Brane Space: Let's Cut The Bull: Analysis-Based Conspiracy Theories CAN In Fact Be Rigorous AND Scientific!

JFK rear head wound - shows shot from front not rear. NO conspiracy ideation could have concocted this actual autopsy image.

WaPo columnist Philip Kennicott writes in his Saturday essay, with subheader: Can a country born in conspiracy theories find the fine line between suspicion and paranoia?:

"Even thinking about conspiracy theories can feel, well, conspiratorial. One would be a fool to deny that bad actors sometimes work behind the scenes to do terrible things, and cover their tracks with denials, misinformation and lies. But then there’s the rabbit hole of obsession, paranoia and the shadow worlds of intrigue and manipulation offered up by Hollywood, constantly blurring the line between reality and illusion."

Ignoring that the distinction he refers to is actually between conspiracy ideation and conspiracy theory embracing analysis.

As a point of reference, Dr. Pat Banister's theory of mind and its basis for conspiracy awareness, delivered in a symposium in Barbados nearly 50 years ago. This led to the critical distinction between the conspiracy analyst and conspiracy ideationist or believer in indiscriminate 'conspiracism'.

Thus, Alex Jones with his Sandy Hook false flag bunkum (i.e. the kids shot at Sandy Hook were really child actors) belongs to the latter, while the late JFK researcher Mark Lane belongs to the former. Again, conspiracy analysts, such as Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Harold Weisberg, Richard Charnin and others (like yours truly) comprise serious people possessing some measure of intellect who brought their scientific, mathematical and other aptitudes to the investigation of multiple aspects of a putative real conspiracies like Iran-Contra and the JFK assassination.

These researchers put in real man hours and published their work in authoritative media, e.g. BOOKS - (real books!), journals and respected forums as opposed to spreading bunkum through half-assed posts in the lowest dreg regions of the net, like 4chan and 8chan.

And as Bannister herself disclosed, the genuine conspiracy analyst is also a top notch conspiracy theorist. In the tradition of science (in this case physics), the hypotheses offered are testable, have been testable and show confirmation - i.e. that the WC version of the head shot could not have occurred as the Warrenites claimed.

The problem is that today's mainstream media contributors almost always end up conflating conspiracy ideations with conspiracy analysis and theories - probably because of a desire to avoid getting into the 'weeds' of scientific facts. Mr. Kennicott appears to be able to distinguish conspiracy ideations from analysis and serious theories when he goes on to write:

"But the current moment, like the suspicion aroused by the Kennedy assassination, differs from the usual American paranoia. Today, as in 1963, a broad culture of conspiracy thinking is suddenly grappling with what philosophers would call a “warranted conspiracy theory".

This falls immediately under what Pat Bannister would confirm, given it possesses enough data points and factual aspects to merit serious analysis. Kennicott for his part cites a philosophy professor who uses the analogy of jury "reasonable doubt" deliberations to define a warranted conspiracy theory. Adding "we might believe this about it but can never be certain." Well, the scribes in the media may not be certain, but for those of us who've done the decades long digging and analysis it is crystal clear: a) Oswald was not the Kennedy assassin, and b) the Warren Commission was actually a whitewash commission.

Kennicott, however, stumbles a bit when he writes:

The current moment is analogous to another critical turning point in America from the 1960s, when there was widespread suspicion about the official narrative of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The idea of conspiracy theories predated the Kennedy assassination, but it appeared in its current sense in an infamous 1967 CIA dispatch about the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination and produced a report that became a kind of bible of supposed disinformation for the conspiracy minded. The authors of the cable — which is a source of its own conspiracy theories — fretted that “Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us.”

The problem with that cable claim is that Oswald did work for the CIA, at least in some capacity (contract agent - like Clay Shaw) - and there are the CIA files to prove it. These were revealed by Military Science professor John Newman, in his landmark book, Oswald and the CIA. We know from Newman that Oswald's CI/SIG 201 file (CI/SIG = Counterintelligence special interest group) was opened on December 9, 1960 more than a year after his defection to the USSR. The ostensible reason was his defection, but the more plausible one was to act as a counter intelligence contract agent inside the Soviet Union.

But how could Oswald be given such responsibility, one may ask? Easy! We know from the documents already released that he received the 201-289248 CI/SIG classification following his service at Atsugi Naval Station and already had responsibility over much of the most critical data there. This included: locations of all bases on the west coast, all tactical call signs, strength of all squadrons, the number and type of all aircraft in each, including names of commanding officers and the authentic codes for entering and exiting all ADIZ radar ranges. If the CIA's claim was they'd never take a guy like that and he was too much of a "loose cannon" how is it he'd already been entrusted with so much critical defense responsibility?

Interestingly, Kennicott's next to last paragraph does finally echo Prof. Bannister's arguments in finally referring to "conspiracy ideation". I.e.

"There is something self-reenforcing about conspiracy ideation that makes it remarkably resilient over decades, and, in the case of antisemitism, millennia. In a 1999 paper in the Journal of Philosophy, Keeley suggested some possible explanations. Unlike scientific theories, in which contrary evidence may scuttle a hypothesis, conspiracy thinking begins with an assumption that there are bad actors who may concoct false data, or hide affirmative evidence. Keeley writes:

'Conspiracy theories are the only theories for which evidence against them is actually construed as evidence in favor of them.” They are also comforting, and they create a sense that the universe is ordered and meaningful. When “tragic events occur, they at least occur for a reason, and … the greater the event, the greater and more significant the reason.”

But then this philosopher Keeley (whom he quotes) conflates the valid conspiracy theory issues with conspiracy ideation. Not taking proper cognizance of the measure of concentrated analysis that goes into the conspiracy theorist's research. Let me show why. The core trope used to eliminate conspiracy in the JFK assassination was to limit the shots fired to 3 instead of 4.

This was by way of Arlen Specter's "magic bullet" gimmick. But early on Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford saw that in order for it to work the rear bullet angle had to be altered from what the original autopsy report said. Let's get into the 'weeds' a little bit here because it points to the role of Keeley's "bad actors concocting false data". In this case applicable to WC's Ford:

I will use the original portrayal in the Warren Report, the now famous WC sketch by artist H.A. Rydberg:

Note the upper inclined arrow (from the upper shoulder) through Kennedy’s throat marks the original placement. This was done in order to simultaneously account for the (actual) upper back wound (5.5. inches below the tip of the right mastoid process) and the throat wound without adding an extra shot (entry from front) , which would have pointed to conspiracy (i.e. at least two shooters).

Thus the "single bullet" or "magic bullet" theory. Ford's change in angle and placement (on JFK's back) had to be done else it would require someone firing from street level (blue arrow), as opposed to firing from the Texas School Book Depository. Ford's "genius" - if it could be called that - was to raise the bullet's path by 5.5. inches- leading to a downward sloping angle for a bullet from the School Book Depository to ALSO make the throat wound (thereby eliminating a frontal 4th shot.) The problem is that Ford had to violate the original autopsy report from Admiral George Burkley, to accomplish this manipulation. The original autopsy report read:

“A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine."

Ford altered it to read:

“A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine."

The deliberate act of manipulation was reported decades later by the NY Times.

But the author was not savvy or informed enough to grasp it was not a "correction" to an autopsy error but a deliberate falsification to make the wounds conform to the single bullet theory. He basically let Ford get away with 'cooking' the autopsy report to yield the result the WC wanted to make a conspiracy go away. More to the point, we know now there actually was a frontal throat wound shot identified in Zapruder frame 193:

And it was confirmed by Parkland surgeon Malcolm Perry:

Who identified it as an entry wound just above JFK's tie knot. On three occasions during a press conference with Parkland chief Kemp Clark, Perry declared the neck wound an entrance wound. Clark never contradicted him. Years later a quandary emerged as to why Dr. Perry (and other Parkland drs.) changed their original claims, i.e. the latter expressed in the link below:

In One Blockbuster JFK Assassination Documentary 7 Parkland Doctors Expose The Chicanery Of The Warren Commission

The reason came out after former Secret Service agent Elmer Moore (also a Kennedy hater) admitted his role in intimidating the Parkland drs. -including Malcolm Perry - to change their accounts. Author James Douglas (JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 309) provides the background:

“Moore confessed his intimidation of Dr Perry to a University of Washington graduate student, Jim Gochenaur, with whom he became friendly with in Seattle in 1970. Moore told Gochenaur he had ‘badgered Dr Perry into making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck. Moore then admitted ‘I regret I had to do that with Dr Perry.”

The fakery and manipulation of evidence doesn't stop here. John Newman, for example, has also highlighted the Warren Commission's falsification of the FPCC handbills handed out by Oswald on Canal Street. He notes [1]:

We have here evidence that was deliberately falsified at the Government Printing Office during the publication of the Warren Commission Exhibits.

Then there is the 'magic bullet' itself (WC Exhibit CE 399), alleged to have made all seven wounds in JFK and John Connally. A preposterous claim exploded by ballistics expert Dr. Joseph Dolce as shown in the image below - showing the "pristine" bullet (A) along side one of 100 actually fired into cadavers.

When asked if CE 399 could have made all 7 wounds, Dolce wrote in testimony:

"No, it (CE399) could NOT have caused all the wounds. Our experiments here show beyond any doubt that merely shooting a wrist deforms the bullet drastically. In every instance, the front or tip of the bullet was smashed. It's impossible for a bullet to strike a bone, even at low velocity and still come out with a perfectly normal tip."

At the end of the day then, deep, rigorous analysis trumps all modes of ill-informed speculation, codswallop. inferior media research or stray suggestions, i.e. that conspiracy researchers may just want to "comfort" themselves that a terrible, seemingly random event happened for a reason. Nope. As Michael Parenti once noted (Dirty Truths) such nonsense conflates the subjective admiration of JFK at the time- via his charisma, intellect etc.- with the political value of the assassination itself.

By contrast, the serious researcher has his/her focus on the latter and what the released documents show, not on any personal 'adoration' or a need to "comfort" oneself that an assassination was not done by a 'nobody' and 'loser'. A mistake logician John Allan Paulos also makes in assessing why many blamed Princess Diana's death on assassination - as opposed to an unfortunate auto accident.

Sometimes, as in the JFK assassination, bad actors really DID allow their political motives to trump the truth and willingly chose to keep the blinkers on the public. The whitewash then proceeded - as in the Warren Report- to falsify evidence and lie to keep the lid on. It has been up to dedicated researchers to pierce the veil and expose the facts.

As Michael Parenti aptly put it (Dirty Truths, p. 156):

“To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers."

[1] John Newman: 1995 Oswald and the CIA, Carroll & Graf, p. 307.

And:

The Assassination Sequence from Executive Action.

And:

Skeptics Society Still Tilting At JFK Conspiracy "Windmills"

And:

'The Nature Of Conspiracy Theories' - Another Book That Fails Because Of Loose Thinking & Squishy Definitions

And:

"Conspiracism Is Like Creationism" : Poor Research Predicated On A Bogus Definition

And:

The Southern Poverty Law Center: Still In Over Its Head On the JFK Assassination

And: