A JFK Assassination Book All Serious Researchers Need to Read!

Richard Charnin’s new book: Reclaiming Science- The JFK Conspiracy, features an apt title because it entails reclaiming the content that has hitherto been obfuscated and distorted under the specious science (or what I call pseudo-science) of the Warren Report as well as its PR apologists like Gerald Posner ('Case Closed') and Vince Bugliosi ('Reclaiming History'). These charlatans have sought to reinforce all manner of pseudo-science to do with the assassination - that's been pumped out by a clueless and complicit media the past five decades. And believe me, Richard Charnin's book is the ideal antidote.


Granted, it likely won’t be on any NY Times best sellers’ lists but I found it to be one of the best new books on the JFK assassination to emerge in the past 25 years. Charnin, a former consultant and quantitative programmer for investment banks has written a mathematical masterpiece which uses Poisson analysis to show a significant number of witness deaths in the wake of the JFK assassination were indeed unnatural (Confirming an earlier London Times actuarial assessment).

This is important given how the matter of JFK witness deaths represents what many serious researchers regard as one component of the ongoing cover up.  It is also important because the issue is rife with disinformation and misinformation from know-nothings.

These are people who believe they're entitled to just recklessly babble about the assassination from a position of woeful ignorance, like Marilyn Elias. Recall that in a prior post, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-second-assassination-today-fifty.html

I'd noted how Elias had tried to refute witness deaths such as that of Dorothy Kilgallen- in her piece 'Conspiracy Act' , in The Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report (Winter, 2013, p. 15). Elias also, in some of the worst yellow journalism, tried to tar the  whole witness murders theme by castigating Richard Belzer for being a nasty, anti-government sort because he appeared on a radio program with Alex Jones to promote his new book,  'Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination' .

I have read Belzer's book, along with Charnin's, and believe it to be one of the most important for newcomers and also more experienced researchers (who've done  at least 10 yrs. work) to get a handle on the matter of the witness deaths, and why they are not coincidental.  Elias, for her part,  shows her incompetence by her reliance on hack Gerald Posner who has already been exposed as one of several disinformation agents, see e.g. how his slapdash investigations have been exposed here:

http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm

Re: Kilgallen, as Charnin notes (p. 120):

"was the only reporter granted an exclusive interview with Ruby in jail. She openly attacked the cover-up in her New York Journal-American columns on 2/2/64 and 9/3/65."

Most notably (ibid.):

"She reported a meeting between Ruby, Tippit and a Texas oilman, and revealed that Oswald was in too many places at one time, had links to U.S. intelligence and his true story was known to just a few government agents."

This alone would have put Kilgallen on the architects' radar, for likely elimination, because of:  a) her prominence as a journalist, and b) exposing aspects of the plot the architects wanted kept under wraps. This especially applied to LBJ who had many links to Texas oilmen, (including Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt) which he didn't want broadcast, not to mention undermining his Warren Commission fraud.  Two key aspects were the Oswald double - which I examined before and cited James Douglass' sterling work exposing it in his 'JFK and the Unspeakable', including the actual intelligence background of Oswald. The latter destroys the lone nut madman myth that LBJ and Hoover wanted to plant in their illegitimate 'child' - the Warren Commission Report.

Thus, one sees there would have been ample reason to eliminate Kilgallen, as much or more as the reasons to eliminate David Ferrie (when the Garrison investigation started) and William Bruce Pitzer, the lab specialist at Bethesda who vowed to expose the actual autopsy photos and chicanery.

But this is where Charnin's probability analyses (e.g. in Chapters 3, 4) really comes to the fore - in separating the suspicious witness deaths from the natural ones. And note, imho this could only have been done using a Poisson -type analysis.  Much of this hearkens back to statistics shown at the end of the excellent movie, Executive Action (1973) which I strongly recommend to any interested person. Those stats cited an actuary's finding reported in the London Sunday Times which calculated the odds of 18 material witness deaths within three years of the assassination at 100, 000 trillion to 1. In other words, 100,000 trillion to 1 against being coincidence!

As Charnin points out (p. 25):

"The HSCA statistician dismissed the odds as being invalid, claiming the universe of witnesses was unknowable."

But, of course, this is nonsense since as Charnin later notes 1400 material witnesses are listed in 'Who's Who in the JFK Assassination'.

Charnin also correctly observes (ibid.)

"The (London) actuary's probability was actually very conservative. At least 42 JFK-related witnesses died unnaturally in the three years following the assassination.  Using the 0.000220 weighted JFK -witness mortality rate the probability is E-53 (1/ Trillion ^4). "

For those more accustomed to standard (scientific) notation this would be:  10 ^-53    or, alternatively, 1 in  10⁵³   odds.

Linked to the issue of witness deaths is how they could have been accomplished with so many seeming objective observers being none the wiser. This Charnin takes up in Chapter 6 on 'Motives and Techniques' where we learn, for example, of the poison dart gun umbrella developed by the CIA at Fort Detrick, Maryland - used in the JFK throat shot. (There was a small entrance wound in JFK's neck but no bullet was ever recovered - leading researchers to believe a small dart left the partial wound which later dropped out, or an ice pellet)

We also learn of "a special type of poison that induces a heart attack and leaves no trace unless an autopsy is conducted." This was surely the type used to eliminate David Ferrie, as well as others (Clay Shaw, Earlene Roberts).

Charnin's other chapters are equally compelling including to do with the Warren Commission itself (p. 17),  Dealey Plaza (p. 55),  Acoustics (69), the Zapruder Film ( 79) , Wounds (83), the Patsy (87), Disinformation (105) and his JFK Calc Spreadsheet (p. 135). The latter has now been enhanced to include Dealey Plaza witnesses' reference to the origin of the shots.

There are also 38 pages comprising nine appendices- ending with a quiz on the assassination. (Something every would - be bloviator or opinion provider needs to take - to prove he is worthy of making comments!)

No one should let the math get in the way of owning this useful and essential book, a critical addition to the assassination literature.

See also:

http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/jfk-witness-deaths-graphical-proof-of-a-conspiracy/

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

The SPLC claimed (in its Intelligence Report)  last fall that Jack Ruby shot Oswald to spare Jackie from a trial. Even the greenest researcher knows this is bare balderdash.


The SPLC insists murders, like that of David Ferrie (called before Jim Garrison's investigation),  were really "officially suicides" - again displaying unbelievable naivete and gullibility.

How do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories too? 

- Matt Ridley in 'Maybe We're All Conspiracy Theorists',  The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10-11, 2011

While I do support the SPLC,  especially in its work against domestic terror cells, hate groups and rabid racists, I have problems with their ‘baby out with the bathwater’ take on conspiracies. It appears the good folks at SPLC have,  for some reason, branded ALL conspiracies as unproven and likely right wing creations – even those that have the most solid support. (Like the Kennedy assassination.)

A recent case in point was the article  'Conspiracy Act' , in The Southern Poverty Law Center’s  Intelligence Report (Winter, 2013), by Marilyn Elias,   in which she actually babbles (p. 15):

"They (conspiracy theorists) never mention the clear testimony that Oswald's assassin gave to the Warren Commission denying any plot and saying that he killed Oswald on impulse to save Jacqueline Kennedy the pain of returning to Dallas for a trial"


Actually, we do mention it - as I did in several blog posts in November last year - while noting that only a moron would believe that codswallop.  The document trail unearthed by Mark North ('Act of Treason') is revelatory here. North's FOIA -released files showed Ruby had an outstanding  debt to Uncle Sam - owing more than $40,000 in back excise taxes to the federal government, plus $20,000 in other back taxes. A phone call (also documented)  then would have assured Ruby his tax problems would “disappear” if he performed one more job: offing Oswald. Given the mob link to ZR/Rifle, such a scenario would be totally logical. Few people today, unless they've  mined the document trail, are remotely aware of the extent to which the CIA and Mob worked hand in glove, especially on the ZR/Rifle Castro assassination operation. Given Oswald's 'Staff D' connection (from his 201 CI/SIG file) to ZR/Rifle it wouldn't have been a biggie to have this one "jokers wild" element severed - one that had become too dangerous 


Apart from which, only a JFK assassination new-be or slacker would so gullible to believe that if Ruby really was involved he'd admit it to a bogus Commission created, owned and operated by LBJ and Hoover, which had the power to swat him down like a Texas horsefly. This is the same LBJ, btw,   who threatened to disclose Earl Warren's Hoover files if he didn't come onboard as a WC  figurehead.  (See My FAQ - Part 4a, on the Warren Commission, posted Nov. 13 last year).

Like Philip Shenon, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/author-philip-shenon-is-he-idiot-or-dupe.html

Elias wasn't content to stop there, but bloviated onward making herself look even more clueless, as when she wrote (ibid.):

"In a similar way they portray as suspicious the deaths of Dorothy Kilgallen and other journalists skeptical of the story - but say nothing of the many doubting reporters who lived on unmolested."


Well, obviously they "lived on unmolested" because they were journalists within the "Operation Mockingbird" orbit:  either part of it themselves, or their doubts easily neutralized by it. The former brought on in assorted media venues as reported by Kathryn Olmstead, in her book, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, Univ. of North Carolina Press, p.21 noting:

“According to the Church committee's final report, approximately fifty U.S. Journalists had covert relationships with the CIA, about half of which involved money. Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein charged that the total number of U.S. journalists who worked for the CIA was actually much higher”


To see a Youtube video on 'Mockingbird', with open admissions,  go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCfTIapds0


So, perhaps Marilyn Elias was too untutored to even have been attempting such a piece (although yes, her prime target was Richard Belzer - using the guilt by association rap, i.e. with Alex Jones).  Or perhaps  she was too incompetent to dig up the Mockingbird journalist links.   As for her complaints about the connections in the witness deaths we can perhaps excuse her because of a likely deficient math education, i.e. which didn't allow any exposure to Poisson statistics, such as employed by Richard Charnin in his mathematical proof:


http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/jfk-witness-deaths-graphical-proof-of-a-conspiracy


Now really, I have no problem if people have less math education than those who've gone the physics or engineering  route, but then they need to refrain from spouting bollocks such that "the witness deaths aren't connected." This only reveals their level of ignorance (especially of Poisson statistics), as it does for Ms. Elias - no matter how many years (26)  she's had as a USAToday staffer, before peddling her anti-conspiracy baloney for the SPLC.  In other words, merely because you might be proficient in one area of journalism doesn't mean you are in all. And just because you find most conspiracies to be half-baked baloney doesn't mean you're entitled to toss all in the memetic dumpster. Or.....attribute all to right wing nutcases.

But to me, the mere fact Elias probably got all her JFK assassination info based on an interview with Gerald Posner (quoted in her piece), immediately disqualifies her from commenting at all on the Kennedy assassination, no matter how hard up she is to nail Richard Belzer for being a nasty, anti-government sort because he boldly holds to the conspiracy thesis as in his new book,  'Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination' .

Sadly, the SPLC hasn’t yet been educated sufficiently to deal with these issues up to now, as in their latest response (‘TV Actor Defends Claim About Deaths of JFK Witnesses’, Summer 2014, p. 6) where  they double down on attempts to rebut Richard Belzer – ending up no better off than Elias after her own embarrassing  JFK assassination reveal last fall.

This time we read:

“as the Report story said, the people who were allegedly murdered typically had their deaths officially attributed to illness, accidents and suicide”

To which the serious JFK researcher must begin reaction by rolling eyeballs – first to the left then to the right and asking: Can these people truly be THIS naïve and out of touch? Have they no common sense or basic insight at all that any witnesses killed in the wake of the event would most likely be taken out via methods  to make the deaths LOOK LIKE accidents, suicides, natural deaths? Are they so bereft of imagination (or information, education)  that they would not be able to see how such acts could be accomplished? (And we know, from many ZR Rifle documents, the CIA had by 1963, perfected numerous poisons to dispatch those it considered threats and do it in surreptitious ways. One of the most notorious incidents, documented by James Douglass (in JFK and the Unspeakable) involved the CIA's use of Rolando Cubela - a Cuban political figure whom Castro trusted-  to attempt to murder Castro using a ball point pen rigged with hypodermic needle to inject cyanide.

Then take the case of Bethesda Naval Hospital officer and medical technician, William Bruce Pitzer, who had made the mistake of announcing film evidence of actual autopsy manipulations that he intended to make public. Well, he didn’t live to do so – on account of being found with a gunshot wound to the head. Suicide? Why the fuck would he off himself when he stood on the cusp of possible glory for finally exposing the sick cover up of medical evidence in JFK’s killing – which would have shown bullet wounds to the front of the head? Apart from that – as his family observed – the weapon had been made to discharge leaving a wound opposite in location to the hand Pitzer would have used!

 Then there was David Ferrie, who had actually begged New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison to protect him if he was to be called to account in the Garrison Investigation. Studying in New Orleans at the time (Loyola University), and following the goings on, I could not believe reading in the Times –Picayune and States-Item of his “suicide” on Feb. 22, 1967.  Ferrie had absolute mortal fear of being killed, so why on Earth do it himself? In fact, his heart condition would have only required a bit of digitalis – say injected via syringe– to bring about the desired effect and eliminate one prime witness. (Ferrie is believed to have provided one of the vehicles that transported a team of 'mechanics'  from New Orleans to Dallas - with the beat up condition of the car as described by witness Lee Bowers - who was also killed)

 But I could go through the whole list of those killed and make similar points. What has the SPLC got to show for it? Only its naïve acceptance of assorted “official” stories which do not jibe with Richard Charnin’s demonstrated statistics.   These, when the false filters are removed, show there were at least 96 unnatural deaths (80 homicides, 5 suicides, 8 accidents, 3 unknown).

Charnin notes on his link:

“There are 120 suspicious deaths listed in JFK Calc. Seventy-seven (77) were officially ruled to be unnatural (34 homicides, 16 suicides, 24 accidents, 3 unknown). Forty-two (42) were ruled natural (heart attacks, cancers, other). But since many accidents, suicides and natural deaths were likely homicides, the number of unnatural deaths was adjusted to 96 (including 80 homicides).”

These adjustments would have taken into account aberrations such as I noted in the case of Pitzer and Ferrie.

The attempted SPLC rebuttal (to Richard Belzer) then goes on to state:

“In addition, the story pointed out that a large number of people who did testify have had normal life spans”

 Of course they did, because their testimonies did not detract from or contradict the false Warrenite narrative of one lone nut! So there’d have been no reason to deal with any of these “witnesses” – many of whom (e.g. Julia Anne Mercer, Jean Hill et al) later admitted that they surrendered to pressure put on them by so-called “authorities”, including the FBI and Secret Service.  The ones that had to be dealt with were mainly the material witnesses whose testimonies would have rocked the boat and exposed the Commission for the fraud it was!

 Lastly, the SPLC has continued its manifest blindness to Operation Mockingbird assets with this twaddle:

“just as many reporters who were skeptical of the Warren commission account were not murdered.”

Again, the contrarian reporters would only have been murdered if they were material witnesses, like Dorothy Kilgallen. There’d be no need at all to go after mere skeptics because anything they wrote could be easily  neutralized (or simply ignored for publication) by the  entrenched Mockingbird CIA assets. How difficult can this stuff be to grasp?  Evidently, it's like fractal calculus for the good folks at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who one would have thought would have their hands full with racial animus and hate groups without taking on the Kennedy assassination.

The SPLC piece by Elias – as well as the recent follow-up,  also illustrates another irritating aspect of the Left's conspiracy phobia:  running from anything that smacks of "anti-government" sentiment, despite the fact we have reams of documents, files to support the need for a critical wariness of anything government claims (as Edward Snowden's files have disclosed).

 So, indeed, if one faction of our own government - the national security state  -  was responsible for killing Kennedy,  it merits attention from genuine citizens. However, too many on the Left - especially in  its  myopic enclave of conspiracy phobics (like Marilyn Elias and the SPLC) , have become part of the problem of the "unspeakable" noted by author James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable') . This is usually when they go too far, consigning ALL conspiracies to the historical dustbin or attributing them to "anti-government' Right wing sources.  The problem is that this knee-jerk reaction leads to them stumbling over their own arguments and claims which come over  as half-baked in the context of actually demonstrated conspiracies as for the JFK assassination.

The tendency then is to harp on any conspiracy theories and aspects that disclose any remote connection between proponents - as between Richard Belzer and Alex Jones- with one (Jones) being a right winger they're frightened of. As Belzer pointed out in his response to the Elias' ambush, however, he used Jones' site because it was the only one that permitted the sale of his book without charging fees.

What really gripes me is how the SPLC has so energetically gone after JFK assassination researcher Belzer but up to now remained totally stone silent as the NSA expands its web of mass surveillance, violating the 4th amendment. Lest the SPLC forget, that amendment is the cornerstone of all civil rights,  for all Americans. In this case, the SPLC  exposes itself to be cherry-picking, civil rights hypocrites.

Please, guys,  I generally like your work and mission, but don't hump threats of the KKK, Volksfront and Aryan Nation, etc. if you're prepared to give a pass to the national security fascists!  While it is useful to expose the genuine anti-government  whackos and the nascent destructive forces in the country, it is equally useful to be aware of the government's own destructive effects on us all - such as NSA's  indiscriminate mass surveillance . (See my post on Marianne Williamson's take.) My point? If you paint one side all 'black' and the other all 'white' (or good) then you simply cannot do your job. You lack the balance and logical proportion to weigh all actors properly and assign blame correctly.


The best takeaway from all of this in concert is that the SPLC needs to back out gracefully from any further inputs or opinionating on the JFK assassination. That is, until they bring themselves up to speed. To that end, I’d strongly recommend the 50^th anniversary edition of my book, The JFK Assassination – The Final Analysis.

(If they wish to hound dog other conspiracies, that’s ok so long as they can justify their attention  - or show direct relations to hate groups.)

See also:

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/11/jfk_assassination_conspiracy_d_1.html

The Second Assassination: Fifty Years Ago Today

Lee Oswald assassinated by Jack Ruby to keep him quiet

Those not around 50 years ago, but amidst the media blather today, may not be aware that no one witnessed JFK being killed on TV - either live or in newscasts- during his motorcade through downtown Dallas. All we received were news bulletins and updates. The stills from the Zapruder film wouldn't be seen until a week after the event,  published in a Nov. 29 special issue  of LIFE, which described them as: "a remarkable and exclusive series of pictures which show, for the first time and in tragic detail, the fate which befell our President".

Meanwhile, the full film wouldn't be available until years later after being subpoenaed  in the Garrison case.

In contrast to this, millions of us on this date 50 years ago, saw Lee Oswald shot down before our very eyes. The first ever live- as it happened-  assassination, and the second victim of those dark days 50 years ago. Yes, I said victim. Not assassin, not "alleged assassin".   I seem to recall, perhaps from one long removed course I took at Loyola in ethics (chapter on American law) that "a man is innocent until proven guilty". Sadly, Lee Oswald was cut down before having his day in court, so there was no way to prove him guilty. Hence, in the strict eyes of American justice (if it means anything and isn't merely theoretical or another useless trope for the brain dead) then he must remain innocent under that law.

I do not regard the Warren Commission as any kind of official or legitimate court no matter how many names sat on its whitewash "blue ribbon"  panel. And I've already exposed this fraud in several FAQs, including: 4(a) and 4(b), 5 and 6. Indeed, (as Steve Kornacki noted yesterday morning) Warren Commission creator LBJ was on the verge of being subjected to a massive LIFE magazine expose (and Senate investigation) for the Bobby Baker scandal - including influence peddling to net millions of dollars- with the money trail to be published. Hence HE stood to gain the most, at just the right instant of time, with JFK killed.  Instantly he became the great "successor" as opposed to damaged criminal, and dropped from JFK's '64 ticket. Yes, yes, I know, it's a damned bloody thought. But recall the ancient question of Julius Caesar: "Et tu, Brute?"  His "Commission" itself nothing short of a stroke of evil genius - giving the patina of  "government" benediction while being in control of all evidence forthcoming. ("To commit the perfect crime, one need only be in charge of the investigation that follows")

See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQzLBYZP3mE

Watching Oswald shot down like a dog on the screen in front of me that Sunday morning, my first reaction was absolute shock. How in the hell could this bloody happen, and in a police station? How could it happen in the United States of America where every manjack was due his day in court? My mind then propelled to the obvious question: WHO would have wanted him dead?

The story at the time is that beneficent ol' Jack Ruby, owner of the Dallas' Carousel Nightclub, did it out of the goodness of his heart, to "spare Jackie from having to return to Dallas to endure a trial". (Which most critical observers even then had the intelligence not to buy.) Some time later he recanted that WC "testimony" and professed that  - if he could be taken to Washington to testify - he'd spill the beans on the real story. No one took him seriously and he died a short time later of cancer.

Again, it would be years - decades- before the documents came out to complete a picture of Jack Ruby and his connections, especially to organized crime.  Mark North, using actual,  released FBI files, documents many of Ruby’s Mob connections in his book, Act of Treason- including his reported “gangster connections in Dallas”, especially to Joseph Civello, the Mafia boss in Dallas. The same files disclose that Ruby, on October 26, 1963, “placed a 12 minute person to person call to Irwin S. Weiner at Weiner’s Chicago home”.

It is further noted that Weiner was a:

 “prominent Chicago Mafia associate” and “instrumental in coordinating the flow of cash between the Teamsters and Las Vegas casinos." (North, op. cit., pp. 333-34).  

We also learned of Ruby's past as a former Mob operative (for Santos Trafficante) in the 50s, gun-running into Cuba. In other words, the guy wasn't some little "angel" just out to do good deeds. (Let us also be aware, that the CIA's ZR/Rifle program had deliberately recruited Mafia to be part of assignments to nail Castro, given the mob had been entrenched in Cuba until Castro removed Batista - a friend to the mob).

North conjectures that  the phone call concerned Ruby 's outstanding  debt to Uncle Sam - owing more than $40,000 in back excise taxes to the federal government, plus $20,000 in other back taxes. A phone call could then have assured Ruby his tax problems would “disappear” if he performed one more job: offing Oswald. Given the mob link to ZR/Rifle, such a scenario would be totally logical. Few people today, unless they've  mined the document trail, are remotely aware of the extent to which the CIA and Mob worked hand in glove, especially on the ZR/Rifle Castro assassination operation. Given Oswald's 'Staff D' connection (from his 201 CI/SIG file) to ZR/Rifle it wouldn't have been a biggie to have this one "jokers wild" element severed - one that had become too dangerous  After all, it had been expected that this 'joker'  would be killed in the Texas Theater confrontation, not make it out alive to walk down the halls of the Dallas PD loudly proclaiming "I am just a PATSY!"

Ohhhh my god! ZR/Rifle, the mob, Ruby, Oswald doubles, CIA renegades, Richard Helms DDP, LBJ..... WAHHHHHH!  And yet even professed "liberal" sources fail to do their homework and instead pay heed to a dissembler (and likely CIA  'Mockingbird' asset) such as Gerald Posner - rather than get off their butts to do independent  research. A recent case in point is Marilyn Elias in her piece 'Conspiracy Act' , in The Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report (Winter, 2013),  in which she actually babbles (p. 15):

"They (conspiracy theorists) never mention the clear testimony that Oswald's assassin gave to the Warren Commission denying any plot and saying that he killed Oswald on impulse to save Jacqueline Kennedy the pain of returning to Dallas for a trial"


Well, we do mention it - as I have here in this post - while noting that only a moron would believe that. Evidently then, Ms. Elias is a moron or a dupe.  Apart from which, is she so stupid to believe that if Ruby really was involved he'd admit it to a bogus Commission created, owned and operated by LBJ and Hoover, which had the power to swat him down like a Texas horsefly - the same way LBJ  threatened to disclose Earl Warren's Hoover files if he didn't come onboard as a figurehead?  (See FAQ - Part 4a).

Like Philip Shenon, Elias isn't content to stop there, but bloviates onward making herself look even more like a horse's ass, when she writes (ibid.):

"In a similar way they portray as suspicious the deaths of Dorothy Kilgallen and other journalists skeptical of the story - but say nothing of the many doubting reporters who lived on unmolested."

Well, obviously they "lived on unmolested" because they were journalists within the "Operation Mockingbird" orbit: brought on in assorted media venues as reported by Kathryn Olmstead, in her book, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, Univ. of North Carolina Press, p.21 noting:

According to the Church committee's final report, approximately fifty U.S. Journalists had covert relationships with the CIA, about half of which involved money. Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein charged that the total number of U.S. journalists who worked for the CIA was actually much higher

To see a Youtube video on 'Mockingbird', with open admissions,  go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCfTIapds0

So, perhaps Elias is too ignorant to even be doing such a piece (although yes, her prime target is Richard Belzer - using the guilt by association rap, i.e. with Alex Jones) or she's too incompetent to dig up the Mockingbird journalist links - or she is one of them herself.   As for her complaints about the connections in the witness deaths we can perhaps excuse her because of a likely deficient math education, i.e. which didn't allow any exposure to Poisson statistics, such as employed by Richard Charnin in his mathematical proof:

http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/jfk-witness-deaths-graphical-proof-of-a-conspiracy/

Now, I have no problem if people have less math ed than those who've done the physics or engineering  route, but then they need to refrain from spouting bollocks such that "the witness deaths aren't connected." This only reveals their level of ignorance, as it does for Ms. Elias - no matter how many years (26)  she's had as a USAToday reporter, before peddling her anti-conspiracy baloney for the SPLC.

But to me, the mere fact Elias probably got all her JFK assassination info based on an interview with Gerald Posner (quoted in her piece), immediately disqualifies her from commenting at all on the Kennedy assassination, no matter how hard up she is to nail Richard Belzer for being a nasty, anti-government sort because he boldly holds to the conspiracy thesis as in his new book,  'Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination' .


The SPLC piece by Elias also illustrates another aspect of the Left's conspiracy phobia:  running from anything that smacks of "anti-government" sentiment, despite the fact we have reams of documents, files to support the need for a critical wariness of anything government claims (as Edward Snowden's files have disclosed). So, indeed, one faction of our own government - the national security state  -  was responsible for killing Kennedy. In this case the Left,  and its weak sister conspiracy phobics like Marilyn Elias, become part of the problem of the "unspeakable" noted by author James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable') . They harp on certain conspiracy theories and aspects or connections between proponents (as between Richard Belzer and Alex Jones) of which they are frightened, but remain totally stone silent as the NSA expands its web of mass surveillance, violating the 4th amendment  - the foundation of all civil rights- for all Americans. In this case, they expose themselves to be cafeteria-style, civil rights hypocrites. So please don't hump threats of the KKK, Volksfront and Aryan Nation, etc. if you're prepared to give a pass to the national security fascists!


Yes, it may be too much for some minds to cope with. But unless we get to the bottom of it, especially why both Kennedy and Oswald were killed, we will be hostage to the zeitgeist of the architects who carried it out:  the national security and war state. (See also Peter Dale Scott's updated book, The War Conspiracy.)

As for those idiots on the UK Guardian site- online forums I saw bloviating about "no real account of how such a conspiracy could take place has ever been given" - I suggest they either get hold of the fictional account 'Executive Action' - or see the film. It probably comes closer to the actual scenario than any other.  Certainly, than any other films I've seen.

While Oliver Stone's 'JFK' can be regarded as a "counter myth" to the Warren Commission's myth of 'Oswald dunnit', Executive Action is more closely a portrayal of how the deed was really carried out - and why both JFK and Oswald were victims.

RIP, Lee Harvey Oswald. One day, when this country finally finds the heart, will and balls to  pursue the truth - as opposed to manipulating the public mind via the expedient path of lying and cover up - your name will be cleared, and your family's honor restored.

See also: http://www.projectcensored.org/project-censored-presents-key-issues-assassination-president-john-f-kennedy-special-broadcast-pacifica-radio/

What Have We Learned This Past Week?

The past week we in the United States - at least many of us- recalled the events leading up to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy 50 years ago Friday. As with previous commemorations (25th, 30th, 40th) , the way the lead up and final day were dealt with disclosed a lot about who we are as a people.  Most critically, the spotlight shone bright on our media culture and the political class.

For myself, it was especially useful to look back at the media from previous commemorations to see what was portrayed compared to the monumental 50th occasion. What I saw, on looking back at old 30th, 40th anniversary tapes, wasn't too appealing.

It mainly showed that much of the media perspective has been lost, or otherwise totally distorted. For example, only once  in all the news segments dealing with the event did I hear a media maven (Charlie Rose) use the words "alleged assassin" to refer to Oswald. Whether this has been intentional I can't say. However, if the media culture - mainly corporate- takes its cues from the political class, it is perhaps understandable. As we know, one of the most shocking early disclosures this year - certainly shocking to those of us in the JFK assassination research community - is that the National Archives refused to release key files on the assassination, and in the 50th anniversary year.  See:  http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/national-archives-to-jfk-file-seekers.html

The records were originally requested by the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), will now remain secret until at least 2017, when the 1992 JFK Records Act mandates public release of all assassination files in the government’s possession. 


Interestingly, The Archives’ decision came as two former CIA officers went public with the unsubstantiated (and nonsensical)  conspiracy theory that Cuban leader Fidel Castro had advance knowledge of JFK’s assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. In a piece published in the Daily Beast the week of June 15th, retired CIA officer Glenn Carle claimed that “the Cuban dictator knew of Lee Harvey Oswald’s intention to kill President Kennedy.” Carle also defended a deceased CIA colleague, David Phillips, from allegations of JFK conspiracy theorists that he conspired in JFK’s death. Of course, I quashed Carle's gibberish and disinfo in my two blog posts (last month) on the Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald. I also skewered author Philip Shenon whose absurd new book is based on this flatulence. See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/author-philip-shenon-is-he-idiot-or-dupe.html


According to Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia (who also published a book about the impact of JFK’s assassination) referring to the National Archives:

“This is a deeply disappointing decision that deprives everyone of a fuller understanding of the JFK assassination The 50th anniversary of that terrible event is the perfect opportunity to shed more light on the violent removal of a president. This adds to the widely held public suspicion that the government may still be hiding some key facts about President Kennedy’s murder.”

But my point here is that the corporate media may well have taken their cue from this and decided to go all out on the way they portrayed the assassination.

Anyway, here are some of my takeaways from this past week:

1)The nation still hasn't come to terms with the reality of the assassination, and how it undermined civil, democratic society while hyper-empowering the military-national security war state. At the heart of this is what James Douglass has called "denial" and the "unspeakable".

Douglass presciently wrote in his landmark  book (JFK and the Unspeakable) 6 years ago [1]:

“Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas cover-up. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government – and ourselves.

Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based – first of all –on denial. Not the government’s but our own- and the unspeakable was not far away.”

Douglass held all of us accountable (including himself) to the extent we have contributed directly or indirectly to the zeitgeist of entrenched denial, spinning and subterfuge and worse, dignifying the Warren Commission as the default perception. He referred to this behavior as being part of the “Unspeakable”.  This term was first coined by monk, Thomas Merton,  to describe: “an evil whose depth and deceit go beyond the power of words to describe”.

 

To me, this evil was evident in almost every frame and soundbite in nearly every media program I beheld - whether documentary or film - about the assassination:  from History's  'The Definitive Guide' to the National Geographic's 'Killing Kennedy' to dozens of media segments that aired either as part of the morning news offerings or the nightly news.  The contributors to it ranged from Mo Rocca - trying to paint Dallas as not nearly as wretched as it actually was back in 1963, to  Bill Maher, trying on his 'Real Time' to insist conspiracy thinking was akin to "belief in God" and being "unable to accept a random event" (see (3) below) to ABC reporter Byron Pitts - essentially punking Jean Hill (who was 21' from JFK when he was struck by the kill shot and always maintained she heard up to 6 shots). While his segment allowed Hill's relatives to have their say Pitt ended by noting they held to Jean's belief "despite a Blue Ribbon Commission" that found Oswald guilty. Of course, that Commission was actually a pig in lipstick as I already showed in the FAQ Parts 4 (a) and (b).

 

2) The media has essentially boiled its POV down to one note: Oswald did it, case closed. This was sounded repeatedly all through the week with nary ONE single skeptical-conspiracy POV broadcast, other than short (2-3 min.) segments like Byron Pitt's when he ended up punking the person (Jean Hill) featured. This was in contrast to 2003, for example, when the History Channel broadcast the BBC 6- part series 'The Men Who Killed Kennedy' - which at least provided some strong counter narratives to the Warren Commission claptrap.  How is it the series wasn't shown this year?  According to Wikipedia:

 

The network was also criticized by Stanley Kutner for airing the controversial series The Men Who Killed Kennedy in 2003. Kutner was one of three historians commissioned to review the documentary, which the channel disavowed and never aired again.^[8] On the other hand, programs such as Modern Marvels have been praised for their presentation of detailed information in an entertaining format

 

Yet the network is quite okay with broadcasting 'The Definitive Guide to the Assassination' with two of the biggest shills and liars to ever appear on the tube. As well as televising inspiring and awesome fare such as  Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men and Pawn Stars . Look, no one says The Men Who Killed Kennedy was perfect and flawless. But it certainly didn't merit being punked because a couple "academics" pitched a hissy fit - yet when presented with the Warren Follies it's all A-ok.  All I am saying is balance was needed, another POV - even if parts might be subject to different interpretations. Hell's bells, have a short discussion period afterwards then, but don't eliminate the POV completely!

 

Meanwhile, for the 30th anniversary in 1993, Marina Oswald Porter was interviewed on prime time on NBC.  Marina - having vastly improved her English from those dark days in Dallas 30 years earlier- gave Tom Brokaw all he could handle and more. Even as Brokaw incessantly tried to browbeat her to admit Lee's guilt, Marina steadfastly refused. She repeated several times how Lee admired and loved JFK, and would never ever have shot him.  After she warned Brokaw to stop his errant mischief and the blowhard  refused, Marina detached her mic and walked out. I actually had to give a few hand claps to putting the self-styled media maven in his place!

 

 

3) Even progressives  don't get it. Including Bill Maher who asserted last night:   "We need conspiracies for the same reason we need God because we cannot accept that things are just random." 

 

Brit guest Katty Kay also stepped into the heaping pile prepped by Bill when she bloviated how "government distrust" fuels conspiracy theories (it actually does, but FACTS are what we are about in the JFK case, not global warming "conspiracies")  and how we can't accept "some lone, banal loser with a twenty -one dollar rifle (actually it was $12.78) could shoot the President of the United States just seems implausible to people."
 

 

Adding: "And if you don't like government at all it's just one more step to saying it's conspiracy"

 

NO! NO! NO!   At this point I felt like tearing my hair out and hurling a chair at the TV. How could professed liberals be so fucking dumb and uneducated? How could they play into this horse crap? And yet we beheld Steve Kornacki doing it barely 5 days earlier, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/even-liberals-can-be-victims-of.html

 

Therein I noted the error in conflating the personal political value of JFK with the value of the assassination. As good as JFK was, in so far as he managed to change from Cold Warrior to peace advocate, his personal political value was relatively low.  The point is that the assassination was the primal event, not John F. Kennedy per se. It was the assassination that altered the arc of American history for the worse. It was the assassination  that had the high political value, since with Kennedy out of the way, many more nefarious initiatives could be undertaken. So, Katty Kay just like Robert MacNeil on Kornacki makes the same stupid error.

 

As for Maher, I would have thought he had more ability for intellectual discrimination than to compare skepticism of the official story on the JFK hit to God belief. In so doing, Maher disclosed he has absolutely no insight into what happened, and perhaps doesn't care to. As for the event being random, so leading us to conspiracy, why?  That's gibberish. It is also echoing the conspiracy phobia Michael Parenti has noted.

 

What we do know is, given the basic definition of conspiracy  (e.g. Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary), viz.

 

“A treacherous, surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons”

 Then something either meets these criteria or it doesn’t. The definition isn’t rejected because the conspiracy is proven ex-post-facto or its objectives never manifested in reality, or one is erroneously convinced it's invoked as a path out of randomness! If at any time the “plan” condition in the definition was met, however briefly, then it was a valid conspiracy! From this, Watergate was a conspiracy, so was Iran-Contra. Similarly with the JFK assassination, since we have the files, documents track including Oswald's OS-351-164 (office of security), the 201-289248 CI/SIG, and the 74-500.  Has Bill seen any of these, or is it easier simply to talk out of his  ass?  In which case his segment isn't serious but done merely for shits and giggles.

 

If Maher had taken the time and trouble, he'd have learned for example, that the letter ‘D’ – on the cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicated CIA Staff D, a SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security  Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): “In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle”. In other words, Oswald was part of the ZR/Rifle operation. Is this "random"? Not when being part of it also facilitates being set up as the patsy that Oswald proclaimed, see: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee_1807.html

Other nominal progressives, like Marilyn Elias in her piece 'Conspiracy Act' , in The Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report (Winter, 2013),  have shown themselves willing to wade into the JFK assassination based on minimal knowledge or research. Hence, despite dubious preparation that'd put a college freshman's term paper to shame, they're ready and willing to tar all those who've shown Jack Ruby's role in Oswald's killing, or the basis for JFK witness deaths, as well as those who've revealed (as I did in my FAQ Part 5 ) that the autopsy of JFK was indeed "doctored".  These conspiracy phobic, reactive progressives give credence to Michael Parenti's criticism of "conspiracy phobia" on the Left - and its basis in superficial or emotional investigation- often citing poor or discredited  sources such as Gerald Posner and Vince Bugliosi.  As I also noted about Elias (see my  Nov. 24th post: 'The Second Assassination') while she goes guns blazing after Richard Belzer for his recent  conspiracy stances and support - including of hyper-conspirator Alex Jones- she remains stone silent about the NSA's much more malignant transgressions against 4th amendment rights. In this sense, she and others of her ilk emerge as civil rights hypocrites: prepared to go after isolated individuals but not stand up to the national security state itself- the selfsame that killed Kennedy.


On the positive side, it appears Tom Hanks' planned 13 -part  extravaganza on HBO (based on Bugliosi's bollocks) never materialized. We can be grateful for small mercies.

 

Sadly, if we are so lazy, self-absorbed and disconnected that we accept Maher's "random" event take or Marilyn Elias' conspiracy phobia and cherry-picked villains, then we merely become cogs in the wheels of the "unspeakable" and part of the ongoing denial on display this whole week. And if that's the case, this country will never be healed - since the festering pustule left on the body politic 50 years ago will ultimately lead to its downfall.

 

 

---

[1] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Orbis Book, p. xvi

Frequently Asked Questions on the JFK Assassination (Pt. 10): The Media Complicity in Coverup, Gerald Posner & Vince Bugliosi

1. How has the media affected our perception of the assassination?

In his book,  America Besieged (p. 140)  Michael Parenti devotes an entire chapter to Media Manipulation.  Among the many methods elaborated, by which the corporate mainstream media projects the dominant ideology, are (ibid.):


- Suppression by omission

- Attack and destroy the target

- Labeling

- Face-value transmission

- Framing

In the first, the media omit key or relevant facts from discussion, or fail to connect the existing facts to their reasoning. For example, this morning the author of the book JFK- End of Days, was asked if there could have been anyone involved in the assassination besides Lee Oswald. He said emphatically 'No!' but then described Jackie moving over the rear of the limo trunk to try to snatch a fragment of her husband's skull.  The latter, of course, totally shows the laws of physics at work in the case of linear momentum transfer - such that a bullet's momentum, driving a piece of skull backwards, means the shot had to have come from the front.  But the author never made any connection or reference to it, or the physical meaning.

Another example of media manipulation- embodying the remaining tactics -  appeared on NBC’s Today during the week of Aug. 8,  2002. Entitled 'Truth or Conspiracy', the manipulation began from the outset by framing the title as a false dichotomy. By posing it as truth OR conspiracy, the implicit message was that conspiracy was untruth, or lie: The logical effect of such a subtext was to drive the viewer away from conspiracy by regarding it as the polar opposite of truth. If one had truth, then conspiracy was mutually exclusive with it, or so NBC would have had us believe, totally reinforcing Michael Parenti’s point that the mainstream corporate media depicts it as imaginary despite the fact people have been prosecuted for it!

In the NBC segments, John McAdams was the sole person appearing along with some of his (Marquette University) students who mainly played the role of willing dupes.  In the segments,  McAdams masterfully labeled those he disagreed with ('buffs')  while also framing conspiracies as essential nonsense or lack of knowledge.  It was a superb exhibition of media complicity at work.
 

The upshot is that our national media is devoted only to fake objectivity through a distorted lens. Nowhere is this more evident than in political elections which the media consistently turn into a “horse race” or they trivialize them in other ways. Our government panders mainly to corporations, who give money for campaigns, and ignores average citizens. Lacking knowledge of the forces that killed JFK, these trends can only be reinforced as the corporate information tentacles metastasize.

2. How can these media tendencies be explained?

One major clue we have is provided by Katherine S. Olmstead in her book, 'Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI', 1996, Univ. of North Carolina Press. Olmstead pointedly notes (page 21):

"According to the (1978) Church committee's final report, approximately fifty U.S. Journalists had covert relationships with the CIA, about half of which involved money. Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein charged that the total number of U.S. journalists who worked for the CIA was actually much higher. In a controversial article in 'Rolling Stone'.

Bernstein claimed that more than 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA from the early 1950's to the mid-1970's. The 'New York Times' alone, Bernstein insisted, provided cover for ten CIA officers from 1950 to 1966"

Further (ibid.):

"Even when a newspaper or network did not have a formal relationship with the CIA, the agency could still have close ties and mutual interests with its reporters and editors- Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's brother-in-law was covert operations chief Cord Meyer; Post Publisher Phil Graham was a close friend of another covert operations agent,  Frank Wisner."

And there we have it: The Post was not only in bed with operatives of the CIA, they (in all probability) followed the Agency's party line directive for dealing with critics of the Warren Report - as laid out in CIA document 1035-360. Why else over react so violently over a film (JFK) even recruiting nabobs like George Will  to write piffle when their forte isn't history at all!

Recall also that Don de Lillo's superb novel 'LIBRA' - also a fictitious portrayal of the Kennedy assassination- was skewered by critic Paul Gray in a review ('Reimagining Death in Dallas') published in TIME (Aug. 1, 1988).   The sad truth is that centers of power and elite overclass interests immensely fear a fully conscious public as opposed to a deluded, false conscious one.

 3. What is Operation Mockingbird and could the media's biased posture be associated with it?

Absolutely!  This was a CIA-instigated operation during the 1960s-70s  to infiltrate the media with CIA contacts to divert or manipulate discussion, information on sensitive topics (such as the Kennedy assassination). In fact the book by Olmstead (previous section) likely summarizes key aspects of it.  In this way, seemingly coordinated fronts would be generated in the media to make it seem they all agree on critical discussion points. I.e. Was there a conspiracy? Of course not! Oswald did it! Case Closed! We have the forensic evidence, etc.

To see a Youtube video on 'Mockingbird', with open admissions,  go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCfTIapds0

Thanks to the Church Committee, Mockingbird was exposed though when people see the same propaganda in the current media mutation they seldom make the connection to what went before.(They should recall how the shameless media all acted as cheerleaders  for the Bushite  Iraq invasion and war back in 2003!)

Author Michael Parenti ( America Besieged,  Dirty Truths ) has perhaps done the most to expose the insidious nature of conspiracy phobia that resides in elite American culture, mainly in the mainstream media, and its halls of power.  Two particular chapters, ‘Is Conspiracy Only a Theory?’ in the first book, and ‘Conspiracy Phobia on the Left’ in the second, hold the clue to why even some liberals like Tom Hanks, Rachel Maddow, Marilyn Elias et al run from the c-word. Parenti makes no bones about the fact that “most people suffer from conspiracy phobia” and “they treat anyone who investigates conspiracy as a conspiracy buff or oddball." Of course, "most people" to which he refers are mainly members of the media and political class - always bound by conformity to "official" narratives- lest they be tagged as "non-objective" or "loony".

Parenti notes if the claimed conspiracy hasn’t been validated to their satisfaction, it’s merely a theory (which they erroneously equate with speculation), but if it was validated, as in Watergate, then ‘Voila!’ it’s no longer theory but an actuality!  But this is essential nonsense. As Parenti observes, it means that “conspiracy can never be proven and if proven it can’t be conspiracy”.

Parenti concludes all conspiracies are thereby relegated to “the realm of the imaginary”. Real conspiracies (proven so), meanwhile, shuck off the c-word label and become another, different breed of historical reality.

We are reminded here of the foremost rule of propaganda and brainwashing as enunciated by the master of mind- mashing, Edward Bernays:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.”

This prescription clearly underlies the persistent media efforts to drive the American public to accept one version of the Kennedy assassination and no other.

4. What About Gerald Posner? Didn't his 'Case Closed' answer all questions?

 Let me put it this way: If it had, why would Vince Bugliosi have found it necessary to write a 2,500-plus page cinderblock of  book to 'Reclaim History'? Unfortunately for Posner, people did read his book, not to satisfy themselves that he’d closed the case, but to assess just how closely Posner adhered to the known facts. One of the earliest scrutinizing efforts was The Posner Report- A Study in Propaganda: One Hundred Errors in Gerald Posner’s Case Closed – Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by David Starks. Starks draws on the published reports and documents of true experts like Peter Dale Scott, Dr. Gary Aguilar and Martin Shackelford. The Report skewers Posner’s claims and effectively discloses a hack who made “hundreds of errors” in his pell-mell rush to judgment.

5. So how much did Posner get wrong?
 

A lot!  The Electronic Assassination Newsletter which collates the research from most JFK Assassination experts documents twelve of the most serious “Posnerisms” here:

http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm

Those who take the time to examine, study the examples in the link will become aware of an unnerving lack of attention to detail and a penchant for what appears to be deliberate misrepresentation. Indeed, Posner’s entire case appears to be erected on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations, gross distortions and shoddy methodology, the mass of which can’t even redeem it as coincidental. Despite that, he remains the official “hit man” to use against conspiracy “buffs” by the corporate media to knock down anything that remotely smacks of conspiracy.

Harrison Livingstone, a long time researcher, described Posner’s book as: "a fatally flawed, intellectually dishonest effort”.

 

 

Meanwhile, Prof. David R. Wrone, whose review of Case Closed appeared in The Journal of Southern History, notes:

Posner often presents the opposite of what the evidence says. In the presentation of a corrupt picture of Oswald’s background- for example – he states that, under the name of Osborne, Oswald picked up leaflets he distributed from the Jones Printing Company and that a ‘receptionist’ identified him. She in fact said that Oswald did not pick up the leaflets as the source that Posner cites indicates. “

He adds:   No credible evidence connects Oswald to the murder. All the data that Posner presented to do so is either shorn of context, corrupted, the opposite of what the sources actually say, or non-sourced.

And further:

Posner crowns his theory with the certainty of science by using one side of the computer-enhanced studies by Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo Park that his text implies he commissioned. The firm, however, lambastes his use as a distortion of the technology that it developed for the American Bar Association’s mock trial of Oswald where both sides used it.”

Not surprisingly, many ordinary researchers as well as professionals (e.g. Harold Weisberg) contend Posner is likely a disinformation hack, possibly for the CIA, and perhaps even part of its notorious “Operation Mockingbird” propaganda machine which infected the U.S. Media from the 1970s. Most importantly, Posner’s book neatly aligns itself with CIA Document 1035-960 (See Appendix) with its mandate to counter criticism of the Warren Report using “propaganda assets”.

In the meantime one is left to ponder how a person such as Posner could have gained so much influence and gravitas. The best answer I can arrive at is that offered by Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind. Posner, then, has proven skillful and adept at doing exactly what the corporate media PR mavens and their CIA associates demand: manage the “Middle Mind” and prevent it from veering too far off the established tracks, as defined by the Warren Commission’s parameters.

6. So is Posner now 'damaged goods' - never to appear again?

 

Hardly! He will be appearing with Vince Bugliosi - I understand - on some farce called "The Definitive Guide to the Kennedy Assassination"  on the History Channel. Posner, incredibly, is also afforded gravitas by being quoted (p.15) in a recent (Winter, 2013) issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, in an article ('Conspiracy Act') by a Marilyn Elias. She not only provides cover to the lying Posner but criticizes the well-validated surgical alteration of Kennedy's wounds (see my FAQ Pt. 5) and the similarly exposed role of Ruby. In this way even the so-called progressive media becomes part of the 'unspeakable' described by author James Douglass. In so doing, she plays directly into the hands of the propagandists as a willing dupe. All I can say here, is that anyone who watches the History HD farce and seriously believes it's the "definitive guide" will likely need to sign up for a future episode of The Walking Dead. As one of the zombies!Ditto for anyone who takes the SPLC bunkum seriously.

 

 

7. What of Vince Bugliosi? What he did get wrong? What is he advocating?

 

 

Let me take the last question first: Bugliosi is none other than a shill for the Warren Whitewash Commission which I exposed in my FAQ - parts 4a and 4b. Readers can consult these and see what they think. If they agree the Warren Commission and its Report are legit - after reading through them carefully - there's nothing more I can say.

 

 

As for the amount of items Bugliosi got wrong, they are too voluminous to recount here in one FAQ segment, and too much to expect the casual blog reader to confront. However, the interested reader who wants to delve into the errors can consult any of these links:

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/green/BesmirchingHistory.html


http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/2007/05/reclaiming-history-from-vince-bugliosi.html

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Essay_-_Is_Vincent_Bugliosi_Right_that_Neutron_Activation_Analysis_Proves_Oswalds_Guilt

My main complaint is that Bugliosi's book amounts to one long ad hominem. It veers into it even when discussing evidence. When I took my first college Logic course, one of the things we were instructed to look out for was “ad hominem” in parsing arguments.  That is, attacking the sources as opposed to the arguments. Bugliosi commits this in spades, for example,  writing :

(p. 1258) " ... simple common sense, that rarest of attributes among conspiracy theorists ... " , 

 p. 1275: "But conspiracy theorists are not rational and sensible when it comes to the Kennedy assassination." 

 (p. 1277) " ... silliness is what all of the conspiracy allegations are about ... "

Sadly, Bugliosi’s penchant for ad hominem doesn’t end with the critical conspiracy community – authors but extends to key witnesses and others (e.g. Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden) trying to fight for the truth. For example, Bugliosi refers to the courageous African-American woman Aquilla Clemmons (who pointedly noted that a heavyset man shot Officer J.D. Tippitt, not Oswald) as a “kook”. He dismisses the first African-American Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden as a "liar", though it beggars the imagination to think Bolden would actually put himself in the way of a long prison sentence merely to tell tall tales.

But is Bugliosi rational? Anyone who commits the level of errors, conflations, ad hominem we behold in his work must question such an assumption.  But what really gets the discriminating reader annoyed are the multifold LIES. In his chapter on Cyril Wecht, ‘A Conversation with Dr. Cyril Wecht’, Bugliosi concluded by insisting that Wecht:

 “demonstrated there is no credible evidence whatsoever that any shots were fired from the president’s right side or right front” adding that “the conspiracy theorists’ main forensic expert cannot even hypothesize a shooting from the right side or right front that is intellectually feasible.”

But in fact, Wecht can and DID! (In the video documentary 'The Single Bullet Theory')  Moreover he did it in meticulous detail including using anatomical sketches, and diagrams sowing the putative single bullet’s path and why it couldn’t work. In addition,

Wecht hasn’t budged from this position since that documentary was completed ca. 1993! Indeed, when Wecht was confronted with Bugliosi’s words (‘Last Word’, 2011, by Mark Lane, p. 153) he responded that Bugliosi’s words were “inexplicable” since Wecht had:

 “stated to Bugliosi that all the relevant evidence – including the medical evidence, the x-rays of the president that he had examined and the statements of the physicians, had long ago convinced him that a shot had been fired from the grassy knoll area.”

 

 

So why didn’t Bugliosi faithfully report Wecht’s words instead of lying about them and yes, distorting them? Because to do so would not have served his agenda of holding up the Warren Commission Report as the “Holy Grail” of the assassination and the last word! However, this misstep, like the hundreds of Gerald Posner in his ‘Case Closed’ – merely shows both to be in the service of disinformationists, most likely the CIA who in their own document 1035- 960 (marked ‘Psych’ for psychological warfare operations) clearly state under Sec. 3(b) ‘Propaganda assets’:

But Bugliosi's lies even veer into the most generic arenas. Bugliosi (p. 1003) insists that one of the first critical authors of the Warren Commission , Mark Lane, never mentioned in his book Rush to Judgment, that Oswald had been arrested. Bugliosi’s exact words are: “He doesn’t even mention Oswald’s arrest”.

Bugliosi must not think many readers have access to his book (which I finally located at a Colorado Springs library last year) or Lane’s, but he’s wrong. When I checked my copy of Lane’s book I found (p. 81) not only the details of the place of arrest but the time and the words “Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater at approximately 1.50 p.m. that day” but other confirmations.


The question that emerges is: If Bugliosi can lie with impunity about even a minor pro forma (generally accepted) event as concerns the critical pro-conspiracy community, how many larger events would he be prepared to misrepresent in the interest of his propaganda?

------------------
APPENDIX: CIA Document 1035-960

CIA Document #1035-960
RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report:

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination.

Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. 

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms. 

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.