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June 23 radio show on Urban Legends and Conspiracy Theories

We were back on the air! XM 169 had some technical upgrades last week.

Here's the
clip of the June 23 show. My co-host Eliot Morgan and I focused on urban legends, conspiracy theories, and rumors. To be clear, when you consider history, there are some good reasons for blacks to be suspicious of the various levels of government (as all people should be suspicious of government). But does the reality of Scotsboro, Tuskegee, and COINTELPRO mean that we must also believe that:

Ø Church’s Chicken or Kentucky Fried Chicken have been injected with an ingredient to sterilize black men.
Ø Nike and Reebok use their profits to support the Klan?
Ø That rich clothing designers don’t want to sell clothing to black women because they believe that black women have big hips.
Ø The first U.S. president was black.
Ø Memorandum 46—the "confidential" memo allegedly written by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor.

As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, I'm posting the time line that I've constructed related to Memorandum 46. Of course I'm more than willing to add dates and information to this:

DATE: 1978—March 17
ACTIVITY:
Memorandum 46 distributed among top administration officials.
SOURCE: Linked on the Internet by typically leftist organizations.
NOTE: If this memo was so top secret, why was it given a Memorandum # that was in sequence with other Memoranda that they knew could be declassified?

DATE: 1980—September 12
ACTIVITY: “The first confirmed surfacing of this forgery was on September 12, 1980, when it was hand-delivered by an unknown individual to a radio station in Washington, DC.”
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1

DATE: 1980—September 16
ACTIVITY: A N.Y. journalist gave a copy of the forged memorandum to a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1

DATE: 1980—September 17
ACTIVITY: Jerry Funk sends a memo to Jody Powell and Al Friendly labeling the Memorandum as a forgery.
SOURCE: On
Jimmy Carter’s Website

DATE: 1980—September 18
ACTIVITY: Memorandum published in the Sun Reporter
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1
NOTES: My best guess is that the
Sun Reporter is a black newspaper in California. I called, but they had no recollection of the article and don't have in-house archives. I did a search through the Washington Afro-American from September-November 1980, but couldn't come across any articles mentioning Memorandum 46.

DATE: 1980-81
ACTIVITY: Appeared in Soviet publications, including Red Star and Moscow News as well as in a TASS item, and also in Zambia and Mozambican media. The memorandum was also circulated in South Africa.
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1

DATE: 1981, November
ACTIVITY: A leftist newspaper in the Netherlands, Volkskrant, published an article about Memorandum 46.
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1
NOTES: This was the last known public appearance of the Memo until the year 2000.

DATE: 1982, July 13, 14
ACTIVITY: Soviet Active Measures: Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session.
Hearings were declassified in 1983.
NOTES: The CIA reported on suspected forgeries—more than 100 pages of suspected forgeries were submitted by John McMahon, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence

§ Forgery of “U.S. war plans”
§ Forgery of Chou En-Lai testament
§ Forgery of Islamabad
§ Use of map of Austria in disinformation
§ Use of map of Afghanistan in disinformation
§ Forgery of President Reagan’s letter to the King of Spain
§ Forgery of NATO letter
§ Forgery of cablegrams
§ Forgery of Presidential Review Memorandum
§ Forgery of State Department letter
§ Forgery of Haig-Luns letter
§ Use of map of Cuba in disinformation
§ Forgery of Commerce Department document
§ Forgery of U.S. business form letter
§ Forgery of Department of Defense news release

DATE: 1992, September 17
ACTIVITY: Jimmy Carter Library Processing Note
These documents were taken from Staff-Offices, Special Assistant to the President, Louis Martin’s file, box 66, folder Miscellaneous [1]. This is not PRM-46
SOURCE: On
Jimmy Carter’s Website

DATE: 2000, November 7
ACTIVITY:
Graves v. Cohen, 99-4476; Affirmed; N.D. Ohio
SOURCE: 238 F. 3d 421
NOTE: This was a lawsuit filed trying to prove that AIDS was created in a laboratory by the U.S. government.
Note: The case was dismissed as “delusional and fantastic.”

DATE: 2001, June 4
ACTIVITY: Graves v. Rumsfeld, 00-9587 C.A. 6th Cir
SOURCE: 532 US 1072
NOTES: The Supreme Court in no way “certified” this document. The court refused to hear the case.

DATE: 2001, September 2
ACTIVITY: Rep. Cynthia McKinney
presents a copy of Memorandum 46 to Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. McKinney also mentioned Memorandum 46 in speeches.
SOURCE: Internet links embedded directly above
NOTES: I have no doubt that government officials engage in conspiracies. As I mentioned above, because of things that the government has done, people are willing to believe any and everything.

DATE: 2005
ACTIVITY: Talk-show host Joe Madison presented Memorandum 46 at the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual gathering.
Dr. Sharon T. Freeman said that she wanted to include Memorandum 46 in a book she was writing.
SOURCE:
Congressional Black Caucus Website

CJL

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