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

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

Glenn Garvin: "Facts Don't Matter in JFK Conspiracies" - Maybe Not To A Warrenite Dupe!

My impatience with certifiable hacks and know-nothings in the media grows daily as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination tomorrow. I don't mind, or wouldn't, if these ignorant tools would keep their unsupported (except by the now defamed Warren Commission Report) hogswill  to themselves but they never do. They present it as "gospel" and also cite the top Warren apologists such as Gerald Posner and Vince Bugliosi.

No surprise as a result, way too many incompetent commenters - like on the WaPo  NY Times and UK Guardian forums- parrot this BS, including that "Occam's razor applies". Uh, no, it doesn't! (See the last Mail Brane blog.).  Another dope on The Guardian site actually insisted:  "The Edward Snowden revelations show conspiracy can't work!"  Huh! Have you lost all your neurons? Or is it too much nose candy that blew them out?  Here's a clue: if a person is going to wax forcefully on the JFK case, at least make sure you know some basic facts, i.e. like Oswald's Mannlicher- Carcano didn't even work properly and the telescopic sight shims had to be rebuilt for the Warren Commission test trials! (See my FAQ,  Part 6)


Sadly - and possibly partly to do with the raft of ignorant comments in so many online news forums-  the pro-Warren malarkey is being recycled with revived intensity, especially as the current polling shows those who accept conspiracy has plummeted to 61% - from 81% in 1988. So the media brainwashers are feeling powerful and like they're making headway.  For example, Miami Herald hack Glenn Garvin in his recent piece: "The JFK Conspiracies: Facts Don't Matter" - which I happened to spy in today's online Denver Post. As I read through Garvin's tripe it immediately became evident to me the guy isn't qualified to write about the minerals in dog poop far less the JFK assassination.

What got my dander up? Let's see some of the codswallop on offer from this Mockingbird imitator:

He begins by citing the master disinfo hotshot Vince Bugliosi (who I will have a separate FAQ on) from a History Channel documentary to be shown tomorrow who cites "42 different conspiracy theories involving 82 assassins and 214 accomplices".  This, of course, is intended to make heads explode and sneer instantly at any suggestion of conspiracy. But note, this is coming from a liar who couldn't even get basic facts straight in his brick-sized tome 'Reclaiming History' - including insisting that some guy named "Miller" succeeded in duplicating Oswald's rifle feat, when the Warren Commission's own sharpshooter team couldn't do it! (which I elaborated in FAQ, Part 6) .

I also noted already the reason for a disjunctive plurality of theories which mainly arose during the three decades or so when no critical files on Oswald were available  I noted in my Nov 20 post (to do with TIME's nonsense)  how this changed after the JFK Records Act was passed to make available millions of files by 1993. These included Oswald's CIA file : 201-289248 CI/SIG, as well as others, which finally opened the window on Oswald to serious researchers - showing he wasn't the "lone commie nut" portrayed by the Warrenites and their apologists and enablers.  This was the first breakthrough paving the way to the CIA as the primary culprit.

Thus, the Oswald focus became much clearer with the HSCA's exposure (mainly thanks to brave investigators like Gaeton Fonzi, Danny Hardway, Ed Lopez (author of the Lopez Report) and others, when we finally saw how David Atlee Phillips used forged cable to frame Oswald for the hit. With the actual released photos of an Oswald impostor in Mexico City the framing became more evident, and the path led to assets of the Mexico City Station’s Chief of Covert Action and Cuban Operations, David Atlee Phillips.  Has Garvin done any research into this area? Not bloody likely!

My point is that the serious researchers have pinpointed the CIA as the top culprit. But let's examine some of Garvin's further bollocks, in fact to do with the CIA:

"The CIA did it because Kennedy was going to end the Vietnam War and cost the military-industrial complex a lot of potential profits! (No word yet on why the CIA didn't kill President Eisenhower a decade earlier for ending the Korean war. Maybe its profit margins were smaller?"


How do we teach this little twerp how to approach the document base? Is it even possible? Though the guy mocks the Kennedy intent to end the Vietnam War, he's blinded by his own arrogance and egoism. Does he even know where to look for the FACTS?  What we are referencing here is National Security Action Memorandum 263 - but alas, it is presented in a manner that is not amenable to lazy wannabe journalists, or dimwits.

What is often actually cited as the NSAM, i.e.
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/w6LJoSnW4UehkaH9Ip5IAA.aspx


Is in fact only the cover letter by McGeorge Bundy. It has only passing relevance to the actual content of the NSAM, but it does clearly state “the President approved sections IB(1-3) of the report". Which report? To find these, the researcher must turn to Document 142 in The Pentagon Papers: ‘Report of McNamara Taylor Mission to South Vietnam'. Then the serious researcher will read:

IB(2) A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by the Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. military personnel by that time.

IB(3): In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.

Note the wording and that a partial drawdown of 1,000 was due for the end of 1963 and the bulk by 1965. Most lazy wannabes never get this far while some others that do mistake the "1,000" total for the entire intended lot. I dispute that Garvin even got beyond the cover letter. If he did he'd never spout the ignorance he does.

Then there is the snide remark on 'why the CIA didn't kill Ike a decade earlier for ending the Korean War'. In fact, this idiot doesn't even know history since technically that war NEVER ended!  Instead a temporary truce was signed (never mind its duration) that was never considered as final or total, certainly not by Ike.

In addition, there were things JFK did to piss the Agency off, that Ike didn't do. One of them was firing its Director, Allen Dulles, after the Bay of Pigs debacle.  Dulles had virtually become the Company's identity since its early (post WWII) days as the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services) Another was firing the deputy director, Charles Cabell. The Agency also wasn't exactly thrilled when Kennedy vowed to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds". Unlike today's blow dried morons in media, the spooks took those words very seriously, not just as beer talk, or hyperbole.

While Ike was irritated at the CIA for its  overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) leading him to regard the Agency as "dangerously out of control"- and thus establishing  'The President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activity' - JFK went much further.  He created the Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible only to him, and mandated all over flights of Cuba be done by the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. He also defined a list of directives on what the CIA could and could not, do. By the end of 1961, JFK's 'Special Group' had no less than 17 recommendations for the "reorganization and redirection of the CIA.

The CIA, however, retaliated by withholding intelligence from Kennedy. By June, 7, 1961, Kennedy was complaining that he was receiving "inadequate developments" concerning events in a number of countries. As his ally, Gen. James H. Doolittle had put it, it was a case of the  "covert operations dog wagging the intelligence tail".

Does Garvin know any of this? Evidently not. It's far easier to shoot from the hip for a callow wannabe than to dig up FACTS.

But let's continue since having wallowed in initial foolishness, Garvin clearly isn't about to stop - as when he writes:

The Vietnam War theory is a good example of how conspiracy-itis is immune from either evidence or rational argument. Kennedy was elected president as a militant Cold War hawk who pledged an America that would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe" in the fight against communism

So let's see. Garvin is too dumb to acknowledge or perceive  that Kennedy, realizing he'd never be elected going against 'Tricky Dick' as a peacenik,  chose to portray himself as "Cold warrior" - could change stripes? And yet we know this happened - again because the document base supports it. The pivotal event was the October 1962 Cuban Missile crisis. Of course, one would need to get up off his lazy ass and consult a book with the transcripts of the tapes from the time: The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, by Ernest R. May and Philip K. Zelikow (1997, President and Fellows of Harvard College).

On p. 183 one sees LeMay saying that "we have got to do more than take out the missiles" and he demands a massive air strike as well. Afterward,  we see  JFK choosing a naval blockade option.This leads  LeMay to actually compare JFK to Neville Chamberlain, and referring to his actions as “appeasement”.  According to one of the first major mainstream news releases after the tapes in the WH situation room were released (The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 26, 1996, 'Bomb Cuba!Le May Urged JFK', p. 2A):

"Blasting Kennedy's cautious approach, the Air Force Chief, Gen. Curtis LeMay, told the President at a White House meeting on Oct. 19, 1962, "This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich......"

Through those days Kennedy was fending off strong pressure for an attack on Cuba from congressional and military leaders such as LeMay, who told him, 'We don't have any choice but direct military action...I see no other solution...'"

The upshot is that the close approach to the precipice of nuclear war had changed Kennedy to a confirmed fighter for peace, who was all about disarmament. (Noted and mentioned in his famous "Pax Americana" speech at American University in June, 1963).  Could Garvin even have gotten himself to a newspaper archives to check this out? Clearly not!

Garvin bloviates onward:

Just three weeks before his assassination, Kennedy's administration helped to instigate a coup in South Vietnam in hope of installing a government that would press the war against the communist North more aggressively. The idea that he was killed because he was soft on communism is preposterous.


Well, what's really preposterous, Glenn, is your abysmal ability to track down files, documents and check facts. Can we say you are incompetent? Yes, I believe so. In fact, it was the CIA that instigated the coup and murder of the Diem brothers and this also has been made known in sundry released files,  Some of the key ones are located in the book, JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass.

As Douglass notes (op. cit. p. 192): Kennedy got his  final wake up call on who was controlling his government when, in an early September, 1963 meeting he was informed by a David Bell of AID (a CIA cover organization) that the funds from the Commodity Import Aid Program had “already been cut off”,  essentially assuring a coup would ensue with the Diem government in South Vietnam. The Diems were killed on Nov. 2, 1963 and the CIA had planned for Kennedy to be taken out the same day in Chicago, except that trip was cancelled. The lone assassin set up for that hit was Thomas Arthur Vallee. (About whom details more will be provided in the next FAQ, Part 9)

Kennedy was evidently livid and directly asked Bell who had told him to do that, to which Bell replied, “No one” (ibid.). The will to power disclosed here indicates the CIA felt it more powerful than Kennedy himself or his decision-making authority.  If they felt that way, there is nothing that they wouldn’t do to prevent the President from getting in their way.  The incident was confirmed by New York Times journalist Arthur Krock  in his piece  ‘The Inter-Administration War in Vietnam’, The New York Times, Oct. 3, 1963). wherein he wrote:


"If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government, it will come from the CIA”
 
This followed his observation  that:  "the CIA had flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.”

This in regard to disbursing the funds from the Commodity Import Aid Program . So what do we know now? We know Garvin is full of shit, has no ability to probe documents to any depth and is hostage to slipshod journalism. I would call it "yellow" but don't wish to insult the real  yellow journalists

Not prepared to quit while he's ahead Garvin babbles on:

Even more outrageous is the belief that a lifelong Marxist like Lee Harvey Oswald would be the trigger man in a plot supposedly aimed at making America more anti-communist.

But if Garvin had taken the time and trouble to examine Oswald's 201 CI/ SIG files as well as the HSCA findings on David Atlee Phillips and his band of CIA renegades,  he'd see this is tommyrot and that Oswald  been actually sheep-dipped by the CIA to present this fictitious front. See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-jfk_10.html


Let's take one more hit on this character, given he opens the way:

What's been largely lost in all the conspiracy hoo-hah over motives is that the forensic evidence tying Oswald to the assassination is mountainous and indisputable. The murder weapon was purchased by Oswald through the mail with an order-form filled out in his handwriting and his wife took photos of Oswald posing with it months before the assassination. It bore his palm print and was found in a room in the building in which he worked.


Now, in the first case, the forensic evidence is certainly not "indisputable"   - though I do concede the false evidence is mountainous. For a rundown of the crap trotted out by the Warrenites  including altering the original autopsy notes, faking the autopsy photos, see my FAQ - Part 5. As to the alleged "murder weapon" - I already showed (in FAQ, Part 6) it couldn't have hit the broad side of a barn since the crack team of sharpshooters recruited by the Warren Commission couldn't even begin to USE the weapon for their trials until they had "rebuilt the shims" since the sighting was so far off!

As for the backyard photos, I already dealt with those including the use of the Oswald "ghost" photo which good ol' Glenn appears never to have heard of, e.g.

This had been  recovered at Dallas PD headquarters some time after the assassination. As one can discern, the “ghost” is a cutout into which another image can be pasted-superposed. The cutout image, many of us conclude, was obtained using a Dallas cop stand –in, which photo was also found in Dallas Police files, along with the ghost image.

Photo specialist Robert Hester was called on 22 November, 1963 to help process assassination -related photos for the FBI and Dallas police. Hester reported (and his wife Patricia confirmed) that he saw an FBI agent with a color transparency of one of the backyard photos with NO figure in the picture.  Hester has surmised and many researchers agree, that the blank photo was intended to deliberately set up Oswald.

Finally, Glenn proclaims:

But conspiracy theories never expire at the hands of evidence and logical refutation. Mostly, they don't expire at all. Thirty years ago, the theory that Oswald wasn't really Oswald at all, that he'd been bodysnatched (by the KGB or the CIA, take your pick) and replaced with a trained-assassin imposter

Well, first he conflates the Oswald imposter with the Oswald double.  Maybe a couple of pictures - since they're worth a thousand words each- can assist. The imposter, Glenn, is the one shown entering the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City - a heavy set guy who claimed he was Lee Harvey Oswald and the one Philip Shenon insists threatened the life of Kennedy openly. Below I show the actual Oswald at left and the one who claimed to be him approaching the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City:

Now, the Oswald double - who went around Big D making all kinds of outrageous statements (and which I will detail in the next FAQ) was actually photographically exposed through the efforts of Jack White by taking two separate Oswald photos- claimed to be the same person- and overlaying them at the chin line so that they match, or are perfectly integrated.

The result is shown below which clearly displays the difference in height that the witnesses cited in James Douglass book allude to:




Never mind! With brainwashed, conspiracy phobic media hacks like Garvin, one can't expect a changeling. All we can expect, and have seen this whole past week, is lying babble out of the mouths of the whole constellation of corporatized media - whose main job is now propaganda.

Even Liberals Can Be Victims of Conspiracy Phobia - As on Kornacki This A.M.

It's really distressing to the critical thinker to behold the extent to which crappola continues to be spouted on the JFK assassination, particularly the media's consistent disparaging of the whole notion of conspiracy. And while most Europeans think we're idiots for believing that one lone nut killed Kennedy, in America that meme is just fine and dandy. After all, it keeps the hoi polloi in their comfort zones so they can tweet, play fantasy football, and watch 'Survivor' without being bothered.

This was fully on display this morning at the end of Kornacki's 'UP' program where the usual canards, shibboleths were trotted out in abundance. And, of course, who was front and center at Kornacki's  coffee table?  None other than the moron (or dupe) Philip Shenon, still trying to peddle his nonsense about Oswald declaring he wanted to kill JFK in Mexico City.  See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/author-philip-shenon-is-he-idiot-or-dupe.html

Guest Walter Mears, a former AP reporter, and evidently on the verge of Alzheimers is no better, trying to peddle the baloney that "Oswald was the perfect guy for conspiracy theories" then reciting all kinds of idiocy such as "he  defects to Russia, went to Mexico City, kicked out of the Marines, etc." failing to distinguish actual actions from those that emerged from the false defector program I described 3 blogs ago. Mears  goes off the beam, trying to be sardonic or sarcastic, as when he blabs:

"I covered Washington well enough to know that if you have a conspiracy and three people are involved, one of them is going to blow the whistle."

To which all the guests laughed like idiots, unable to grasp how many witnesses were taken out one by one, not only at the time of the Warren Commission, but at the Garrison Investigation and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978-79). Indeed, author Richard Charnin has proven - to a mathematical certainty, these witnesses could not have been offed by "coincidence" or some other claptrap. See:  http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/jfk-witness-deaths-graphical-proof-of-a-conspiracy/

Interestingly, Mears did get the key part of the JFK conspiracy right when he blurted: "And if two are involved, it will keep if one of them dies".

But in the JFK "Witness Death project" - likely carried out by CIA contract  hit men (such as killed William Bruce Pitzer), it obviously will also "keep" if dozens are killed - one by one as they are called to testify before any given investigation. (See Charnin's link and proof.) Mears actually nailed the reason for the lack of evidence he claimed not to see, but was too dumb to understand how or why. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day!

Even Kornacki, an otherwise intelligent MSNBC host on most issues, fell down here,  displaying more ignorance and historical cluelessness than insight.  He made the embarrassing remark:

"Yeah, that's the other part here. We talk about the government as this sort of bumbling, bureaucratic mess. To pull off something as wide scale as in the Oliver Stone movie ('JFK') you try to reconcile that with the government we know."

But Steve K. conflates too many dissimilar factors. For one thing, only one sector was involved- and one clandestine services branch of that. It wasn't like that branch (Richard Helms' DDP) was trying to form an enormous collective involving everyone in gov't! These people didn't "bumble" either, having already shown they could take down the legitimate government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, see:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

Oh, btw, this same branch also took down a Cuban airliner over Barbados, on Oct. 6, 1976 killing all on board. And up to now, the perps involved have never been prosecuted - but we know who the key players were (Freddy Lugo, Hernan Ricardo, Luis Posada), though not the architects within the CIA who dispatched them.  So pardon me, if I have great disdain for any who smirk and laugh at a possible JFK conspiracy.

Steve also misses the boat on 'JFK' which Oliver Stone always maintained was a counter myth to the myth of the Warren Commission. Hence, Stone deliberately interjected all conceivable players to weave that narrative, but at least he was honest in doing so and admitted up front what he was doing (in several interviews I still have on tape, including one with Larry King on CNN from 1991). The WC, meanwhile, deliberately falsified records and evidence, including the autopsy photos and record. (See my FAQ (Pt. 4) on the Warren Commission.)

Both Mears and Kornacki also miss the point that there have been other conspiracies that survived a good deal of time without exposure -including:

- 'Project Stargate' - the DIA and CIA- sponsored program to 'exploit the paranormal' in psy warfare (London Electronic Telegraph, Issue 521,Saturday October 26, 1996) was concealed at least that long.

-MK Ultra which used LSD in secret experiments on military personnel, kept hidden for overt two decades.

-The massacre of South Korean civilians at NO Gun Ri by U.S. soldiers at the start of the Korean War, kept hidden for fifty years.

- The ZR-Rifle Assassination program, kept concealed over twenty-five years.

- The CIA's Report on its own dereliction in the Bay of Pigs, kept concealed over 35 years.

All of these in concert show how anti-conspiracy canards can and do acquire a life and validity of their own simply through repetition. But they're not any more credible from having been repeated - in the media or other venues - umpteen times!

The fact is the government is quite capable of keeping key operations and programs hidden, and the conspiracies associated with them. Indeed, 'black operations' ('black ops') are totally dedicated to that premise! In the JFK case, it is even more possible- given that no formal documents or papers were probably ever generated (by the architects) to sign off on the hit. Though as serious researchers have noted, one can examine exactly who profited in its wake.  We must also bear in mind, as Peter Dale Scott has observed, there are three components here: 1) the fictitious portrayal-framing of Oswald, 2) the actual killing of Kennedy (Executive Action), and 3) the ensuing cover-up, which sadly Kornacki and pals still appear to be part of, if not intentionally.


Then there's Robert MacNeil who chirps in his own two cents - while conceding he's never studied any conspiracy theory ( though he was in Dallas at the time):

"I have never seen any hard evidence that convinces me either that Oswald was not the shooter or that there was a conspiracy around it."

Then, Robert, I suggest you take a careful look at my Frequently Asked Questions, Part 5, related to the bullets and wounds. READ that through carefully, examine the images - and then tell me or write to me with a straight, sober face there was no conspiracy. If you can do that I award you The Utmost Idiot Medal of the Year.

Not content to offer his first "insight" MacNeil continues:

"I think the other piece of this is the emotional radiance Kennedy achieved in the minds of the public, and the inconceivability of that being shattered in this way, by this man."

Which regurgitates a decades long trope that 'Oh me, oh my, we were all so shocked, SHOCKED by the murder of a beloved President at the time - by an alleged filthy commie loner - that it was too much to accept and process'. Horse SHIT.

All MacNeil does here is echo what John Paulos wrote in his book, 'Irreligion' (2008, p. 108) dealing with people's emotional factors to do with belief and non-belief. He wrote:

"Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill-suited for the job of Giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators. Similar remarks apply to the death of Princess Diana"


Paulos’ major error again is in conflating the personal political value of JFK with the value of the assassination. Thus, whether Lee Oswald was an “unprepossessing nobody” or an intel contract agent who tried to warn of an earlier assassination[1], is immaterial to the proposal of a conspiracy hypothesis in JFK’s assassination. The fact is that the assassination as an event had immense historical ramifications.

One of many was the Vietnam War which Kennedy clearly planned to terminate as per his National Security Action Memorandum 263, by the end of 1965.  With Johnson’s ascension to power, his NSAM -273 (allowing for full military engagement) could easily trump JFK’s NSAM-263, and the final touch was the bogus firing on the Turner Joy in claimed international waters in Aug. 1964- the trigger for the massive U.S. military action leading to 58,000 lives lost.

Other historical ramifications can easily be followed if one has the mind, the political insight and the intestinal fortitude. For example, the $269 billion squandered on the Vietnam War meant that the Apollo Moon missions had to be short circuited (last one launched in 1973), since the money wasn’t there to further the early lunar visitations. One can exactly trace that truncated space program arc to the conservative near-Earth Shuttle program.

 

The point is that the assassination was the primary 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, including assassinations and launching an 8-plus year undeclared war in Vietnam, for the benefit of war profiteers and oil companies.

 

Of course, because Paulos - and Robert MacNeil likewise- err by mistaking the low political value of the person for the high political value of the assassination,  they similarly err by believing the choice to embrace conspiracy is contingent on the shock effect of an emotional loss to a "loser". But had either enough history and deep politics education they'd see how stupid this sounds. Further, if they knew how hard many of us worked to dig up the FACTS through filing requests, and pouring through the files released they wouldn't be so damned dismissive of conspiracy in this case. Or so brain dead as to embrace Philip Shenon's palpable BS.

What we (including authors James Douglass and Michael Parenti) want is for the nation to finally face this tragedy without pretense or specious rationalizations. No denials, no subterfuge, no deflections and no more excuses for intelligence agency stone-walling and inaction. Or, protecting their asses by specious arguments because it's believed the American people can't handle the truth that their own government (at least one branch) played a major role in Kennedy's killing.

We do so not to "run from reality", a demeaning choice of canard from the pseudo-historians, but confront it. As Michael Parenti has pointedly noted ('The Dirty Truth'. p. 186), we:

"are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy."

Parenti also notes (op. cit., p.174):


" Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room, plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers.  But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"

 I sincerely hope my Brane Space readers don't suffer from conspiracy phobia, because I believe this 50th anniversary year of the assassination is the time to let it all hang out in terms of smashing through the cobwebs of manufactured delirium and false history with which we've all been saddled. That is a primary reason I am expending a lot of energy on these assassination-related posts which I think people have a right to see, and in the process learn of our real history. Yes, it will often be painful, but unlike Steve Kornacki and his guests I am betting they can handle the truth.
 

---

[1] See, e.g. Douglass, op. cit., p 200 (and further) with reference to an “informant named Lee” who phoned to expose the plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963- the same day the Diems were to be executed in Vietnam. As Douglass observes, had that earlier plot succeeded, the accused lone-nut assassin we’d be arguing about would be another former Marine, Thomas Arthur Vallee, not Lee Harvey Oswald.