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Today in History with Ray – November 12
John Bunyan
For example, John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress was arrested on this day in 1660 and imprisoned for 12 years. His crime? His constant spreading of the gospel. It was the 1st of 2 times Bunyan would be placed in prison for the very same crime. During those two stays in prison, he wrote several Christian books and began his work on Pilgrims Progress. He released the 1st part of the book after his 2nd stay in prison.
By the time of Bunyan’s death in 1688, 11 additions of The Pilgrim’s Progress had been published with over 100,000 copies in print. He also left a legacy of many other great books and poems.
In their book “Baptist Theologians” by Timothy George and Ernest Bacon, they wrote this about John Bunyan. “There was 1st and foremost in John Bunyan a deep personal love for his Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ….Bunyan’s books are full of Christ – His welcome, His unshakable truth, His advocacy for sinners.….Bunyan’s preaching and writing were Christ centered, and it was this that carried men’s hearts captive to Christ. If our present-day preachers and theologians had the same emphasis, a very different spirit would prevail in both the Church and the State.”
Abigail Adams
Upon hearing of England’s rejection of the so-called Olive Branch Petition on November 12, 1775, Abigail Adams writes to her husband, “Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our Brethren. Let us renounce them and instead of supplications as formerly for their prosperity and happiness, Let us beseech the almighty to blast their councils and bring to Nought all their devices.”
The previous July, Congress had adopted the Olive Branch Petition, written by John Dickinson, which appealed directly to King George III and expressed hope for reconciliation between the colonies and Great Britain. Dickinson, who hoped desperately to avoid a final break with Britain, phrased colonial opposition to British policy as follows:
“Your Majesty’s Ministers, persevering in their measures, and proceeding to open hostilities for enforcing them, have compelled us to arm in our own defence, and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent to the affections of your still faithful Colonists, that when we consider whom we must oppose in this contest, and if it continues, what may be the consequences, our own particular misfortunes are accounted by us only as parts of our distress.”
By phrasing their discontent this way, Congress attempted to notify the king that American colonists were unhappy with ministerial policy, not his own. They concluded their plea with a final statement of fidelity to the crown. “That your Majesty may enjoy long and prosperous reign, and that your descendants may govern your Dominions with honour to themselves and happiness to their subjects, is our sincere prayer.”
By July 1776, though, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed something very different: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Congress’ language is critical to understanding the seismic shift that had occurred in American thought in just 12 months. The militia that had fired upon British Redcoats at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 had been angry with Parliament, not the king, who they still trusted to desire only good for all of his subjects around the globe. This belief changed after King George refused to so much as receive the Olive Branch Petition. The fundamental grounds upon which Americans were taking up arms had changed.
Abigail Adams’ response was a particularly articulate expression of many colonists’ thoughts: Patriots had hoped that Parliament had curtailed colonial rights without the king’s full knowledge, and that the petition would cause him to come to his subjects’ defense. When George III refused to read the petition, Patriots like Adams realized that Parliament was acting with royal knowledge and support. Americans’ patriotic rage was intensified with the January 1776 publication by English-born radical Thomas Paine of Common Sense, an influential pamphlet that attacked the monarchy, which Paine claimed had allowed “crowned ruffians” to “impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears.”
On November 12, 1799, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an early American astronomer born in Vermont, witnesses the Leonids meteor shower from a ship off the Florida Keys. Douglass, who later became an assistant to the famous astronomer Percival Lowell, wrote in his journal that the “whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with sky rockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the light of the sun after day break.” Douglass’ journal entry is the first known record of a meteor shower in North America.
The Leonids meteor shower is an annual event that is greatly enhanced every 33 years or so by the appearance of the comet Tempel-Tuttle. When the comet returns, the Leonids can produce rates of up to several thousand meteors per hour that can light up the sky on a clear night. Douglass witnessed one such manifestation of the Leonids shower, and the subsequent return of the comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1833 is credited as inspiring the first organized study of meteor astronomy.
Union General William T. Sherman
On this day in 1864, Union General William T. Sherman ordered the business district of Atlanta, Georgia, destroyed before he embarked on his famous March to the Sea.
When Sherman captured Atlanta in early September 1864, he knew that he could not remain there for long. His tenuous supply line ran from Nashville, Tennessee, through Chattanooga, Tennesse, then one hundred miles through mountainous northern Georgia. The army he had just defeated, the Army of Tennessee, was still in the area and its leader, John Bell Hood, swung around Atlanta to try to damage Sherman’s lifeline. Of even greater concern was the Confederate cavalry of General Nathan Bedford Forrest,a brilliant commander who could strike quickly against the railroads and river transports on which Sherman relied.
During the fall, Sherman conceived of a plan to split his enormous army. He sent part of it, commanded by General George Thomas, back toward Nashville to deal with Hood while he prepared to take the rest of the troops across Georgia. Through October, Sherman built up a massive cache of supplies in Atlanta. He then ordered a systematic destruction ofthe cityto prevent the Confederates from recovering anything once the Yankees had abandoned it. By one estimate, nearly 40 percent of the city was ruined. Sherman would apply to the same policy of destruction to the rest of Georgia as he marched to Savannah. Before leaving on November 15, Sherman’s forces had burned the industrial district of Atlanta and left little but a smoking shell.
After more than a decade of ineffective military campaigns and infamous atrocities, a conference begins at Fort Laramie to discuss alternative solutions to the “Indian problem” and to initiate peace negotiations with the Sioux.
The United States had been fighting periodic battles with Sioux and Cheyenne tribes since the 1854. That year, the Grattan Massacre inspired loud calls for revenge, though largely unjustified, against the Plains Indians. Full-scale war erupted on the plains in 1864, leading to vicious fighting and the inexcusable Sand Creek Massacre, during which Colorado militiamen killed 105 Cheyenne women and children who were living peacefully at their winter camp. By 1867, the cost of the war against the Plains Indians, the Army’s failure to achieve decisive results, and news of atrocities like those at Sand Creek turned the American public and U.S. Congress against the Army’s aggressive military solution to the “Indian problem.”
Concluding that peaceful negotiations were preferable to war, the attendees at the Fort Laramie conference initiated talks with the Sioux. The talks bore results the following year when U.S. negotiators agreed to abandon American forts on the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming and Montana, leaving the territory in the hands of the Sioux.
However, the promise of peace on the central plains was fleeting. Concern about wars between the different Indian tribes led the U.S. to renege on its promise to provide guns to the Cheyenne, and the angry Indians took revenge on Kansas settlements by killing 15 men and raping five women. By late 1868, American soldiers were again preparing for war on the Plains.
William “Pudge” Heffelfinger
On November 12, 1892, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger becomes the first professional football player when Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Athletic Association pays him $500 to play as a ringer in a game against its rival Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Before Heffelfinger, players had traded their services on the field for expense money, “double expenses,” or trinkets that players could pawn back to the team–but no one had ever openly accepted a cash payment to play football. (Baseball, on the other hand, had been frankly professional for almost 25 years.) For his part, Heffelfinger never acknowledged that he’d taken the payment. He went on to become a prominent insurance executive and congressman from Minnesota.
The AAA and PAC football teams, bitter rivals and sworn enemies, had played one another the month before. In that game, the star of the PAC team had been a mysterious young man who called himself “Stayer.” Team officials swore he was just a neighborhood kid who’d never played football before, but he turned out to be A.C. Read, the captain of the Penn State team. The AAA was livid and, though it had managed to play to a 6-6 draw, demanded a rematch. The PAC agreed, since its team manager had his eye on an even more promising ringer: Pudge Heffelfinger, who’d been a football star at Yale and was currently on leave from his job in an Omaha railroad office to play (in exchange for “expenses,” no doubt) for the fabled Chicago Athletic Association team. The PAC offered Heffelfinger and his teammate Knowlton “Snake” Ames $250 apiece to play for their team. At the end of October, thePittsburgh Press helpfully printed an account of these negotiations; shortly afterward, the AAA contacted Heffelfinger and offered to double his pay if he’d play for their team instead. He agreed, but didn’t tell the PAC officials about it–and, consequently, they didn’t find out that they’d lost their ringer until he showed up at the field in an AAA uniform. (Meanwhile, Ames refused to play for any price; he didn’t want to jeopardize his amateur status.)
The PAC team was furious, as were its fans; the AAA was smug, and its fans were delighted. The PACers stormed off the field and refused to play until AAA agreed that the game wouldn’t count. For good measure, all bets were off–which appeased the PAC’s partisans but infuriated the people who’d were hoping to get rich on Heffelfinger’s team. In the end, Pudge turned out to be worth his paycheck: He scored the only touchdown of the game and the AAA team won in a shutout.
For the next week’s game, the AAA paid Ben “Sport” Donnelly (one of Pudge’s Chicago teammates) $250 to play for its team. The next year, team managers signed season-long, $50-a-week contracts with the young ringers James Van Cleve, Oliver Rafferty and Peter Wright. In 1896, the AAA went broke, but the model they’d pioneered survived.
The beautiful Dardanelles
On November 12, 1918, one day after an armistice ended World War I, the Allied fleet passes through the Dardanelles, the narrow strait running between Europe and Asia that had in 1915 been the site of a disastrous Allied naval operation.
As the only waterway between the Black Sea in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west, the Dardanelles was a much-contested area from the beginning of the First World War. The naval attack, spearheaded by Winston Churchill, Britain’s young first lord of the Admiralty, opened on March 18, 1915, when six English and four French battleships headed toward the strait. Turkish mines blasted five of the ships, sinking three of them and forcing the Allied navy to draw back until land troops could be coordinated to begin an invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula. With troops from the Ottoman Empire and Germany mounting a spirited defense of the peninsula, however, the Gallipoli offensive turned into a significant setback for the Allies, with 205,000 casualties among British Empire troops and nearly 50,000 among the French.
Allied troops had more success, though, with their later offensives in Mesopotamia and Palestine. By September 1917, the crucial cities of Jerusalem and Baghdad were both in British hands. As the war stretched into the following year, these defeats and an Arab revolt had combined to destroy the Ottoman economy and devastate its land, leaving some 6 million people dead and millions more starving. In early October 1918, unable to bank on a German victory any longer, the Turkish government in Constantinople sought to cut its losses and approached the Allies about brokering a peace deal. On October 30, British and Turkish representatives signed the Treaty of Mudros, ending Ottoman participation in World War I. By the terms of the treaty, Turkey had to demobilize its army, release all prisoners of war, and evacuate its Arab provinces–the majority of which were already under Allied control–and open the Dardanelles and Bosporus to Allied warships.
This last condition was fulfilled on November 12, the day after the general armistice, when a squadron of British warships steamed through the Dardanelles, past the ruins of the ancient city of Troy, toward Constantinople. By the post-war terms worked out by the Allies and formalized in the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, the waterways formerly under Ottoman rule–including the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora and the Bosporus–were placed under international control, with the designation that their “navigation…shall in future be open, both in peace and war, to every vessel of commerce or of war and to military and commercial aircraft, without distinction of flag.”
General Hideki Tojo who ruled Japan throughout the Second World War,
hears his death sentence at the conclusion of his trial.
On November 12, 1948, an international war crimes tribunal in Tokyo passes death sentences on seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, who served as premier of Japan from 1941 to 1944.
Eight days before, the trial ended after 30 months with all 25 Japanese defendants being found guilty of breaching the laws and customs of war. In addition to the death sentences imposed on Tojo and others principals, such as Iwane Matsui, who organized the Rape of Nanking, and Heitaro Kimura, who brutalized Allied prisoners of war, 16 others were sentenced to life imprisonment. The remaining two of the 25 defendants were sentenced to lesser terms in prison.
Unlike the Nuremberg trial of German war criminals, where there were four chief prosecutors representing Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR, the Tokyo trial featured only one chief prosecutor–American Joseph B. Keenan, a former assistant to the U.S. attorney general. However, other nations, especially China, contributed to the proceedings, and Australian judge William Flood Webb presided. In addition to the central Tokyo trial, various tribunals sitting outside Japan judged some 5,000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed.
Ellis Island (1892–1954)
On this day in 1954, Ellis Island, the gateway to America, shuts it doors after processing more than 12 million immigrants since opening in 1892. Today, an estimated 40 percent of all Americans can trace their roots through Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor off the New Jersey coast and named for merchant Samuel Ellis, who owned the land in the 1770s.
On January 2, 1892, 15-year-old Annie Moore, from Ireland, became the first person to pass through the newly opened Ellis Island, which President Benjamin Harrison designated as America’s first federal immigration center in 1890. Before that time, the processing of immigrants had been handled by individual states.
Not all immigrants who sailed into New York had to go through Ellis Island. First- and second-class passengers submitted to a brief shipboard inspection and then disembarked at the piers in New York or New Jersey, where they passed through customs. People in third class, though, were transported to Ellis Island, where they underwent medical and legal inspections to ensure they didn’t have a contagious disease or some condition that would make them a burden to the government. Only two percent of all immigrants were denied entrance into the U.S.
Immigration to Ellis Island peaked between 1892 and 1924, during which time the 3.3-acre island was enlarged with landfill (by the 1930s it reached its current 27.5-acre size) and additional buildings were constructed to handle the massive influx of immigrants. During the busiest year of operation, 1907, over 1 million people were processed at Ellis Island.
With America’s entrance into World War I, immigration declined and Ellis Island was used as a detention center for suspected enemies. Following the war, Congress passed quota laws and the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply reduced the number of newcomers allowed into the country and also enabled immigrants to be processed at U.S. consulates abroad. After 1924, Ellis Island switched from a processing center to serving other purposes, such as a detention and deportation center for illegal immigrants, a hospital for wounded soldiers during World War II and a Coast Guard training center. In November 1954, the last detainee, a Norwegian merchant seaman, was released and Ellis Island officially closed.
Beginning in 1984, Ellis Island underwent a $160 million renovation, the largest historic restoration project in U.S. history. In September 1990, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum opened to the public and today is visited by almost 2 million people each year.
Seymour Hersh, an independent investigative journalist, in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, reveals the extent of the U.S. Army’s charges against 1st Lt. William L. Calley at My Lai. Hersh wrote: “The Army says he [Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968, in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville."”
The incident, which became known as the My Lai Massacre, took place in March 1968. Between 200 and 500 South Vietnamese civilians were murdered by U.S. soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division. During a sweep of the cluster of hamlets known as My Lai 4, the U.S. soldiers–particularly those from Calley’s first platoon–indiscriminately shot people as they ran from their huts, and then systematically rounded up the survivors, allegedly leading them to a ditch where Calley gave the order to “finish them off.”
The original investigation–which had been conducted in April 1968 by members of the 11th Infantry Brigade, the unit involved in the affair–concluded that no massacre had occurred and that no further action was warranted. However, when the cover-up was discovered, the Army Criminal Investigation Division conducted a new investigation. Additionally, Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland appointed Lt. Gen. William R. Peers to “explore the nature and scope” of the original investigation to determine the extent of the cover-up. He found that 30 persons either participated in the atrocity or knew of it and failed to do anything about it. In the end, only 14 were charged with crimes. All eventually had their charges dismissed or were acquitted, except Calley, who was found guilty of murdering 22 civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, Calley’s sentence was eventually reduced and he was released from prison in 1974.
Also on this day: In Washington, D.C., the federal government begins to assemble 9,000 troops to assist the police and National Guard with massive protests and demonstrations scheduled for November 14-15. The Defense Department announced that the troops were being made available at the request of the Justice Department and were to augment 1,200 National Guardsmen and a 3,700-man police force.
Iran takes Americans working at their US Embassy hostage
On this day in 1979, President Jimmy Carter responds to a potential threat to national security by stopping the importation of petroleum from Iran.
Earlier that month, on November 4, 66 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been taken hostage by a radical Islamic group. The alarming event led Carter and his advisors to wonder if the same or other terrorist groups would try to strike at American oil resources in the region. At the time, the U.S. depended heavily on Iran for crude oil and Carter’s cultivation of a relationship with Iran’s recently deposed shah gave the radicals cause, in their view, to take the Americans hostage. Not knowing if future attacks were planned involving American oil tankers or refineries, Carter agreed with the Treasury and Energy Departments that oil imports from Iran should be discontinued immediately. This ended America’s formerly friendly association with the oil-rich nation.
The U.S. and Iran had previously enjoyed a healthy diplomatic relationship; Carter had even enlisted the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s help in reconvening peace talks between Israel and Egypt. Carter also sought Iran’s help in supporting nuclear non-proliferation talks with the Soviet Union. Carter and the shah affirmed their desire to collaborate on alternative energy and oil conservation. He even once toasted Iran under the shah as “an island of stability” in the Middle East.
While Carter and the shah planned closer collaboration on energy issues and the Middle East peace process, an Islamic revolution was brewing in Iran. The shah, who was reviled by the revolutionaries as catering to evil Western influences, was deposed in January 1979 and replaced by a clerical regime led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. In October 1979, the exiled shah came to the United States for cancer treatment. Carter’s hospitality toward the shah enraged the group of radical Iranian students who, on November 4, stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage.
The ensuing hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, eroded Carter’s popularity and he lost his bid for re-election to Republican Ronald Reagan. Reagan went 
on to serve as president from 1980 to 1988.
Voyager 1
More than three years after its launch, the U.S. planetary probe Voyager 1 edges within 77,000 miles of Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system. The photos, beamed 950 million miles back to California, stunned scientists. The high-resolution images showed a world that seemed to confound all known laws of physics. Saturn had not six, but hundreds of rings. The rings appeared to dance, buckle, and interlock in ways never thought possible. Two rings were intertwined, or “braided,” and pictures showed dark radial “spokes” moving inside the rings in the direction of rotation. Voyager 2, a sister spacecraft, arrived at Saturn in August 1981. The Voyagers also discovered three new moons around Saturn and a substantial atmosphere around Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
Voyager 1 was preceded to Saturn by Pioneer 11, a smaller and less sophisticated U.S. spacecraft that flew by the gas giant in September 1979. The Voyager spacecrafts were equipped with high-resolution television cameras that sent back more than 30,000 images of Saturn, its rings, and satellite. Voyager 1 was actually launched 16 days after Voyager 2, but its trajectory followed a quicker path to the outer planets.
Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in March 1979, followed by Voyager 2 four months later. Both spacecraft then continued on to Saturn, with Voyager 1 arriving in November 1980 and Voyager 2 in August 1981. Voyager 2 was then diverted to the remaining gas giants, arriving at Uranus in January 1986 and Neptune in August 1989. Voyager 1, meanwhile, studied interplanetary space and continued on to the edge of the solar system.
In February 1998, Voyager 1 became the most distant man-made object from the sun, surpassing the distance of Pioneer 10. Voyager 2 is also traveling out of the solar system but at a slower pace. Both Voyager spacecrafts contain a gold-plated copper disk that has on it recorded sounds and images of Earth. Along with 115 analog images, the disk features sound selections that include greetings in 55 languages, 35 natural and man-made sounds, and portions of 27 musical pieces. The Voyagers are expected to remain operable until about the year 2020, periodically sending back data on the edge of the solar system.
Yuri Andropov
Following the death of long-time Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev two days earlier, Yuri Andropov is selected as the new general secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. It was the culmination of a long, but steady march up the Communist Party hierarchy for Andropov. Born in Russia in 1914, by the 1930s Andropov was an active participant in the Communist Youth League.
During World War II, he led a group of guerilla fighters who operated behind Nazi lines. His work led to various positions in Moscow, and in 1954, he was named as Soviet ambassador to Hungary. During the Hungarian crisis of 1956, Andropov proved his reliability. He lied to Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy about Soviet military intentions, and later assured Nagy that he was safe from Soviet reprisals. Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in November 1956 and Nagy was captured and executed in 1958.
Andropov’s work in Hungary brought him back to Moscow, where he continued to rise through the ranks of the Communist Party. In 1967, he was named head of the KGB, Russia’s secret police force. A hard-liner, he supported the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and oversaw the crackdown on dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn. In 1982, with Brezhnev deathly ill and fading fast, Andropov left the KGB and began jockeying for power. When Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, Andropov was poised to assume power. He was named general secretary on November 12. His rule was short-lived, but eventful. At home, he tried to reinvigorate the flagging Russian economy and attacked corruption and rising alcoholism among the Soviet people. In his foreign policy, Andropov faced off against the adamantly anticommunist diplomacy of President Ronald Reagan.
Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were severely strained when Soviet pilots shot down a Korean airliner in September 1983. Later that year, Soviet diplomats broke off negotiations concerning reductions in Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START).
Andropov had suffered from nearly debilitating illnesses since early 1983, and died on February 9, 1984. He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko.
Crown Prince Akihito, the 125th Japanese monarch along an imperial line dating back to 660 B.C., is enthroned as emperor of Japan two years after the death of his father.
Akihito, the only son of the late Emperor Hirohito, was the first Japanese monarch to reign solely as an official figurehead. His father, Hirohito, began his reign in 1926 as theoretically absolute, though his powers were sharply limited in practice. After the Japanese defeat in World War II, Hirohito was formally stripped of his powers by the United States and forced to renounce his supposed divinity. With the signing by Japan of the amended constitution of 1946, the emperor became the official figurehead of Japan.
Akihito caused controversy in 1959, when as heir to the Japanese throne he broke a 1,500-year-old tradition and married a commoner, Shoda Michiko, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Upon becoming emperor, Akihito, an amateur marine biologist and accomplished cellist, commenced a new Japanese era, known as Heisei, or “Achieving Peace.” The imperial couple have three children: Crown Prince Naruhito, born in 1960; Prince Akishino, born in 1965; and Princess Nori, born in 1969.
The New York crash site
An American Airlines flight out of John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport in New York City crashes into a Queens neighborhood after takeoff on November 12, 2001, killing 265 people. Although some initially speculated that the crash was the result of terrorism, as it came exactly two months after the September 11 attacks, the cause was quickly proven to be a combination of pilot error and wind conditions.
Flight 587 took off at 9:14 a.m., bound for the Dominican Republic with 260 passengers and crew on board. Just ahead of the Airbus 300 jet, also using runway 31, was a Japan Air 747. Even with the standard four-mile distance between them, the 747 created some wake turbulence that hit Flight 587 just minutes after takeoff. As the plane climbed to 13,000 feet, there were two significant shudders and then a violent heave.
Unfortunately, the pilots of Flight 587 overreacted to the wake turbulence and their subsequent maneuvers put too much strain on the tail section of the plane. The tail, along with the rudder in the rear, broke off completely and fell into Rockaway Bay. Without this part of the plane, Flight 587 crashed to the ground.
As Flight 587 was in its final moments, Kevin McKeon was in his house on Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula. In an instant, his house virtually exploded; he was thrown out into his yard as the plane fell onto his house. In all, 10 homes were set ablaze, and five people on the ground, as well as all 260 people on the plane, lost their lives. The disaster hit Rockaway especially hard, as the community was still reeling from the September 11 attacks, in which 65 area residents lost their lives.
Hillary Clinton checks her email
And finally, this is the lead story to this hour for November 12, 2015…… This may be the reason that Al Gore hasn’t endorsed Hillary Clinton for president yet. Could he be standing in the wings in case Hillary stops running for president?
The FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case.
Fox News is told agents are looking at U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to “materially false” statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party. Violations also include pressuring a third party to conspire in a cover-up. Each felony violation is subject to five years in prison.
This phase represents an expansion of the FBI probe, which is also exploring potential violations of an Espionage Act provision relating to “gross negligence” in the handling of national defense information.
“The agents involved are under a lot of pressure and are busting a–,” an intelligence source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Fox News.
The section of the criminal code being explored is known as “statements or entries generally,” and can be applied when an individual makes misleading or false statements causing federal agents to expend additional resources and time. In this case, legal experts as well as a former FBI agent said, Section 1001 could apply if Clinton, her aides or attorney were not forthcoming with FBI agents about her emails, classification and whether only non-government records were destroyed.
Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said the same section got Martha Stewart in trouble with the FBI. To be a violation, the statements do not need to be given under oath.
“This is a broad, brush statute that punishes individuals who are not direct and fulsome in their answers,” former FBI agent Timothy Gill told Fox News. Gill is not connected to the email investigation, but spent 16 years as part of the bureau’s national security branch, and worked the post 9/11 anthrax case where considerable time was spent resolving discrepancies in Bruce Ivins’ statements and his unusual work activities at Fort Detrick, Md.
“It is a cover-all. The problem for a defendant is when their statements cause the bureau to expend more time, energy, resources to de-conflict their statements with the evidence,” he said.
Separately, two U.S. government officials told Fox News that the FBI is doing its own classification review of the Clinton emails, effectively cutting out what has become a grinding process at the State Department. Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy has argued to both Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Congress that the “Top Secret” emails on Clinton’s server could have been pulled from unclassified sources including news reports.
“You want to go right to the source,” Gill said. “Go to the originating, not the collateral, authority. Investigative protocol would demand that.”
On Friday, Clapper spokesman Brian Hale confirmed that no change has been made to the two “Top Secrets” emails after a Politico report said the intelligence community was retreating from the finding.
“ODNI has made no such determination and the review is ongoing,” Hale said. Andrea G. Williams, spokeswoman for the intelligence community inspector general, said she had the same information. Kennedy is seeking an appeal, but no one can explain what statute or executive order would give Clapper that authority.
A U.S. government official who was not authorized to speak on the record said the FBI is identifying suspect emails, and then going directly to the agencies who originated them and therefore own the intelligence — and who, under the regulations, have final say on the classification. tat least four classified Clinton emails had their markings changed to a category that shields the content from Congress and the public, in what State Department whistleblowers believed to be an effort to hide the true extent of classified information on the former secretary of state’s server.
One State Department lawyer involved in the alleged re-categorization was Kate Duval. Duval once worked in the same law firm as Clinton’s current and long-time lawyer David Kendall and at the IRS during the Lois Lerner email controversy. Duval left government service for private practice in mid-September.
This is Ray Mossholder. Be sure you see the pictures that accompany each of these historical moments on reachmorenow.com
Today in History with Ray – November 12
Today in History with Ray – November 12