Rush to judgment, the strange death of Andrew Breitbart, the assassination of RFK -- and more.

Iran: Is there any "hard evidence" that Iran is building nuclear weapons? No, there is not.

Although all 16 U.S. secret state intelligence agencies confirmed, again, that "Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier," reaffirming the "consensus view" of not one, but two National Intelligence Estimates The New York Times reported last week, the march towards war continues.

Sarah Palin says that Obama has brought us back to where we were before the civil war. She's right. Before the civil war, nobody regulated Wall Street. Before the civil war, if you lost your house, you were on your own. Before the civil war, wages were kept miserably low and a tiny elite controlled the economy.

Rush to judgment: Gloria Allred wonders if the latest Limbaugh scandal can lead to a lawsuit. After all, he used the words "slut" and "prostitute" to describe a woman who, as far as we know, is nothing of the kind. Is speech of that sort protected? Even in these debauched times, certain extreme types of verbiage should (in my opinion) be considered out of bounds.

Interestingly, Allred is talking about a possible criminal case, not a personal libel suit. Limbaugh, who broadcasts out of Florida, may have violated Section 836.04 of the Florida Code:

The statute stipulates that anyone who “speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity” is guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.

Isn't that law sexist? What about men who are falsely accused of a want of chastity? If the law were rendered gender-neutral, would Floridians be allowed to say "Rush Limbaugh can blow me"?

Breitbart: Alternet suggests that substance abuse played a role in the man's death.

A commenter on an addiction site noted that Breitbart’s enraged appearances reminded him of his own behavior after an extended cocaine binge. “You can’t summon up that kind of insane rage naturally," he said. "No one can be so angry all the time.”

I dunno. Some people are just born rage-junkies. At any rate, here's the closest thing to evidence on offer:

A source close to the blogger told The Fix on condition of anonymity that he'd done cocaine with Breitbart as recently as last October. On the day after his death, Anthony Cumia, of the radio show "Opie and Anthony," said of Breitbart, “I went out drinking with him, and boy, can he party.” “He liked to stay awake," added Anthony. "That’s all I’ll say.” Other friends maintain that Breitbart regularly took high doses of Adderall and other stimulants to counteract his lifelong ADD. (Both cocaine and Adderall, an amphetamine, can increase the risk of a heart attack. The FDA even warns that Adderall can cause “sudden death in patients with heart problems or heart defects.”)

Asked about these allegations, many of Breitbart’s associates firmly deny that he was using drugs in the time period leading up to his death.

In the absence of hard science pointing toward drug abuse, I'll have to take at face value the word of those who say that the guy was clean. It's fair to say, though, that Breitbart sometimes acted like he was on drugs.

Spying on OWS: Wikileaks has gotten hold of a report affirming that the Department of Homeland Security was eavesdropping on the protesters.

The DHS report found financial services sectors had been the “focal point of the OWS movement, with protesters holding protests and camping out” in financial districts.

Brilliant work, Sherlock. How on earth do you do it?

RFK: Believe it or not, the case may get re-opened.

Lawyers for convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan claim their client did not fire any of the gunshots that struck the presidential candidate in 1968. And in their latest federal court filing, they also rule out another man some have considered a suspect -- a private security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar, who was escorting Kennedy at the time he was shot.

Attorneys William Pepper and Laurie Dusek insist someone other than their client, Sirhan, fatally shot Kennedy. They now say the real killer was not Cesar, a part-time uniformed officer long suspected by some conspiracy theorists of playing a sinister role in the senator's murder.

It wasn't Cesar. I happen to know (even though the facts have not been formally published) that his long-lost 22 caliber pistol, long suspected to be the real murder weapon, was rediscovered in the late 1990s. (It had been thrown into a lake.) The weapon was examined by an expert chosen by conspiracy researcher Ted Charach, and was found to be different from the gun that fired the fatal bullets.

That said, Cesar is indeed a strange fellow -- an extreme right-winger who was somehow picked (by a private security firm) to protect a liberal candidate whom he (Cesar) detested.

At least one witness has spoken of seeing a firearm's flash in a rolled-up poster. I don't know if that claim has been published, and I certainly don't know if it is accurate. But I have been told that one person who was on the scene has made that assertion.

Pepper and his co-counsel also allege fraud was committed at Sirhan's 1969 trial when prosecutors allowed substitute bullets to be admitted as evidence in place of the real bullets removed from Kennedy's neck and shooting survivor Ira Goldstein's hip.

As of the late 1990s, Ira still had the tweed sports coat he wore that evening -- with a small hole in the tail. I've seen it. (No, Ira is not the guy who claimed to have seen a flash in a rolled-up poster.)

Here's another story that you probably have not seen in print (although a slightly garbled version appears here). Directly after the shooting, Ira Goldstein (wounded himself) ran up to the dying RFK and asked: "How is he? How's the senator"? Ethel Kennedy screamed "How dare you say that?" and slapped him. It turns out that she mis-heard Goldstein; she thought that he had said "How's the sunvabitch?" The misunderstanding was soon cleared up and apologies made.

For previous Cannonfire stories on the assassination, go here.

At the other end of that link, you will see why I think William Pepper should contact Lea Purwin D'Agostino, the Deputy D.A. who prosecuted John Landis in the "Twilight Zone" case. He should also talk to director Richard Donner and to a fellow named Peter Bren -- who, if memory serves, became a restauranteur.