("Quid coniuratio est?")
INTERVIEW WITH SHERMAN SKOLNICK -- MARCH 20, 1995
On March 20, 1995, I interviewed Mr. Sherman Skolnick of the Citizens' Committee to Clean-up the Courts [CCCC] by telephone. The following is my transcription of that interview. Note that in this interview I neither necessarily agree nor disagree with either all or some of the statements of Mr. Skolnick.
-- Brian Francis Redman, Editor-in-chief, Conspiracy Nation
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CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. To get to some questions: first off, are there any late-
breaking stories that you're workin' on?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well, we're workin' on a story about the FBI which will probably
be, might be our next message on our recorded message. There's a
lot to be said about them.
What else is happening. Uh, well... I'm trying to think. What is that late-breaking item?
Well we're trying to check out something. There was some radio, smaller radio stations, carried a story the other day that several very sizeable banks in this country are in terrible condition, which may pull down the banking system. I've been checking with my financial sources to see if there are any further details. But that's something that has to be looked into.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. And just generally, I wanted to start off if there's any
pressing message that you wanted to get out, before I get to some
of the other questions. Just, you know, if there's anything that
you had that you wanted to especially say.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Not that I can think of. I may think of somethin' and call you
right back. But... Are you home?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
After I finish this, I may think of somethin'. I'll call ya right
back if you're gonna be there.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, okay. I'll hang around for maybe an hour or so.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
O.K. All right, go ahead with your questions.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. In one of your radio interviews, you talked about how you
had interviewed Michael Riconosciuto. And you mentioned...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well it was more than that.
A lawyer that we knew at the time volunteered to be his attorney while Riconosciuto was in the federal jail in Chicago. And that turned out to be a period from September 'til almost the first of the year. From September '92 'til almost the end of December '92, Riconosciuto was in the Metropolitan Correction Center, which is the federal jail, downtown Chicago. (It's one of the only triangular buildings, by the way, in the world.)
And I and an associate of mine volunteered to be the paralegals. And so, the three of us, quite often, were down there in the jail, talking in a conference room with Riconosciuto, who contended, number one, that he had been framed on false dope charges to get him out of circulation. Because he's a super-duper computer hacker and was the chief of research for Wackenhut Corporation, which is a private off-shoot of the Central Intelligence Agency.
And, so that's basically what we did over a period of months. And we found out a great deal of information, while he was waiting to be brought before the Inslaw federal grand jury, which was headed by a former judge, Nicholas J. Bua.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
I can fill in a lot of details. But that's briefly what it is.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
All right, and in this interview that I'm thinking of, you said
that...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Not interview. It's in the plural; we were there sometimes
three times a week!
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. But what I'm referring to is a specific radio interview, I
think it was Radio Free America, where you... When I say "the
interview", I mean the interview with Tom Valentine...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah, okay.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
...and you, as I recall, you said that when you began probing
into the area of the World Trade Center bombing, Riconosciuto...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
No, that was after he had finished his grand jury testimony and
was sent back to a federal jail facility, elsewhere in the
country. That one of our group -- he used to call some of us, in
our group, collect. It was the only way to contact us. And one of
our associates began asking him (this would've been in the Spring
of '93, after the World Trade Center bombing). And we asked him
whether the "EHT", that he invented -- Electrostatic Heat
Transfer (that is a type of explosion, just below nuclear. It's
not dynamite. It's something else.) -- whether that was used in
the bombing of the World Trade Center. Because, unlike usual
explosives, whatever was used melted some of the girders. And
usually, dynamite and stuff like that simply blows out the weaker
elements -- windows, brick walls. It wouldn't get to the point of
melting steel. The only thing that can do that, as a type of
explosive, is this sub-nuclear thing called "EHT", which was
invented by him, and promoted by him and his former business
partner, Robert Booth Nichols.
And when we talked to Riconosciuto about it, unlike him, he flew into a terrible rage and says, "You better get off that!!" And from the conversation, we gathered that his position was that if we didn't get off that, we were in terrible, terrible danger in even discussing it.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. And who do you... Do you have any opinion on who was behind
that World Trade Center bombing?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Probably foreign intelligence agencies that wanted to blame it
all on Arabs. Because one of those who, I believe, subsequently
confessed to certain things had a phone number where he could be
reached. And that phone number was the number, the phone number
of a woman who was with Israeli Intelligence. From that, and a
number of other details, we gather that it is not the Arabs
that really were involved. They were, they were... I don't know
how to put it. They were pushed into the position of
provocateurs. But they were being manipulated by others that were
not Arabs! That were some foreign intelligence agencies: either
French, Israel, or others.
Because what they wanted was a very negative thing against the Arabs. And that helps the FBI. Because currently -- and that's the story we're working on, by the way -- more than half of the FBI, in their major offices, like Chicago, more than half of 'em are into counter-terrorism. And basically what they're doing is they're sitting outside the homes all night of Palestinian- Americans (some of whom run grocery stores), as if every one of 'em is a terrorist! In other words, half of the FBI in Chicago are counter-terrorists.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
There's this thing with this Trade Center bombing that, there's a
thin line -- O.K.? Because the FBI was probing into it, but it
may be that they had crossed a thin line into actually provoking
the incident.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well, the point is, they work in teams: one side investigates,
and the other side purports to represent the would-be defendants.
The principle attorney during most of the time (I think he was
pushed out, late in the prosecution), the principle defense
attorney was William Kunstler.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Who was formerly a top officer of the O.S.S., which later became
the CIA.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
I'm surprised to hear that! Because Kunstler, I had always
thought of him as...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
...as a "radical revolutionary". Yeah, I understand. I understand
that.
For awhile... When I first confronted Kunstler with this, in 1969, he wouldn't answer. But he pushed Jerry Rubin up against my wheelchair, to try to scare me. In later years, into the '70s, a magazine came out called Counterspy. And he [Kunstler] was up on the masthead as a senior officer of the O.S.S.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. And he's defending, if I'm not mistaken, the Shabazz thing
with, you know, where Malcolm X's daughter had...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. He gets into all these so-called "radical, revolutionary"
situations. Starting as far back as the "Chicago 7", Rennie Davis
and all that. And I don't know if you saw the detailed fact sheet
that we had about Rennie Davis, but um... Did I send ya one of
those?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, we covered it. You know, that Rennie Davis was...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
...got a blue fact sheet. I think I sent you one of those.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. You may have. I put all your stuff in a file, so...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
It's a very small type. But it's very complete.
Most of those that were in the "Chicago 7", the thing was funded by CIA foundations. And we went into a very detailed research report about it.
And the lawyer that fronted for them, in months and months of criminal trial here, was William Kunstler. And like I say, at the time I confronted him that he had been with CIA, he wouldn't answer. Instead, he pushed Jerry Rubin to, you know, sort of "block" me, or whatever you want to call that.
So when you say that he's with the Shabazz thing and he was with the World Trade Center criminal defendants, that, by itself, is a piece of circumstantial proof that supports our position that there's espionage involvement.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. Regarding that "Chicago 7" trial, one of my sort of "heroes"
was Abbie Hoffman, when I was younger. I find it hard to...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
I liked Abbie quite a bit. But Abbie got into a treacherous area
there of playing games with CIA. And it may have led to his
strange death. {1}.
I ran into Abbie over the years. He wouldn't... He liked to tell very obscene jokes, which some of our friends used to laugh at; they were rather funny. However, he wouldn't answer our specific research points as to how he was allowed to travel all over the world, by court permission, while he was, had been convicted or was awaiting -- during the criminal trial and while he was convicted, the judges allowed him to travel all over the world. Which is not done to people facing much lesser criminal charges. For example, he flew into split Yugoslavia about the same time that Nixon did. Which would be, I believe (I think it's on our fact sheet), approximately 1970 or '71.
But on the CIA thing, is when Abbie stopped laughing. During the '72 GOP convention, which later resulted in riots, we... I was down there with friends of mine that had their own van. And we used to drive Abbie around in our van while we talked to him. And he would joke, like I say, about porno and so on, obscene things, which some of my friends laughed at quite a bit.
But then when I showed him some of the documents, that were little-known, about CIA and that, he really got very upset and wouldn't answer.
And I suspect that he thought it was cute to play these games, use CIA foundation money to do what he was doing, and sort of "play both sides". He was a very clever man.
[...to be continued...]
-------------------------<< Notes >>----------------------------- {1} "In 1988, Playboy magazine published an in-depth article on the October Surprise scheme. In what would become a pattern of killings that coincidentally protected high U.S. officials, one of the authors, Abbie Hoffman, was killed shortly after bringing the article to Playboy." -- Page 198, Defrauding America by Rodney Stich. Expanded second edition. ISBN: 0-932438-08-3. Diablo Western Press, Inc., 1994.
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
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