Was Katharine Graham Killed for 9/11?

RIP KMG

A powerful publisher had a great fall.

Did anyone see it? No one can recall.

Maybe those who exposed all the president's men

Will tell us in time, but no one can say when.

--Originally posted on 9-10-01

Surviving operatives of the old Soviet bloc propaganda apparatus have to be impressed with how complete and thoroughgoing in case after important case in the United States is the suppression of important news by what still manages to call itself a “free press.” When this writer was able to obtain the long-secret official report on the violent death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University even sent out a press release dramatically announcing its availability, not a single newspaper, magazine, radio, or television station in the country reported it. The same thing happened when Kenneth Starr issued his long-delayed report on the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster. It contained an addendum, ordered attached over Starr’s strenuous objections by the same 3-judge panel that appointed him, that thoroughly undermined his suicide conclusion. I have called the press silence about that addendum “The Great Suppression of ’97.” The press was similarly silent when Starr’s lead investigator, Miguel Rodriguez, resigned in disgust and when we published his resignation letter.

The phenomenon of news suppression in the American mainstream media is indisputable, but what may be even more important is that those contemplating an outrage like the two mentioned or the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King or the Oklahoma City bombing can be quite confident in advance that not a single major news organization will “go rogue” on them and actually publish salient contrary facts. It’s like knowing in advance that America’s air defenses would remain completely supine while one airliner after another would stray radically off course on September 11, 2001. How can they be so sure? Are there planning meetings in which all the key players are present, especially those in the media, to make sure that everyone in completely on board and everyone understands his or her role?

For the smaller, more routine outrages like, say, the “suiciding” of the DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, press cooperation in advance is probably more or less assumed. That was just one person. But what about the outrage of all outrages, the 9/11 “attacks” that killed thousands and has led to the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands, if not millions? You really would want to make sure that you had your press ducks all in a row for that one.

If you watch this short video by Brasscheck TV you will see some very well positioned ducks, indeed: “And then I witnessed both buildings collapse, mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense,” says a New York man in the street, chosen “randomly” by Fox News. The wise man that Dan Rather goes to for commentary turns out to be a confident expert on both building strength and Osama bin Laden.

In another video of the early TV coverage, we hear a CNN news person suggest that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine might be responsible for the attacks because the airplane that went down in Pennsylvania was not all that far from Camp David, Maryland, and we were nearing the September 17 anniversary of the Camp David Accords. The major networks also gave prominence to the false story that West Bank Palestinians were out in the street celebrating the attacks.

I heard a local radio station interview a George Washington University professor on the day of the tragedy who informed the public, “Now perhaps Americans will appreciate what the people of Israel have to go through on a daily basis.” “How did it happen that they would find this particular guy who would make that observation?” I recall thinking at the time.

One doesn’t have to follow and accept everything that Simon Shack puts forward in his hour and a half long video, “September Clues,” to believe that prior planning went into the major media’s presentation of the events of 9/11.

Katharine Graham’s Fatal “Fall”

On Tuesday, July 10, 2001, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Post Company, a media conglomerate that publishes The Washington Post, left for Sun Valley, Idaho, for the 19th annual conference of major movers and shakers that is paid for by New York investment banker, Herbert Allen, Jr. Allen’s company specializes in the media. She would not return alive. She suffered head injuries while at the Sun Valley resort on Saturday, July 14, and died from them three days later in a hospital in Boise. It was said that she had suffered an accident, falling on a sidewalk.

I had been on vacation and was away from the Internet for a period right after Graham’s death. Unable to find any actual details about the accident, I made the following posting on the news group, alt.thebird, on August 26, 2001:

Did anyone witness Katharine Graham's fatal "fall"? Did any news organ anywhere report any details about the "accident"? I hate being kept in the dark like this, or have I just been reading the wrong publications?

Thirteen additional posters weighed in in response to the question with a total of 128 posts over a period of 26 days. Two days and a great number of responses later I made this posting:

What on earth are we going to do about this critical faculty famine in the country? I ask a simple, straightforward question and no one seems to know how to even begin to answer it. I did not ask for speculation. I did not ask for opinions. My question certainly had nothing to do with whether any of us like Katharine Graham or whether any of you like me. I asked if anyone witnessed Katharine Graham's fall.

Still, no one seems to know. Is there no enterprising reporter out there who showed up on the scene in Sun Valley, Idaho, to ask if anyone saw the fall? If the fall was witnessed, how do they say she managed to fall so forcefully as to cause fatal brain damage, if that's what it was that killed her? I'm having great difficulty picturing it in the one season of the year when you are sure not to have ice on the walk in Sun Valley. If no one witnessed the fall, how do they know that the apparent brain injury was caused by a fall?

Now one of the blow-hard respondents, behind a smoke screen of insults, said that he had read that there were witnesses, but he seems to have been the only one. And he has not followed up with an actual news story. At this point I can only conclude that his memory is faulty or he was lying. He was also among those imploring me with epithets that I dig up the information myself. Well, I have looked on Net archives and they all say simply that she fell on a concrete walkway and only imply that she hit her head. That's it. Oh, there was this one from an offbeat story that, like so many mainstream news stories these days, relied on an anonymous source:

N E W S B L U E Z E T T E Wednesday, July 18, 2001

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TIPPED GOLF CART KILLED GRAHAM

Despite widespread reports in the Washington Post, New York Times and Associated Press, an eyewitness to the accident that took the life of Katharine Graham insists the 84-year-old former publisher was in a golf cart that tipped over while making a sharp turn on an asphalt walkway.

His claim directly challenges the company's statement that Mrs. Graham "suffered a head injury when she fell on a concrete walkway outside a condominium in Sun Valley, Idaho."

According to the source, who works for a major news network, "The story about falling during a walk is bullshit."

He says resort employees rushed her to a Sun Valley emergency care facility where doctors determined her injuries were beyond the scope of anything they could handle.

She was stabilized and airlifted in a new twin-engine Bell 222 helicopter (known affectionately as "Deuce") on a difficult 100 mile flight along the ridges of the Sawtooth National Forest.

Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, in Boise, Idaho, which received the critically injured woman late Saturday is touted as the "flagship trauma center of Idaho," the state's only Level II trauma center.

Mrs. Graham underwent surgery Sunday for the head injury, which caused massive bleeding in her brain. She remained in critical condition in the hospital's intensive care unit for nearly two days and never regained consciousness.

Graham's son, Donald Graham, chairman of the board of The Washington Post Company, was at her bedside when she was pronounced dead at 11:56AM Tuesday.

The funeral service will be Monday at 11 a.m. at Washington National Cathedral.

-----------

This strikes me as a false lead. Why does the source want to remain anonymous, and if she fell from a golf cart, why would they lie about it? The fact that a bizarre story like this is being floated is the sort of thing that begins to make me suspicious.

Frankly, I must admit that my suspicion began well before I encountered this curious Internet news story. It was exactly the same sort of almost aggressive lack of curiosity on the part of the news business, particularly in the cases of the deaths of Forrestal and Foster, that prompted my eventually very fruitful inquiries.

Medford Evans, writing in the very limited circulation John Birch Society magazine American Opinion in April 1967, some 18 years after the fact, finally produced what I would consider to be the normal response to the news of Forrestal’s death:

I was living in metropolitan Washington at the time of the defenestration of Forrestal. I remember being convinced immediately that he had not committed suicide—which was the official story—but had been murdered. My reason was simple, but for myself, conclusive. The first report I read, in the Washington Post, said that Forrestal’s body had been found on the hospital roof below the open sixteenth-story window of the tower, clad in pajamas and robe, with the bathrobe cord knotted about his neck. The theory was, said the Post, that he had hanged himself out the window, and then the cord had slipped from the radiator or whatever it was tied to inside the window.

I didn’t believe it. I believe that men hang themselves, or that they jump out sixteenth-story windows. But I don’t believe that they hang themselves out sixteenth-story windows.

But to all other reporters in all the other media, the official story was simply to be believed on its face. They showed no interest at all in examining the actual facts, and when the official investigation was completed but not released, they had nothing to say.

Similarly, from their reporting on Fort Marcy Park, where Foster’s body was found on July 20, 1993, I have the distinct impression only Christopher Ruddy of the New York Post at the time actually ever even set foot in the park. More than one of them wrote of the scenic view in the park overlooking the Potomac River. There is no such view, although the park is not far from the river. When the Park Police ruled the death a suicide but indicated that their report on the matter would be kept secret, only the late Sarah McClendon of the White House press corps complained, and her complaints were never reported by the mainstream media.

In the case of Graham’s death, is it not entirely natural that one should want to know what sort of fall on a sidewalk it was that could have produced such severe injuries? If the cause of the fall was completely innocent, what possible reason could there be for the press to fail to flesh out the story and tell us how the fall happened?

Making little progress on the Internet, I sent the following email to the weekly Mountain Express of Ketchum, Idaho, which abuts Sun Valley, and posted it on the news group on August 30:

Dear Mountain Express,

I have been very frustrated by the paucity of details in the national news concerning Katharine Graham's fatal fall. The New York Times, for example, uses only the web page of The Washington Post for its source, which, in turn, uses a spokesman for the Washington Post Company. All he tells us is that she fell on a concrete walk and that she underwent surgery of an unspecified nature. Then she died.

I'm sure you will agree with me that were this Jane Q. Tourist who died from a fall at Sun Valley this reporting simply would not do. In the case of the death of the world's most powerful woman it is unforgivable.

As the newspaper on the spot, perhaps you can tell me:

1. Were there any witnesses to the fall?

2. If not, how was it determined that her injuries were caused by the fall?

3. If so, who were they and what did they have to say about the fall? What caused it? How did she land? Did she hit her head? If so, on what? If not, what part of her did appear to land on the walk most heavily?

4. I should think that the law would require a police report. What does the police report say about the accident?

5. Did the Mountain Express report the details of the accident? If so, could you please e-mail me what you reported. If not, could you explain why not?

6. If you did not report the details at the request of the Graham family, could you tell me if you would withhold such details at the request of the family of Jane Q. Tourist, even though the police tell us that in unnatural death cases, immediate family members are generally high among the suspects as to the cause of the death?

I would very much appreciate answers to these questions.

A Research Breakthrough

The Mountain Express did not respond. However, one of the lurkers on the news group sent me a revealing article written by Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman of Boise that stated that Graham had been operated on for “extensive intracranial injuries” (plural). I don’t believe any other news organ in the country has reported that fact. Barker also seemed to have asked the questions of the authorities that any good reporter should have done, but received no satisfactory answer, as indicated by the last three paragraphs of his article:

Graham left for the secretive Allen and Co. retreat from Washington, D.C., and arrived in Sun Valley on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.

The retreat, which included Mexico President Vicente Fox and Microsoft founder Bill Gates Jr., began Tuesday and ended Saturday night.

Sun Valley officials would not comment Sunday night on any details surrounding the retreat, including Graham's fall. Neither would officials with the private security force hired by Allen and Co.

On September 8 I received a return telephone call on my answering machine from the chief of the Sun Valley Police Department. He said that Graham had "tripped on a walk on private property" and his department was not involved in the aftermath in any way. He did not say if there were any witnesses.

The Sun Valley Resort, it would appear, is regarded almost as a sovereign country by local authorities. The police apparently knew no more about the purported accident than Rocky Barker. Barker at least pursued the matter up to the “would not comment” point, which the resort, The Post, and America’s great “free” press apparently regard as the end of the public’s right to know.

So let’s think about what might have caused those “extensive intracranial injuries.” Is it not reasonable to conclude that they were caused by multiple blows to the head? To those who would say that this is just speculation the obvious response is to ask who invited the speculation with their indefensible secrecy.

The most common objection that has been raised to my speculation is to note that Graham was 84 years old. Old people, as we all know, are much more likely to fall and to injure themselves badly when they fall than young people are.

Yes, they fall, but my impression from six decades of observation is that they break their hips, not their heads. People young and old, I gather, most commonly fall and suffer serious head injuries in the bathroom, where water causes slickness and one’s head might strike the edge of the bathtub or the toilet. They also fall down stairs. In fact, the best argument that can be made against the speculation of foul play is that if the “fall” story is made up, they would have said Graham fell in her bathroom instead of on a sidewalk, of all places. Old people may be more fragile, but they also tend to walk more slowly and carefully, making a violent fall on a sidewalk, such as they suggest Graham had, appear to be extremely unlikely.

The writer, as it happens, has been the inadvertent participant in a number of “experiments” of the typical effect on the human body of hard and painful falls on sidewalks and other hard surfaces. The most relevant occurred about the time of Graham’s fall. I was jogging—not merely walking—on one of the poorly maintained sidewalks of our nation’s capital. One unanticipated section of the walk was almost two inches higher than another section. A shadow from a tree on a bright, sunny day fell right over that area of the walk and my gaze was distracted by an oncoming pedestrian. When my leading foot was prevented from going forward my horizontal speed was immediately converted into vertical speed downward. The pedestrian screamed, my glasses flew off, and, as I told friends afterward, I hit the sidewalk so hard I almost bounced. I suffered scrapes on the elbows and knees and a bruise under one eye, but my cranium remained unmolested. My hands and arms had cushioned almost all the blow.

Some years before while walking home in the winter at night I stepped squarely on a snowball that had turned to hard ice, turning my ankle and spraining it badly. Naturally, I fell in a heap on the sidewalk, but only the ankle suffered any injury at all.

Just last year I fell twice in the same place in a hotel lobby in a foreign country where there was about a six-inch step-down into the lobby—I learn slowly. I landed on exactly the same place on my right hip each time, producing a colorful bruise, but that was the only part of me that was hurt.

So, with all that experience, I was having a very difficult time picturing what sort of fall on an ice-free sidewalk could have resulted in fatal head injuries. Once it was revealed that Graham actually suffered “extensive intracranial injuries,” my difficulty in picturing the fall became even greater, as did the need for a witness to make sense of the puzzling information. We learned from our inquiries, though, that either there was no such witness or, if there was, the witness or witnesses would not be made available. In the unlikely chance that there was no witness, we were also given to believe from the response that greeted the reporter Barker that we would also hear nothing from the discoverer or discoverers of the stricken Graham.

Anyone believing that the complete absence of any public details about Graham’s “fatal fall” was simply a matter of inadvertence can now put that notion aside. The withholding of the information has obviously been purposeful, but what is the purpose?

An Alternative Scenario

As we see from the opening paragraphs of this essay, our nation’s major news media were deeply involved from the very beginning in selling the phony official 9/l1 story. Although it was, more than anything, a television production, the major print media had to be in the loop, and that includes Katharine Graham and her Post Company. If anyone in the media was to attempt to pull the emergency stop cord on a train bound for disaster for the country and the world, the July gathering of media moguls might well have offered the very last opportunity.

There are no doubt those who will argue that anyone with Graham’s record would have been among the last to stand in the way of the 9/11 outrage. Didn’t The Post go out of its way to sell the phony Forrestal suicide story even 50 years after the fact, and wasn’t The Post the lead news organ in covering up the Foster murder, and hasn’t it been a major participant in practically every major cover-up that one might name?

That may be true, but 9/11 was a diabolical outrage of an entirely different magnitude from any of the previous ones. In these other cases, there is also a possibility that Graham did not know about them in advance. We have seen from the way in which they participated in selling the official story from the first minutes, the major media not only had to have been informed in advance of 9/11, but had to have been part of the planning. That must have included Katharine Graham to some degree.

Maybe she reached her breaking point, and maybe she had been called the most powerful woman in America on so many occasions that it had gone to her head. Maybe she thought that she really had the power to stop 9/11. The administering of the blows that produced the “extensive intracranial injuries” would have put a stop to that.

If the plausible story had been disseminated that Graham had fallen and hit her head in the bathroom, others who were privy to the plot and had thoughts of “pulling a Graham” might have failed to get the message. The preposterous sidewalk-falling story with no witnesses, on the other hand, gave firm notice to any potential backsliders of what might happen to them.

On September 15, 2001 (note the date), one “Tom S.” wrote on the still continuing discussion of Katharine Graham’s death, “If you wait for a few more seconds someone will no doubt blame it on mid-east terrorists.”

The next posting was mine on September 21, “Now I'm beginning to wonder if Kay Graham opposed the 9-11 operation.”

No one responded, and the discussion ended.

David Martin

September 21, 2012

Addendum

“There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” -- Katharine Graham, speaking at the CIA headquarters in 1988.

That would now include, it would appear, the circumstances of her death.

David Martin

September 22, 2012

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