular deletion would prove crucial when later testimony revealed that it had undoubtedly been done to hide evidence connecting the White House to the Watergate burglars.
Still, even given such examples, the post-9/11 period stands out in American history for its relentless reliance on redacting material in government reports. Consider, for instance, the 28 pages about Saudi Arabia that were totally blacked out of the 9/11 Commission Report, an investigation of how the United States failed to prevent al-Qaeda's attacks that fateful day. Similarly, the 2005 Robb-Silberman Report on Weapons of Mass Destruction, classified -- and therefore redacted -- entire chapters, as well as parts of its chief takeaway, its 74 recommendations, six of which were completely excised.
Infamously enough, the numerous military reports on the well-photographed abuses that American military personnel committed at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison, came out with substantial redactions. So, too, have the reports and books on the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques on war on terror detainees held at its "black sites." In FBI agent Ali Soufan's book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, for example, large portions of a chapter on Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda figure who was brutally waterboarded 83 times, were redacted by the CIA. It mattered not at all that Soufan had already testified in a public hearing before Congress about his success in eliciting information from Zubaydah by building rapport with him and registered his protest over the CIA's use of brutal techniques as well. And the nearly 400-page executive summary of the extensive Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Torture Report was partially redacted, too, even though it was already a carefully chosen version of a more than 6,700-page report that was not given a public airing.
It's worth noting that such acts of redaction have taken place in an era in which information has been removed from the public domain and classified at unprecedented levels -- and unacceptable ones for a democracy. In the first 19 years of this century, the number of government documents being classified has expanded exponentially, initially accelerating in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Between 2001 and 2005, for instance, the number of government documents classified per year doubled. Even former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, pushed back against the growing urge of the national security state to excessively classify -- that is, after a fashion, redact -- almost any kind of information. "You'd just be amazed at the kind of information that's classified -- everyday information, things we all know from the newspaper," he said. "We're better off with openness. The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public."
Along the same lines, well-known judges in national security cases have repeatedly commented on the way in which information that, to their minds, did not constitute sensitive material was classified. For example, Judge T.S. Ellis III, who has overseen numerous high-profile national security cases, admitted his "firm suspicion that the executive branch over-classifies a great deal of material that does not warrant classification." Ellis's colleague, Judge Leonie Brinkema, underscored the obstacles classification imposed in the trial of now-convicted terrorism defendant Zacarias Moussaoui, expressing her frustration at the "shroud of secrecy that had hampered the prosecution of the defendant." Other judges have echoed their sentiments.
In the first days of his presidency, Barack Obama declared his intention to reverse the trend towards over-classification. His administration then issued a memo, "Transparency and Open Government," that promised "an unprecedented level of openness in government." In April 2009, he also ordered the release of the 2002-2005 memos from the Office of Legal Counsel that had been written to justify the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that President George W. Bush's top officials had put in place for use in the Global War on Terror. In 2010, Obama also signed into law the Reducing Over-Classification Act aimed at decreasing "over-classification and promot[ing] information sharing across the federal government and with state, local, tribal, and private sector entities." And for a time, the rate of classification of new documents did indeed drop.
In the end, though, it proved impossible to stanch, no less reverse the urge to keep information from the public. As Obama explained, "While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security."
Disappearing Democracy
Another government tactic that, as with former FBI agent Soufan's book, has given redaction a place of pride in Washington is the ongoing strict pre-publication review process now in place. Former public servants who worked in intelligence and other positions requiring security clearances (including former contractors) and then wrote books about their time in office must undergo it. In April, the Knight First Amendment Institute and the ACLU focused on this very issue, jointly filing suit over the pre-publication review of such books, citing, among other things, the First Amendment issue of suppressing speech. In the words of Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and Yale law professor Oona Hathaway:
"Clearly, the government has a legitimate interest in preventing disclosure of classified information. But the current prepublication review process is too expansive, slow, and susceptible to abuse... In an era characterized by endless war and a bloated secrecy bureaucracy, the restrictions on commentary and criticism about government policies and practices pose an intolerable cost to our democracy."
And bad as the urge to redact has been, in recent times the Trump administration and the national security state have taken its spirit one step further by trying to prevent the actual reporting of information. In March, for instance, President Trump issued an executive order revoking the need for the Pentagon to make public its drone strikes in the war on terror or the civilian casualties they cause. In a similar fashion, the American military command in Afghanistan announced its decision to no longer report on the amount of territory under Taliban control, a metric that the previous U.S. commander there had called the "most telling in a counterinsurgency." Similarly, President Trump has repeatedly displayed his aversion to any kind of basic note taking or record-keeping during White House meetings with aides and lawyers (as the Mueller report pointed out).
In this century, the American public has learned to live in an increasingly redacted world. Whether protest over the level of redactions in the Mueller report will in any way change that remains doubtful, at best.
Certainly, Congressman Nadler has been insistent that the Judiciary Committee should see the entire unredacted report. At the recent Judiciary Committee hearing that Attorney General Barr refused to attend, Nadler acknowledged the dangers to democracy that lay in an increasing lack of transparency and accountability. "I am certain," he said, "there is no way forward for this country that does not include a reckoning of this clear and present danger to our constitutional order... History will judge us for how we face this challenge. We will all be held accountable in one way or another."
As he suggested, democracy itself can, in the end, be redacted if the culture of blacking-out key information becomes Washington's accepted paradigm. And with such redactions goes, of course, the redaction of the very idea of an informed citizenry, which lies at the heart of the democratic way of life. Under the circumstances, perhaps it's not surprising that polls show trust in government in steady decline for decades (with a brief reversal right after 9/11).
In the end, blacking out the record of the grimmest aspects of our own recent history will leave American citizens unable to understand the country in which they live. Informed or not, we all share responsibility for the American future. As with that photograph in the Kundera novel, our children may one day see the consequences of our past acts without truly recognizing them, just as many Czechs who saw that photo Kundera described undoubtedly thought it represented reality.
The record of how democracy is being redacted -- sentence by sentence, passage by passage, fact by fact, event by event -- would surely have rung a bell with Milan Kundera. He summed his own time's version of the process this way: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Today, Americans are forgetting.
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QAnon: Why We Have the CIA Partly to Thank for the Craziest Conspiracy Theory Yet
The roots of the wackiest pro-Trump conspiracy can be traced back to the CIA
Aug 09, 2018
As the editor of the JFK Facts blog, I try not to spend a lot of time on stupid conspiracy theories, but given widespread ignorance and confusion on the subject, unpleasant journalist duty often calls.
Who killed JFK? The Federal Reserve? Nah. The Secret Service man? A hoax. Ted Cruz's father? Pure B.S. George H.W. Bush? Heavy breathing is not the same as credible evidence. On a recent Black Vault podcast, the most common JFK question I heard was, "Was Kennedy assassinated because of his interest in UFOs?" Um, no, he was not.
Which brings me to QAnon, the imaginative conspiracy theorist now dominating the internet, attracting followers of President Trump, and obsessing the Washington Post, which has published a dozen articles about QAnon in the span of four days. Like many conspiracy theories, the QAnon fever dream can be traced back to the assassination of JFK.
The QAnon conspiracy theory is a psychedelic mushroom planted in the fertile manure of the Warren Commission. This mind-altering proposition grows in the gloom of anonymous chat groups. It is then stimulated by the bright lights of social media. And finally it is harvested and ingested by Trump cultists eager to prolong the alt-reality buzz that commenced on January 20, 2017.
But it all began on November 22, 1963.
Who Is QAnon?
For the uninitiated, "Q" is the moniker of a person or group of persons who post to 4Chan, a popular image website favored by the anonymous. Q's "theory" (and I use the term generously) is that President Trump was persuaded by the military to smash a network of "deep state" pedophiles that has ruled America for decades. The president (it is said) is working with John F. Kennedy Jr. (who did not die in a plane crash). They will soon smash the perfidious plotters, QAnon predicts, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be sent to Guantanamo.
You may think this is nutty stuff. Buzzfeed News speculates that QAnon is actually a leftist goof on right-wing suckers. But read the respectful coverage of the pro-Trump Washington Times, where QAnon is described as a "mysterious figure" who has been "posting provocative questions about the government since October." This stuff is taken seriously.
The historical foundation of this mash-up of the preposterous, the ludicrous and the vile is, you guessed it, the assassination of JFK.
From a December 2017 QAnon post about Trump's alleged enemies:
As a backup, they defined 'conspiracy' as crazy/mentally unstable and label anything 'true' as such.
This works given most of what they engage in is pure evil and simply unbelievable (hard to swallow).
The 'fix' has always been in - no matter which party won the election (-JFK (killed)/Reagan(shot)).
Why do people believe this nonsense?
One reason is that a few kernels of it are not nonsense. The CIA, in this April 1967 memo, launched a worldwide campaign to demonize critics of the Warren Commission as "conspiracy theorists." Skepticism about official theory of JFK's assassination, wrote one agency official with the approval of CIA director Richard Helms, "is of concern to the U.S. government including our organization."
The agency distributed talking points for "friendly elite contacts," including the bald-faced lie that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was "an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service." In fact, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton had monitored Oswald's movements, politics, personal life and foreign contacts for four years before he allegedly killed JFK.
If that fact became known, the CIA would have a world of hurt on its hands. So the agency said in its memo that the members of the Warren Commission were eminent men and "efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society."
The Commission's critics, said the CIA, "are enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or another." In other words, the CIA did define belief in "conspiracy" as a symptom of the mentally unstable and patriotically unreliable.
In fact, the doubts were fact-based. Skepticism about the Warren Commission's conclusions percolated among the Washington insiders (including Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and Jackie Kennedy) and among foreign leaders (including Fidel Castro and Charles DeGaulle). All of them concluded privately that JFK had been killed by his enemies, not by a lone gunman.
Of course, there are other factors contributing to the vogue of QAnon that have nothing to do with JFK.
The echo chamber effects of social media encourage the credulous. So does a president enamored with "alternative facts" (aka bullshit). The exhaustion of the American economic system, which no longer provides the majority with affordable education or upward mobility, leaves young people grasping for explanation of their plight.
But the U.S. government's implausible account of JFK's assassination--and the CIA's self-serving defense--can always be cited by those who say "The government is lying." So if you want to trace the roots of QAnon in American society, look to the Warren Commission and Langley. Please leave us JFK researchers out of it.
The Origins of JFK Theories
As I wrote a few years ago in The Atlantic, the popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963, University of Chicago pollsters asked more than 1,000 Americans who they thought was responsible for the president's death. By then, the chief suspect, Lee Oswald--a leftist who had lived for a time in Soviet Union--had been shot dead while in police custody by Jack Ruby, a local strip club owner with organized crime connections who hated Bobby Kennedy.
While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone and no one should believe "rumors" to the contrary, 62 percent of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in JFK's assassination. Only 24 percent thought Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken in Dallas during the same week found 66 percent of city respondents believed that there had been a plot.
The belief that Kennedy was killed by his enemies was not created by "conspiracy theorists" or Oliver Stone of the KGB. It was created by the circumstances of the crime and the assassination of Oswald.
The belief in conspiracy was nurtured the factual revelations that followed: The investigations of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the late 1960s, the Church Committee investigation of 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, and the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. The vastly expanded historical record of JFK's murder undermines the Warren Commission's findings and destroys the CIA's cover stories. While we still don't have a good explanation of who killed Kennedy, we do know the available facts do not corroborate the official theory.
As long as the government and major media organizations deny the JFK facts, they give credibility to those who cultivate pernicious fantasies. They water the psychedelic mushroom now altering the American consciousness.
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