The Charlottesville Clash - First Skirmish In The Second Civil War?

White Nationalists (Nazis)  and white supremacists gather in Charlottesville, VA.

Some of the injured tended to after one of the racists rammed them with a car.


White Nationalists march Friday night carrying torches onto the Univ. of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. The torch light ceremony reminded many of the Nazi torch light marches in the 1930s.

Even as a panel on CNN yesterday morning ruminated on whether the media ought to limit coverage of melees like in Charlottesville, Virginia some observers suspect the Second Civil War may have been born with that 2-day spectacle.  It all started on Friday night, during an unplanned (i.e. not properly scheduled)  torchlight parade,  reminiscent of many conducted by the Nazis in the 1930s. E.g. the scene below capturing a Nazi torch light parade outside Nuremberg in 1938:

In the Friday night  manifestation, the hundreds of far right marchers entered the University of Virginia campus, and set upon a much smaller group of counter protesters who were surrounding a statue of Thomas Jefferson. The Nazi-KKK terrorists beat the latter group with truncheons, poles and sticks leaving several bleeding as the vermin bellowed racist and white supremacist slogans. They also targeted the faces of counter protesting women with their mace cans. All of this to try to demonstrate against the removal of a statue of arch traitor Robert E. Lee.

Were the Right's Nazis, racists and fascists out to emulate their forbears? Without a doubt. If not, why were so many wearing Nazi swastikas and Nazi helmets, gear? As I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog the National Socialism of the Nazis is directly tied to the RIGHT end of the political spectrum and the displays on Friday, Saturday further prove it.

Just before 11am Saturday, a formation of about 200 white supremacists were briefly halted by protesters before moving towards the south-east gate. One of their number was seen to mace a young woman who approached the group. By the time they made it in, there were well over 500 far-right protesters in the park, with about 1,000 counter-protesters in the street.

This parade was watched over by Virginia state police, police officers, and armed “Three Percent” right extremist militia members, who were dressed in fatigues and openly carrying rifles. One of the strong objections of protestors was the appearance of the latter group, mocking military and genuine law enforcement.

Offering explicitly fascist chants like “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil”, they had been met by counter-protesters seeking to prevent their entrance to the park. Some counter-protesters, including many marching under red and black antifascist (Antifa) banners, sought to block the streets. This led to altercations with far-right groups, who were seen using chemical weapons, sticks and shields on their opponents.

Indeed, throughout Saturday morning -  leading up to the clearing of Emancipation Park -  massed contingents from neo-Confederate and neofascist groups such as the League of the South,  as well as the National Socialist Movement, had made their way along Market Street towards the park’s entrances.  They were determined to continue their ghastly protest all the while chanting "You will not replace us!"   and "Jews will not replace us!"

Then soon after, real citizens - unable to stomach any more of this hatred and being smacked with shields and sticks - let loose on the racists and fascists.   The latter, however, as is their wont - chose to fight dirty and diabolically with one of their number driving a car straight into a group of people peacefully protesting against them , killing one person (32 year old Heather Heyer)  and injuring 19.  The driver (James Alex Fields Jr.)  reversed out of the devastating scene and drove off, the front end of his car all smashed.

The death was announced in a tweet by the Charlottesville mayor, Mike Signer, who wrote: “I am heartbroken that a life has been lost here. I urge all people of good will – go home.”

The governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe,  earlier declared a state of emergency, even as he deplored the outside terrorists and rabble that had descended on the progressive college town to wreak their racist havoc. Meanwhile, in classic mealy-mouthed, weasel fashion  Trump speaking from Bedminster, New Jersey, condemned the “violence on many sides”,  saying:

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” Trump added that this has been “going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. A long, long time.” 

Neglecting to call out the hate mongers which thereby would have conceded the hate on display had been spiked with his own ascension, as he coddled and played to the memes of  white supremacy, even putting one of this lot (Steve Bannon) into the White House.

A White House spokesperson later amplified slightly  Trump's weasel words, saying: “The president was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter-protesters today.”

Former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, a Trump supporter who was in Charlottesville Saturday, quickly replied. “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists,” he wrote.

Thereby once and for all ripping off the veneer of deceit concerning the malevolent forces that ushered Trump and his cabal into office.  Indeed, dozens of the white nationalists in Charlottesville were wearing red Make America Great Again hats. Asked by a reporter in New Jersey whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, Trump did not respond.  He didn't have to. Obviously he extols and embraces these knuckledraggers and their devotion as much as he does Putin.  As WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin put it on AM JOY yesterday, "Trump has been playing footsie with these White Nationalists all during his campaign."  Ms. Rubin added that Trump "considers them part of his base" so of course he doesn't want to offend them or upset them.

Trump rightly faced criticism for his failure to directly denounce the white supremacist demonstrators.   It was THEIR side after all who carried rifles around posing as a "militia" and their side that drove the car into the crowd. It was their side also that maced innocent protestors who merely called out the racists for what they were: Nazi and KKK vermin. By any proportionate reckoning these vermini were the violent ones wreaking havoc, yet Trump like his rabble followers sought to portray the day's events in terms of false equivalence.

To their credit, more than a few Republicans correctly perceived this and commented. Senator Marco Rubio , for example, tweeted that it was important for Trump to describe the events as a “terror attack by white supremacists”.

Sen. Corey Gardner of our state (CO) also didn't mince words, saying Trump "needed to call evil by its name" adding:

"This is nothing short of domestic terrorism and should be named as such...These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism"

The police declared an unlawful assembly alert and a spokesman for the force said the Virginia national guard “will closely monitor the situation and will be able to rapidly respond and provide additional assistance if needed”.

The car attack came about two hours after state police in riot gear had cleared Emancipation Park, the site of the Robert E Lee statue. (The city’s decision in February to remove the statue drew earlier protests by the “Alt-right” and the Ku Klux Klan.)   The murdering degenerate who was responsible was identified yesterday as 20-year old James Alex Fields Jr.   Incredibly some deluded Reich bloggers  have even insisted (with presumably straight face) Fields was trying to "get away" and save his life!!!  Hey, if he was trying to make an escape he drove in the wrong direction! Also ignored: the car had been weaponized, revved up into a 'muscle car' for the specific purpose of causing harm.

Samantha Bloom, the mother of this terrorist turd, interviewed with clip shown on CNN - first confessed to not knowing anything about her spawn's affiliations or interests.  But later, The Daily Beast reported that Bloom, said she told her son to be “careful” if he chose to join the protests. “[And] if they’re going to rally to make sure he’s doing it peacefully,”   Looks like he didn't take mommy's advice.

Looks like she also never consulted with Fields' high school history teacher, Derek Weimer, who stated Sunday that Fields' was "enamored of the Nazis and infatuated with Adolf Hitler".

One of the Alt-Right speakers, the pro-Nazi  Richard Spencer, bawled that he had been maced on the way into the park and lashed out at police and city authorities. Recall this scumball headed the Alt Right group - the National Policy Institute. He's also been caught  in full throated homage to Nazi ideals and agendas with 'Hail Trump!" (Ger. "Heil Trump!") salutes and "Sieg Heils"  See e.g. this bunch at their recent gathering in D.C. after Trump's rise to power:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/

This maggot had the nerve to bellyache:

“Never in my life have I felt like the government was cracking down on me until today.  We came in peace and we were effectively thrown to the wolves.”

Aw,  BWAAHAHAHA!! Forget the drama of this drama queen, the police chief noted that they did not intervene until they saw cause to do so. Also, these idiots didn't follow the chief's directions for which park entrances to use - thereby coming into direct contact with counter protesters (mainly clergy and UVA students)

Besides,  as one NAACP spokeswoman noted,  the Alt-Right rally wasn't about exercising free speech but fomenting violence and discord in a peaceful, progressive college community.

Even the right-leaning WSJ saw it that way in its editorial  ('The Poison Of Identity Politics', p. A16) today. Noting:

"The particular pathology on display in Virginia was the White Nationalist Movement...They alone are to blame for the violence that occurred when one of their own drove a car into peaceful protestors, killing a young woman and injuring 19.

The Spencer crowd courts publicity and protests and they chose the progressive university town of Charlottesville with malice aforethought.  They used unsubtle Ku Klux Klan symbolism of torches in a Friday night march, and they sought to appear as political martyrs as a way to recruit more alienated young white men."

Who are these "alienated young white men"? According to author J.D. Vance ("Hillbilly Elegy") interviewed on CBS this morning, they are "mostly from well to do middle class families". However, they suffer from at least one major detriment or flaw in their lives: e.g.  can't get along with or form relationships  with women, can't fit in at their jobs, unable to complete an Army tour (like Fields), can't get along socially other than in online rat warrens (reddit, Breitbart, Daily Stormer) where they exchange hate with each other. In many ways their alienation is similar to those disaffected youngsters in Europe and elsewhere that seek meaning in their lives with Isis.

Author Vance insists that we "must not stereotype them as knuckle dragging yokels" but how else portray these losers when they conduct themselves like such?  Military fatigues, helmets, shields and mace cans? Give me a break!  If it walks like a duck, quacks like one and acts like one then it is one.

Spencer, for his part,  vowed his gaggle of outed online scum (as from 'Daily Stormer')  would not back down from protesting against the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee. This is the same arch -traitor whose statue was already removed from Lee Circle in New Orleans several months ago. . Then when Spencer mentioned Mayor Signer by name, the crowd chanted “Jew! Jew! Jew!”

Elsewhere, a group of clergy including Dr Cornel West linked arms at the top of stairs leading to the park in its southeast corner. The Rev Seth Wispelwey, of Sojourners United Church of Christ in Charlottesville, said of the faith-based action: “We’re here to counteract white supremacy, and to let people know that it is a system of evil and a system of sin.”

The biggest trope exploded in the Charlottesville clashes? That the Left is the side "hobbled by identity politics". This canard was given undeserved attention in a long essay  (WSJ Review, p. C1 Aug. 12-13) entitled 'The Liberal Crack-Up' by Mark Lilla  - a "professor of humanities"  and ostensible liberal - at Columbia University.  In it he claimed:

"Liberals have lost the public's confidence by embracing the divisive, zero sum world of identity politics."

Ironically,  the piece came out almost as the Right's tribal nuts were demonstrating identity politics on steroids with their assorted Nazis, KKK racists, Confederates and Alt-Right screwballs wreaking havoc on the U VA campus.  As UVA professor Larry Sabato put it on CNN yesterday "it sickened me to my core".   (Sabato's residence is right near the Jefferson rotunda where the marchers passed by).

If ever there was a manifestation of white trash, pro-Trump identitarian politics it was in what we beheld in Charlottesville, spurred on by Trump. This glorified man-baby swine hybrid provided cover for his hateful spawn by not specifically calling them out, opting instead for the palsied narrative of moral equivalence. Even at that he was unable to straight deliver his message, he had to read it from a paper.

72 years ago the U.S. smashed Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist vermin, so the inquiring,  genuine American citizen is correct to ask why we see their latter day supporters prancing around a Virginia university campus now carrying Nazi flags, e.g.

Even Sen. Orrin Hatch had to tweet that "my brother didn't lose his life fighting Hitler to have to Nazi ideas go unchallenged  at home".    On the positive side, the most gratifying image of all arrived yesterday when a young woman tackled Jason Kessler the rally organizer, who made the mistake of returning to the scene  of his crime:


Meanwhile, in Germany yesterday, a 41-year old American was punched out by a passerby German for giving the Nazi salute. (Germans, unlike too many 'Muricans, don't take kindly to saluting the Fuhrer). The Nazi salute — the right arm straight and angled slightly up, palm down — was used as a greeting and a way of expressing devotion to Adolf Hitler under the Third Reich. Germany outlawed the salute after World War II, along with Holocaust denial and other symbols and signals associated with the Nazis. A conviction can carry a prison sentence of up to three years.

We need new laws like this now in the U.S. of A. to deter our homegrown Nazis from projecting their hate, like they did in Charlottesville.

Will a Second Civil War come out of it? Who knows? But as one panel member (Jennifer Rubin) put in on AM Joy yesterday a.m. it does not bode well if Trump himself is unable to call out white supremacy and domestic terror when it arises - especially as he'd do it in a NY minute if a black person or Muslim had rammed into a crowd with a car. (Note: Trump finally did stop using weasel words today, but it is too little, way  too late. As Mayor Signer put it, he blew a good opportunity to show leadership and instead kowtowed to the haters. Hell, his own daughter Ivanka and Jeff Sessions beat him in naming the culprits).

Whether Charlottesville marks the opening clash in a 2nd Civil War in the end depends on whether ALL  Americans return to their senses after this incident. If it merely emboldens a hard core set of white supremacy Trump supporters (or a lot of others who are invested in Breitbart, and fake news)  then the stage is set for future clashes. These are also likely to get ever more violent, possibly with guns used (guns were toted by the 'Three Percent')  racists in Charlottesville).  Indeed, the "Unite the Right" bunch that was finally forced to leave the campus has vowed to return with larger numbers. Let us hope they don't bring loaded weapons with them.

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/74538/welcome-to-donald-trumps-america

And:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/74539/american-carnage-white-punks-on-parade

And:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/74540/a-national-calamity-in-the-making

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

Larry Sabato's New Book Does NOT Disprove Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination

"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


As I predicted, the conspiracy naysayers will be coming out of the woodwork for this , the 50 th anniversary of the JFK assassination, on Nov. 22, 1963. I already referenced Bob Schieffer's bollocks, and Tom Hanks' upcoming 13 part propaganda series (based on Vince Bugliosi's skewed theories), now we have Prof. Larry Sabato to join them.

Sabato, a University of Virginia Political Science Prof, in his new book, “The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.”   insists that the 1979 House Select Committee (HSCA) Investigation concluding a conspiracy in the assassination "has been blown out of the water" by his own book and investigations.

Sabato bases this fulsome claim on some "new" analysis of the dictabelt  recordings, originally analyzed by a team led by Dr. James E. Barger.  (Acoustics analysts Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, of Queens College, reviewed the data and concluded that "with the probability of 95% or better, there was indeed a shot fired from the grassy knoll'.) Based on his version of the analysis, Sabato claims the microphone on a motorcycle cop’s radio was stuck, so it was believed to capture a full recording from the motorcade. They detected four gunshots on the tape, and according to Sabato, the two "academics" (HSCA original acoustic physicists)  "told the committee that they believed one came from the grassy knoll" — not the Texas School Book Depository. (Note that James E. Barger was not part of an MIT team but part of a private research team denoted BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc.) along with Scott Robinson, Edward Schmidt and Jared Wolf.)

Actually, it wasn't an issue of "belief" nor was it a matter of "estimation" as Sabato claims. The HSCA original team of acoustic physicists (who had vastly more credentials than the  subsequent Ramsey National Academy of Sciences group which featured NO acoustic specialists) in fact methodically matched specific gun impulses in the acoustic record to the evident impacts visible in the Zapruder film, In the course of doing this, they traced the final (4th impulse)  to the head shot - and that it most plausibly originated from the grassy knoll, NOT the Texas Book Depository (but under political pressure, the HSCA, like the Warrenites, lacked the political courage to say so.).  The conclusion of four separate shots then coincides with 4 impacts visible in the Z-film, and the reactions therein. The acoustic impulses were retested in a 2001 investigation ('Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited' ) by D.B. Thomas and published in the Journal Science and Justice., Vol. 41, p. 21, 2001.   The impulses are shown below, with the four highest amplitude peaks associated with rifle muzzle blasts (an association I will justify subsequently):

Thomas treated both the test evidence and actual data from the original date- aware of the same misgivings that Sabato now claims. Thomas' re- test evidence was obtained in August, 1978 when a test shot was fired in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza to provide a fiducial mark for the putative Grassy Knoll shot – such that it could be compared with the impulse record obtained on Nov. 22, 1963 and also how this mark lined up to events recorded on the Zapruder film. Thus, the test evidence (mainly in terms of echoes and echo delay times received via an echogram from a test shot (See Fig. 1) is essentially used to confirm the microphone recording & positions for the shots made on the actual date, by resort to microphones placed at the same (or approximately so) locations.

The hypergeometric p-function was used for differing weighting factor distribution sets, H{M..N, n, i} to assess significance or likelihood of occurrence. It's based on the no. of echo  'windows'  M,  with each spanning 190msec (total time)  at 2msec width per window and n for assigned impulses in the evidence pattern, with 'i' the "coincident impulses" or those matching the original (11/22/63)evidence and the test result. The question was whether a succession of first impulses of given amplitude could be manifesting a signal or was merely random noise. Thomas found that for a given configuration for 2 motorcycles at designated locations, 1 for (GK) shooter location and one for alignment of muzzle blasts with one pair of echoes, the p -value is 0.000012 or about 1 in 100,000 against the null hypothesis, i.e. that the impulses were from random noise. An alternative way to put this is that the odds are 100.000 to 1 in favor of the impulses comprising actual rifle shots.

For the test shot, using Thomas' sonar model and the muzzle velocity for a Norma 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano (which is very doubtful that the GK shooter used), one arrives at a 171 msec time for the shock wave to take the defined path to the microphone, from a distance of 28.3m. One must add the time taken for the putative bullet to travel the distance to the time for the shock wave. In this case: 126 msec + 45 msec. The first parameter is relatively fixed since the distance from bullet to test microphone is fixed at 44.2m and the speed of sound defined for the sonar model was 350 m/s.  The geometry used by Thomas (op. cit.) is shown below:


The second component will alter depending on the muzzle velocity. A German Mauser, with muzzle velocity not much greater than 760 m/s will have its bullet traverse the 28.3 m distance in 37 msec, so that the time will now be: 126 msec + 37 msec or 163 msec, which is some 8 msec shorter. If the rifle used is now a Remington Fireball with muzzle velocity 825 m/s then the total time becomes: t1 + t2 = 126 msec + 34 msec = 160 msec, or 3 msec shorter still.

In the “analytically determined” schema (e.g. actual data obtained on 11/22/63), all the above values change slightly. For example, the distance to Kennedy (from the GK shooter) becomes 30.5 m, and the speed of sound is 342 m/s given the air temperature was 18  C (64.4 F)  at the time of the assassination. The distance from the (GK) assassin to the nearest motorcycle was 67 m leading to the muzzle blast arriving at the motorcycle some Delta t = [67m/ 342 m/s] = 196 msec, after the shot. When air resistance is corrected for by + 11.5% (from the shooter location) the muzzle velocity resulting becomes 748 m/s (using a starting assumed bullet speed of 672 m/s). Because of a shooter “location uncertainty” of +/- 1.5 m (A<-> A') the muzzle velocity uncertainty is at least +/- 32m/s, so one is left with a range of: 748 +/- 32 m/s. Assuming Thomas’ parameters are correct, then this excludes a Remington Fireball as a possible candidate weapon, but it does permit either a German Mauser or a .30-30 Winchester.

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The bottom line is that Thomas' investigation soundly reconfirmed the original acoustic tests and that the kill shot came from the grassy knoll.   Note, however, as I stated earlier, this diverged from the HSCA conclusion that the shot came from the rear (Texas School Book Depository). Many investigators (e.g. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation) have complained bitterly about this tomfoolery, and that the HSCA didn't want to diverge too much from the WC.  But in examining the actual autopsy photos it's clear the HSCA conclusion of a rear shot is absurd, no matter who said what on what panel (i.e. Clark Panel).  A mere examination of the bogus Warren autopsy photo (below left) and the real one sets the record straight, and exposes the HSCA's own brand of cowardice: you simply cannot physically have the rear of a skull blown out by a rear shot! Rather the linear momentum of a bullet fired from the FRONT will blow out the rear of a skull!


For reference, the Warren Commissioners used (NOT as an exhibit!)  the fake photo without a blown out rear skull, to try to make people believe the shot came from behind, i.e. the Texas School Book Depository. The HSCA - rather than accepting the evidence of the actual autopsy photos, opted to stick with the earlier ones from the WC, and hence arrived at a contradictory conclusion to the evidence. 

Note also, the actual rear shot hit Kennedy in the middle of the upper back. (Bullet hole in suit coat to prove it, but the suit coat was destroyed). It thus seems the HSCA was trying to "square the circle" by finding for conspiracy on the one hand yet unwilling to diverge from the Warrenites' misbegotten fake evidence for the head shot on the other!  (See also my FAQ, Part 8, on the HSCA Investigation and how it was co-opted by the CIA, once G. Robert Blakey succeeded the original chairman, R. Sprague.)

What D.B. Thomas did then, was to rectify the disparity with his own investigation and trace the head shot correctly to where the HSCA ought to have tracked it, had they the courage to do so. (Which, if they'd done this, would also have eliminated Oswald as the killer, since he'd been claimed to have been at the TBSD not the grassy knoll.)

This despite Sabato's claim that: "The long-hoped-for Rosetta Stone of the Kennedy assassination is nothing of the sort. And the much-publicized conclusion of proven conspiracy … was deeply flawed and demonstrably wrong.”

 Actually, the conclusion was not "deeply flawed" or "demonstrably wrong" - but rather those descriptions are more aptly relevant to the pretenders, incompetents and obfuscators who attempted to apply flawed methods in the wake of the original acoustic tests. That includes the NAS team of Dr. Norman Ramsey, which never made its data generally available, and none of whom were even acoustic experts - as the original team had been. Indeed, as per an email from another acoustic researcher, W. Antony Marsh, the Ramsey team even exceeded the claimed errors of the original  team and at a more fundamental level. Thomas himself pointed out their claimed use of a Poisson distribution - which wasn't that at all. And deliberately choosing absurd, unphysical  H{M..N, n, i} sets (for the hypergeometric p-function)  to try to make their conclusion conform to the null hypothesis of random noise.

One example, was counting two distinct echoes as "coincident" - thereby immediately altering the p-value. In this sense, the most venerable principles of good faith scientific testing were violated.  Many researchers, obviously, have wondered about the real purpose of a government-based team, given the government is four square behind the Warren Commission conclusion. (Not surprising, given the government has likely orchestrated the ensuing cover up from the get go with its politically -based Warren farce. After all, why destroy key evidence like JFK's suit coat, as well as have the limo disassembled, if they had nothing to hide? Why plant fake Secret Service agents in Dealey with fake IDs (commission books), to throw people off?)

Let me now address the issue of the nature or signature of the impulses shown in Fig. 1. Are they "noise", motorcycle backfires, or actual rifle shots?  The clue is the steepness of the 4 highest peaks which the original MIT physicists associated with gun shot impulses. The technical term is that each  impulse conforms to a Dirac delta function (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function   ). The point is such extreme profiles would not be confused with any white noise, distant motorcycles or backfires or the like.  It is precisely the timing spaces between these four major impulses in the acoustic record which led the MIT physicists to conclude gun shots  - FOUR in all- and then tie them chronologically to the action in the Zapruder film - leading to four shots fired (the upper back shot - from behind, the missed shot near James Tague, the shot wounding Connally in the wrist, and the head shot). The imprint for the missed (Tague) shot is shown below:

Lastly, for what it's worth, I reiterate Harrison Livingstone's remark that "only an idiot" would accept or believe that the truth or falsity of conspiracy rests exclusively on the acoustic record. ('Killing Kennedy and the Hoax of the Century, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1995  )

There is simply too much supplemental supporting evidence, i.e. including from the ballistics, the additional films taken that day, e.g. Nix film, and the actual autopsy photos, as well as skull radiographs and the negative  test results from the purported Oswald weapon by a team of sharpshooters appointed by the Warren Commission. Not to mention the inordinately improbable deaths of  witnesses, see e.g.      http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/a-probability-analysis-of-witness-deaths-within-one-year-of-the-jfk-assassination/

At least Sabato is honest by admitting: “It is beyond question that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission in 1964 and then again to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.”

Though he doesn't register Agent Regis Blahut's attempted destruction of the autopsy photos in the HSCA investigation, reported by Gaeton Fonzi (The Last Investigation)

Also, he has admitted (on politico.com) that:

“a conspiracy of some sort … cannot be dismissed out of hand.” But adding that Oswald was:

“at least one of” Kennedy’s assassins. Just because the tape could not prove a conspiracy, does not mean there was not someone on the grassy knoll."

Which is consistent with H. Livingstone's point.

However, nearly all serious researchers dispute that Lee Oswald had any role at all in the hit. More than likely he'd been set up as the patsy to allow the actual perps to escape, by telling him he'd be the one to help expose the plot. But, by the time the head shot had transpired, he knew he'd been played, and he was the decoy - soon to be nailed.  Author James Douglass  (JFK and the Unspeakable) conjectures Lee became the patsy after he likely called the Chicago FBI to expose the earlier (Nov. 2nd) plot that nailed Thomas Arthur Vallee.

Stay tuned.  There's more 'Whack-a-mole' to come!