It has been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and most of the world still wrongly believes that the culprit was the CIA, or the FBI, or the mafia, or right-wing American businessmen. It has been also 50 years since the Kremlin started an intense, worldwide disinformation operation, codenamed “Dragon,” aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s connection with Lee Harvey Oswald. Not unrelated are the facts that Oswald was an American Marine who defected to Moscow, returned to the United States three years later with a Russian wife, killed President Kennedy, and was arrested before being able to carry out his  plan to escape back to Moscow. In a letter dated July 1, 1963, Oswald asked the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., to grant his wife an immediate entrance visa to the Soviet Union, and to grant another one to him, separtably (misspelling and emphasis as in the original).

The Kremlin’s “Dragon” operation is described in my book Programmed to Kill: Moscow’s Responsibility for Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In 2010, this book was presented at a conference of the Organization of American Historians together with a review by Prof. Stan Weber (McNeese State University). He described the book as “a superb new paradigmatic work on the death of President Kennedy” and a “must read for everyone interested in the assassination.”[i]

Programmed to Kill is a factual analysis of that KGB crime of the century committed during the Khrushchev era. In those days, the former chief KGB adviser in Romania had become the head of the almighty Soviet foreign espionage service and pushed me up to the top levels of the Soviet bloc intelligence clique. My book also contains a factual presentation of Khrushchev’s frantic efforts to cover his backside. Recalling that the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip had set off the First World War, Khrushchev was afraid that, if America should learn about the KGB’s involvement with Oswald, it might ignite the first nuclear war. Khrushchev’s interests happened to coincide with those of Lyndon Johnson, the new U.S. president, who was facing elections in less than a year, and any conclusion implicating the Soviet Union in the assassination would have forced Johnson to take undesired political or even military action, adding to his already widely unpopular stance on the war in Vietnam.

According to new KGB documents, which became available after Programmed to Kill was published, the Soviet effort to deflect attention away from the KGB regarding the Kennedy assassination began on November 23, 1963—the very day after Kennedy was killed—and it was introduced by a memo to the Kremlin signed by KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny. He asked the Kremlin immediately to publish an article in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries …exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,] the racists and ultra-right elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence and terror in the United States.”

Last week – yes, in anno domini 2013 – the Romanian Supreme Court  – yes, the highest court in the country – declined to cancel a 1974 death sentence issued by a two-bit communist Dracula named Ceausescu to an anti-communist, Constantin Răuţă, who is now an American citizen. This American “traitor” committed the “crime” of “betraying” communist Romania’s criminal political police, the brutal Securitate, and of helping the United States to defeat the Soviet evil.

It would be farcical, if it were not so utterly devastating for the international prestige of both NATO and Romania.

Răuţă is a reputable American scientist, who over the past thirty years worked on important U.S. aerospace projects. His native Romania will soon be protected by a ballistic missile defense system in the development of which, ironically, Răuţă himself played a role. Construction of that U.S. interceptor missile facility in Deveselu, Romania, is scheduled to be finished in 2014. Yet, absent a miracle, Răuţă will be still sentenced to death in that country.

On November 23, 2002, when the Romanians were officially informed that their country was being seated at the NATO table, a rainbow appeared in the sky over Bucharest. President George W. Bush, visiting the Romanian capital at the time, told a cheering crowd, “God is smiling at us.” God was indeed smiling at Romania. From one day to the next, that country, which had endured a long and dark history of Roman, Ottoman, Phanariot and Soviet occupations, no longer had to fear foreign domination. American weapons—some designed by Răuţă—and American soldiers—some now stationed in Romania—are committed to defending that country’s territorial integrity.

Yet some members of the Romanian justice system seem incapable of facing up to the fact that their country has been admitted into NATO, although they are perhaps even being chauffeured around in limousines imported from NATO countries.

In the past five years, 6,284 people sentenced by the communists for, in one way or another, helping the United States and NATO to demolish the Soviet empire have asked to have their sentences canceled, but only three have succeeded—because of media pressure. More than 500,000 patriots killed or terrorized by the communists have yet to be rehabilitated.

Post-Ceausescu Romania has been transformed in unprecedented positive ways. The barriers the communists and the Securitate spent 40 years erecting between Romania and the rest of the world, as well as between individual Romanians, are slowly coming down. Private propriety is being gradually restored, and a new generation of intellectuals is struggling to develop a new national identity. On December 18, 2006, the Romanian president condemned communism as “an unlawful and culpable regime,” and he apologized to those whose lives had been destroyed by despotism. In a speech to the nation, he explained that the right to condemn communism’s crimes was given to him by “the need to make Romania a country of laws.” The current Romanian prime minister, a former prosecutor himself, fully agreed.

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I have been absent from these pages for a while. My new book Disinformation, co-written with Professor Ronald Rychlak, and the documentary movie based on it have monopolized my time. But there is a nauseating glasnost-style operation now being conducted here in the United States that makes me feel as though I were watching a reenactment of the immense glasnost I used to manage during the years when I was an adviser to Romania’s communist president Nicolae Ceausescu.

No, glasnost is not a misprint or a typo. During the years I was at the top of the KGB community, glasnost was the code name for an ultra-secret intelligence tool of the KGB’s ultra-secret black “science” of dezinformatsiya. Its task was to transform the country into a monument to its leader, and to portray that leader as god himself. That brings me back to PJ Media and its readers, for glasnost works only for people who do not know what glasnost really means.

If you think that Gorbachev invented the word glasnost to describe his effort to lead the Soviet Union “out of its totalitarian state and to democracy, to freedom, to openness,” you’re not alone. All of the Western media and most of the Western experts, even those in intelligence and defense establishments, believe that too—as does the committee that gave Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize. The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica defines glasnost as: “Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues. It was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and began the democratization of the Soviet Union.”[i] And the American Heritage Dictionary labels glasnost,

an official policy of the former Soviet government emphasizing candor with regard to discussion of social problems and shortcomings. [ii]

But glasnost is really an old Russian term for polishing the ruler’s image. In the mid 1930s—half a century before Gorbachev’s glasnost—the official Soviet encyclopedia defined the word glasnost as a spin on news released to the public: “Dostupnost obshchestvennomy obsuzhdeniyu, kontrolyu; publichnost,” meaning, the quality of being made available for public discussion or control.[iii] In other words, glasnost meant, literally, publicizing, i.e., self-promotion. Since the 16^th century’s Ivan the Terrible, the first ruler to become tsar of all the Russias, all that country’s leaders have used glasnost to promote themselves inside and outside the country. The communist tsars tapped into this time-honored tradition of glasnost. The city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad— just as St. Petersburg, first named to glorify Peter the Great, was changed to Leningrad to glorify Lenin. The embalmed body of Russia’s newest saint, Lenin, was put on display in Moscow as a holy relic for adoration by the people. (more…)

Allow me to begin by apologizing for having been absent from these pages for a while. My up-coming book Disinformation, which I have co-written with Professor Ronald Rychlak, became the subject of a documentary movie to be released in June, and that has monopolized my time.

On March 6, 2013, we celebrate 60 years since the death of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose nom de guerre was Stalin — meaning man of steel. I deliberately use the word “celebrate,” because Stalin’s death allowed the first ray of light to penetrate into one of the darkest and bloodiest disinformation operations in history: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. Soon after Stalin died, the curtain shielding his “workers’ paradise” from public view was ripped apart, and the rest of the world got its first glimpse of the gulag empire that the Soviet Union really was. According to recent revelations, some 94 million people were killed during the lifetime of the Soviet empire[i] so as to uphold the heretical system of socialism, a creed that deprived mankind of the very motivational forces needed to keep mankind going: private property, competition, and individual incentive.

In theory, socialism is an idyllic dream. In reality, it is a phony nightmare, modeled after Karl Marx’s infamous dictum “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen” (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need), a social theory that has destroyed the economy of every country where it has been applied. To put it into plain English, the socialist redistribution of wealth is theft, and stealing became a national policy on the day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born. Immediately after the revolution of November 1917, Russia’s new socialist government confiscated the imperial family’s wealth, seized the land owned by the rich Russians, nationalized Russian industry and banking, and killed most of the property owners. In 1929, the Kremlin turned its covetous eyes toward the poorest elements in the country; by forcing the peasants into collective farms, it stole away their land, along with their animals and agricultural tools. Within a few years, virtually the entire Soviet economy was running on stolen property.

In the mid 1930s, the Communist Party itself became a target for theft. Following a brief period of collective leadership exercised by the Central Committee and later by its elite, the Politburo, Stalin personally stole all the top-level positions in the country and pinned them onto his own chest like war decorations, thereby establishing a dismal new feudalism in the middle of the 20th century. That is exactly what occurred later throughout Eastern Europe, when the Soviet socialists took over after World War II. By the time I said goodbye forever to Socialist Romania in 1978, the list of official positions and titles accumulated by Ceausescu and his wife could have easily filled a whole page.

August 10, 2012, marked the 1,200th day that the Obama administration has been running the United States of America without any approved budget and without any coherent foreign policy. It is no wonder that last September, when terrorists assassinated our ambassador to Libya and three of his subordinates, the White House scurried for cover behind Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Both initially went out of their way to persuade the country that we were not dealing with terrorism, and when that didn’t fly, blamed the intelligence community. The farce was a deliberate diversion designed to throw dust in the country’s eyes, and it should be treated as such.

The fundamental task facing the U.S. today is not to find out who knew what about that despicable act of terrorism, but to establish why it was not prevented.

Preventing terrorism has been a primary national and international task since 1937, when the League of Nations adopted the first resolution on terrorism — the “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism.” Resolution No. 60/288 defining the U.N. Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, adopted on September 8, 2006, states:

The international community should take the necessary steps to enhance cooperation to prevent and combat terrorism.

The 9/11 Commission Report spent most of its 567 pages on measures for preventing new terrorist attacks on American soil, which includes U.S. embassies. “Protecting the American people from terrorist threats is our founding principle and our highest priority,” states the logo of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after 9/11. In 2008, the Heritage Foundation reported that 40 terrorist attacks had been foiled since 9/11. (They are detailed here.)

In his January 15, 2009, farewell address, President George W. Bush said:

[After 9/11] most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did.

…

Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.

…

[T]here can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil. This is a tribute to those who toil night and day to keep us safe — law enforcement officers, intelligence analysts, homeland security, diplomatic personnel, and the men and women of the United States Armed Forces.

On September 28, 2012, The Nation, America’s “flagship of the left,” exploded in an un-American burst of antisemitism. Its cover article stated:

Looking like a slightly deranged grandfather obsessed with something only he can see. … Benjamin Netanyahu fussed and scribbled over a cartoon bomb at the podium of the United Nations yesterday. With any luck, the bombastic, extremist, too-far-right-for-even-Likud Israeli prime minister has done himself in. … No one, or almost no one, believes that Iran is a vast nuclear threat and that the United States (or Israel) has to bomb it in weeks or months or, as Netanyahu suggests, at the latest next summer. Not the Obama administration, which is treating Netanyahu as if it wishes it could haul out a straitjacket and a syringe. … But few people, other than The Nation, are willing to say that Netanyahu might actually be crazy.

(You can read the entire antisemitic rant here.)

The Nation‘s antisemitic hysteria reminds me of the new antisemitic madness that exploded in Moscow in 1998, soon after one of my former colleagues in the KGB community, General Yevgeny Primakov, became Russia’s prime minister. Russian television showed General Albert Makashov, a member of the Duma, screaming: “I will round up all the Yids [pejorative for Jews] and send them to the next world.” Makashov alleged that the Jews were ruining the motherland, and he called for the “extermination of all Jews in Russia.” [i] On November 4, 1998, the Duma endorsed Makashov by voting (121 to 107) to defeat a parliamentary motion censuring his hate-filled statement. At the November 7, 1998, demonstration marking the 81^st anniversary of the October Revolution, crowds of former KGB officers showed their support for the general, chanting “hands off Makashov!” and waving signs with anti-Semitic slogans.[ii]

So, why do I put America’s oldest continuously published weekly, The Nation, on the same page with Moscow and Makashov? Because The Nation has been Moscow’s mouthpiece for almost nine decades. In 1924, when Lenin died, The Nation raved:

Lenin is the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present, out of the rotting bog of stupid current politics. … His hero-character has almost no outward adornment.[iii]

Let’s not forget that in fact The Nation‘s “hero of a legend” fathered the world’s bloodiest tyranny in history, which eventually killed some 90 million of its own people, unleashed a 44-year Cold War, and ignited the current international terrorism. Let’s also not forget that the successor to The Nation‘s “hero of a legend” made a pact with Hitler, who at that very moment was planning to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. On August 23, 1939, when the Soviet foreign minister and his German counterpart met in the Kremlin to sign the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact, Stalin solemnly declared: “The Soviet government takes this new pact very seriously. I can guarantee, on my word of honor, that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.”[iv] Now a more recent Russian successor to The Nation‘s “hero of a legend” is secretly arming a contemporary Hitler dedicated to eradicating the state of Israel with nuclear weapons. “Israel will soon be destroyed,” Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad screamed on August 17, 2012. He described the Jewish state as a “cancerous tumor” that would soon be excised.[v]

The State Department contends that the assassination of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three American officials who defended him was an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment reaction to a low-budget film called Innocence of Muslims. That is nothing more than a fairytale lullaby designed to put American outrage to sleep. The only reaction to this fantasy seems to have been among the Muslim terrorist leaders, who understand it as a go-ahead to attack our embassies all around the world with impunity. Our embassy in Pakistan is now under siege. Thousands of other “angry” Muslims are now screaming “Death to America” and burning American flags in front of our embassies in Egypt, Indonesia, Sudan, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Yemen, Germany, and Great Britain, to mention just a few.

During the years I spent at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community I unfortunately came to know many tyrants quite well, and I learned for a fact that they despise appeasers. In April 1978, President Jimmy Carter hailed Romania’s communist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader.” I was standing next to the two of them at the White House, and I could hardly believe my ears. A few hours later, I was in the car with Ceausescu, driving away from the White House. He took a bottle of alcohol and splashed it all over his face, in reaction to having been affectionately kissed by the U.S. president in the Oval Office. “Peanut-head,” Ceausescu muttered in disgust.

Three months later, President Carter signed my request for political asylum, and I told him who Ceausescu really was, and how he had reacted to that kiss at the White House. On the memorable day of July 19, 1979, however, I watched the TV news with disbelief, as President Carter did it again. He affectionately kissed Leonid Brezhnev on both cheeks during their first encounter in Vienna.

Brezhnev also despised appeasers, as I also knew for a fact. Five months after the infamous Carter-Brezhnev kiss, a KGB terrorist squad assassinated Hafizullah Amin, the American-educated prime minister of Afghanistan, and replaced him with a Soviet puppet. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and President Carter feebly protested by boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. This new sign of American weakness gave rise to the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden’s terrorism.

In the 1990s, the U.S. government virtually ignored bin Laden’s first assault on the World Trade Center, the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. During that same period, we entrusted our national security and foreign policy tasks into the hands of the United Nations — which responded on May 3, 2001, by ejecting the United States from its Human Rights Commission.

We had barely set foot in the 21st century, when bin Laden’s terrorists unleashed a relentless war against our country, with the disastrous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Soon after that, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), expelled the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (AEIA), and let loose a venomous anti-American campaign. “Let’s exterminate our sworn enemy U.S. imperialists!” reads a slogan inside North Korean jet cockpits, sailors’ cabins, and army guard posts.

When Ronald Reagan became president, the U.S. was being treated with contempt by most petty tyrants around the world. The Soviet Union was on the march in Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia, Syria, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, and, of course, Afghanistan. President Reagan reversed all these trends by calling the tyrants and their tyrannies by their real names, and treating them as such. Remember his “Evil Empire”? The Soviet press agency TASS said those words demonstrated that Reagan was a “bellicose, lunatic anti-Communist.” But it was precisely that “lunatic anti-Communist” who won the 44-year Cold War and returned America to greatness.

Unfortunately, in 1993 we got another wishy-washy president, who reinstated Carter’s policy of appeasing Communist tyrants. On April 22, 2000, during a Holy Week, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, President Bill Clinton’s marshals forcibly seized and returned to Communist Cuba a six-year-old boy who had miraculously escaped alive from a boat that had sunk with his mother, who had been trying to free her only child from Castro’s tyranny.

This year’s Republican National Convention will be as historically significant as the one that nominated Abraham Lincoln for the White House. The 1860 Republican Convention was a prelude to our country’s rejection of slavery. The 2012 Republican Convention will liberate our country from the Obama administration’s creeping Marxism. We are glad that our Roger L. Simon is there, in Tampa, to keep us updated, minute by minute.

By choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney showed the country, and the world, that he was unalterably determined to end the populist road show called “Change,” choreographed by the Democratic Party in order to divert attention away from its utter failure to alleviate the country’s devastating economic crisis.

“Change” is rooted in a lie proliferated by our own American leftist media. According to this lie, the United States, the leader of the free world, is in fact a “decaying, racist, capitalist realm” unable to provide medical care for the poor, rebuild her “crumbling schools,” or replace the “shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race.”

“Change” became the Democratic Party’s motto, but it was just a comedy show geared to distracting public attention away from the leader’s economic incompetence. The ancient Roman satirical poet Juvenal used the term panem et circenses to describe such shows. To tame the impoverished Roman populace, the Caesars orchestrated “bread and circuses” distractions, offering a variety of free pleasures: good food, public baths, handsome gladiators, exotic animals, chariot races, sports competitions, theatrical presentations, and the slogan Ave Caesar, Imperator!

The Obama administration’s “Change” has transformed the U.S. into a country of “bread and circuses.” One hundred million people are now on various kinds of welfare, 49% of the population is exempted from paying taxes, and 44.7 million people receive food stamps, while widely televised mass gatherings and nationally circulated newspaper articles worship our first American Caesar.

These “bread and circuses” extravaganzas did not work for the Roman Empire, which eventually collapsed under the weight of its enormous civil bureaucracy and public debt. They are not working for the United States either. At the time of this writing, our national debt is $15,962,835,542,312, the highest in U.S. history, and it is growing by the minute. The country’s total debt per citizen is $52,900, and it is projected to be $67,500 in five years. The unemployment rate, which historically averaged 5.8%, has been over 8% for the last three years. The price of gasoline is now 300% higher than it was before the “bread and circuses” reign.

To solve this growing economic crisis, the Democratic Party offers nothing better than more “bread and circuses.” According to an August 5, 2012, article published in the New York Times, a group of 21 people in San Jose, California, were treated for burns after walking barefoot over hot coals as part of an event called “Unleash the Power Within,” starring the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. “If you are anything like me,” wrote Oliver Burkeman, the author of the article, “a cynical retort might suggest itself: What, exactly, did they expect would happen?” The leaders of the Democratic Party may consider themselves much better motivational speakers, but the question remains the same: What, exactly, do they expect will happen?

The November elections will give the American people a chance to stop walking barefoot over hot coals. The United States is the biggest business on earth, and “We the People” will elect the Romney-Ryan team, who will run our country as a business, not as a “bread and circuses” show.

President Barack Obama’s is currently maligning extremely successful businesman Mitt Romney as a man heartlessly engaged in the exploitation of American labor and the outsourcing of their jobs to foreign countries. I am reminded of Nikita Khrushchev’s portrayal of his competitor, President John F. Kennedy, as a “capitalist pig.”

With my own ears I more than once heard Khrushchev cussing out that “millionaire’s kid” and threatening to wipe that “pig” off the face of the earth. As a matter of fact, all the leaders of the former Soviet Union regularly referred to capitalists as “pigs.” Under Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union’s “capitalist pigs” had been killed off. When Khrushchev came along, there were no more “capitalist pigs” left there, so he turned his hatred towards America.

Heaven forbid I should be understood as comparing President Obama to any of the Soviet monsters. I strongly believe that the first black American president should have a place of honor in our country’s history, but I note a few coincidences that do serve as food for thought.

Khrushchev matured politically in a period when Lenin and Stalin were pulling off what historians term the greatest peacetime mass terror in European history, in which millions of “capitalist pigs” living in the Soviet Union lost their lives. That experience left Khrushchev with a deep-seated hatred for capitalists: “It is in my blood — my serf’s blood!” I repeatedly heard him brag, for he was proud of it. Now, let’s consider what may have been going through the mind of President Obama during the twenty years he was receiving the message of liberation theology, a distorted view of the world specifically created and disseminated by Khrushchev’s KGB (I describe this more fully in my upcoming book Disinformation).

The purpose of liberation theology was to spread hatred for American capitalism throughout North America. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who presided over Obama’s wedding and baptized his two children, is now most famous for “God damn America.” In such an environment, it is no wonder Senator Obama of 2008 described the undisputed leader of the free world as a “decaying, racist, capitalist realm” unable to provide medical care for the poor, rebuild her “crumbling schools,” or replace the “shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race.” Of course the senator pledged to change it by redistributing its wealth.

In my other life in Communist Romania, I managed a large intelligence organization that, among other tasks, was charged with keeping alive a nationalized health care system which in the end bankrupted the country and generated popular contempt. That system, very similar to the Affordable Health Care for America Act, was a bureaucratic nightmare. And it still is a nightmare in the former Soviet empire.

A European Union report on post-Communist Romania’s “Health Care System in Transition” stated that this system “devastated the country,” whose infant mortality rate (20.2 per 1,000) was among the highest in Europe and whose death rate was 70% higher that the EU average.[i] The world’s leading general medical journal, The Lancet, reported that even twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, “life expectancy at birth is 66 years for Russians; 16 years less than for people in Japan and 14 less than the European Union average.”[ii]

My past experience gave me reason to believe that the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the Affordable Health Care for America Act alive constituted a much needed wake-up call for our conservative movement. Since 2009, when the Democratic Party began surreptitiously nationalizing the U.S. health care system, our conservative movement has done nothing but weep and wail and wait for God in heaven and the Supreme Court on earth to save America from such a calamity.

It is time for us to paddle our own canoe. The first three words in the U.S. Constitution are “We the people.” So let us have “we the people” decide what kind of health care we want, because our tax money is paying for it. In order to make responsible decisions in the November election, “we the people” need to know the truth: the United States is today rated No. 1 in the world when it comes to medical responsiveness and quality of health care, and there is no reason to rush to change our system overnight.

In the U.S., the doctor is king. This is crucial for saving people’s lives. If the doctor thinks there is something wrong with his patient, he can immediately start all kinds of diagnostic tests, get the results as soon as possible, and start treatment immediately. Yet in Great Britain, where the nationalized health care system is managed by bureaucrats, a patient has to wait some 18 weeks for an MRI.