What Is Tim Brennan's Main Problem? (Ans. He's Uneducated On the Kennedy Assassination)

Tim Brennan, for those who may have forgotten, is an irritating,  self-appointed critic of JFK assassination conspiracy "buffs" - who fancies himself qualified to remark on others' works - though he's never written even a pamphlet or comic of his own. In an earlier blog post, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/05/educating-australian-bloke-on-basic.html

I attempted to educate him regarding his ignorant claim that the WC rifle tests were a success and showed Oswald was the shooter from the Texas School Book Depository. This was after he delivered his inane post in Google groups, including a reference to the WC exhibit and claiming to indicate where the shots hit.  He then let loose with a digital yelp:

 "X marks the spot where SENIOR OIC member Mark Lane lied! Stop the LIES! Oswald INSIDE!! Disband the OIC!!! "

But, his focus was so intent on sliming Mark Lane he evidently omitted the 15- odd other authors, including Edward Jay Epstein ('The Assassination Chronicles', 1966) who also exposed the rifle tests as a sham (pp. 148-150). Epstein, like me, noted the Army specialists were allowed to fire at  stationary targets (unlike Oswald), and also  that the rifle sights were altered for increased accuracy that Oswald never had. In terms of the altered sights, etc. no- the test did not succeed.  Hell, if Tim had the slightest ambition he also could have availed himself of the key volume:  Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1964: Vol. II,  to learn the details of the test trials, how set up and why Epstein, me and others concluded they failed to prove Oswald  fired the weapon. He could have even exerted himself to obtain other trials that confirmed the WC test failure, e.g.

Oswald 'had no time to fire all Kennedy bullets' - Telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/.../Oswald-had-no-time-to-fire-all-Kennedy-bullets.ht...

In reference to Brennan's 'X marks the spot' baloney I pointedly noted:

"What we behold is a boxlike mold in separate scenes,  with presumed projections of "hits" but no indications of exactly where the hits struck in terms of cranial morphology.  (Rendering the 'X' more like a cartoon joke that seeks to confer credibility where none exists.) It's all of the same deceptive piece as the fake FPCC handbills Newman exposed, the fake autopsy photo (though not a formal exhibit - the WC's top guiding honcho (LBJ)  did authorize its creation at Bethesda), the fake Oswald rifle exhibit, and the CE399 fake.  Close inspection of the images in the exhibit frames shows nothing of any value or anything specific in terms of  relating shot precision to the exact anatomical positions in the absurdly configured  "head". We have a word for such bollocks - it's called a "Macguffin".

Brennan was also smarting after I pulled a "rope a dope" on him to entice him to actually show up and post on my blog. I used the ruse of claiming the autopsy photos were actual exhibits, which they were not, as I noted in the comments section.  I knew I'd elicit a reaction that he'd yelp "You're no expert!" and even had to try to educate him (and others) again, observing:

"In fact, no such exhibits existed because Gerald Ford determined it would be too horrific for any of the Commission members to see them - or to make them public as exhibits. They found their way to RFK who retained them at the Dept. of Justice then they were transferred to the National Archives. They finally did emerge with the HSCA investigation in 1978.

More on the backstory can be found in this youtube interview:

http://www.actionnewsjax.com/videos/news/why-the-warren-commission-never-saw-jfk-autopsy/vCNPy9/

I then - having lured him to the blog - asked him point blank:

"So no, there were no "numbers" for these photos because they didn't exist at the time as exhibits. The question that remains for you is why the false image was used and circulated by WC groupies and not the image showing the rear of JFK's head blown out? "

But rather than be man enough to come back and address the question put to him, he evidently went whimpering like a sniveling wimp to 'Narkive'.  There, he blabbed "Hi all!" then whined that I was a "self proclaimed expert" on the assassination. But one does not invest 35 years in research on the event, then write a comprehensive, 624 page book (which it is evident Tim has never read) to become a "self-proclaimed" expert. No, the book  - the published work - discloses the expertise, including my analysis of the acoustics and the fractional calculus-based  tests I used to show the Oswald rifle photos were fakes, e.g.


http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/analysis-of-pixel-diffusion-in-oswald.html

Did Brennan respond to the manifested expertise? No, he chose to render his grievance-filled comments on Narkive, disguised as an attempted lampoon of my wife's quite reasonable (and justifiable) book review. . In other words he confirms he's a weak-minded, clueless dolt, compounded when he claims (despite never having read my book) that I registered the autopsy photos as actual WC exhibits - which  I never did. What I wrote is the same as what I wrote in the earlier link,

"The reference to "used in Warren Commission" then, doesn't  mean as any official exhibit - but as a dummy mold or 'model'  from which the 2D fictional head shot drawing was rendered.  The critical aspect being the phony basis for a rear shot as opposed to a frontal shot.(The fake construction was done before the WC sketch was made part of the WC exhibits)"  ....This false image did conform with the drawing fiction of how the WC believed the head shot ought to have occurred, e.g. http://jfkassassination.net/russ/infojfk/jfk1/1p255f68.jpg


So clearly, Tim can't even read a blog post properly, far less a full 600+ page work on the assassination.

Stymied by his own futility re: JFK assassination issues, Timmy in his pathetic plea for  Narkive attention resorts to desperation.  He  dredges up a single book review my wife did on a 6 -year old limited edition book, Dialectical Atheism.  He perhaps invoked this to try for some kind of humorous irony or whatever - but falls flat on his  forlorn, Aussie dupe face.

The book itself was only intended for a very limited market of mainly younger atheists or those who'd recently come on board to atheism, who wanted to be able to argue for it in assorted forums, or in letters to editors. Given the expected relevant readership was only 100-150 there would not logically have been an adequate pool with the competency to do a proper review of the book. In addition, the book spanned a history of encounters with theists - including clergy, my own brother Mike ("Pastor Mike") and online religionists spanning 4 decades, for which encounters only my wife was consistently a part of - hence possessed the knowledge of what transpired.  In other words, no other reviewer would have been able to do justice to the content.  And isn't that one wants in a reviewer, as opposed to an ignorant, semi-educated twit or poppet out to do a hit job?

Thus, why not have the most intelligent, competent person one knows  to do a review of a difficult, limited circulation book?  Brennan chafes about the 5 star rating, but I can show him as many 5 star ratings for books on Amazon that are pure crap - including McAdams' recent effort about "logic" and the Kennedy assassination.  Besides, IF Brennan despised the "nepotistic" 5 star review that much he could have written a neutralizing review of his own for "1 star" (if he believed it deserved such).  But that would have necessitated getting off his Aussie ass and writing something more than a crybaby whimper on Narkive -  though I doubt he'd be able to read my book any more than any other on the Kennedy assassination, say Dr. Charles Crenshaw's 'Conspiracy of Silence',e.g.

http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Conspiracy_Of_Silence.pdf

Timmy, alas, has exhausted his bag of tricks and has nowhere else to go but down. He's confirmed he's another sniping, semi-educated puppet who has no business offering comments on works he hasn't read and likely wouldn't understand if he did.  In that vein, perhaps it is best he stick with the  Warren Commission Fables.

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

Mail Brane Blog: Readers Seeking Answers to Questions

I was very interested in your blog post on Josh Fox's Gasland II and how your wife found it too intense to keep watching (on to Part 2).  But I still find it incredible that these fracking interests and state security folks would put citizens onto terrorist rolls. Do you really believe that, or is Fox exaggerating for effect?  -  Alicia, Louisville, KY

A. I don't think Fox is exaggerating at all. As a person involved in deep politics I am well aware of the extent of the existing spy-surveillance state and how it networks (through fusion centers) throughout the country.  I also noted (June 19th) on the COG or 'continuity of government' program, and the recent discovery that a representative for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation told a group of concerned citizens that "complaining about water quality could be considered an act of terrorism,”.  (See: http://www.alternet.org/environment/tennessee-official-says-complaining-about-water-quality-could-be-considered-act)

Make no mistake the same rubric was adopted to harass and persecute Occupy protestors two years ago. Idealistic kids merely trying to exercise their supposed 1st amendment rights, but actually put in the sights of sniper rifles, e.g. in Houston. So no, it's not a stretch to accept that now all domestic protests are to be considered "terror",  ever since the Bushies' expanded such adaptations to COG  which haven't been altered. And to reinforce that, you might also wish to read William Rivers Pitt's recent blog:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/50167/you-terrorist

I am interested if you ever found out for sure if you contracted the corona virus in Europe? Were any tests ever done to confirm it? -  Ramone, Pacifica, CA

A. No tests were ever done, because as I noted in the blog post I had no intention of seeing a doc. However, about two weeks after the post went up the symptoms vanished entirely and I was back to my usual jogging-walking exercise routine 3-4 times a week.  So what I suspect is that I'd actually caught a bad (cold) virus that might have been exacerbated because of a depressed immune system (this brought on by the long, sleepless plane flight home). If it was the worst (MERS) form of the corona virus I doubt the symptoms would have ended with no other effects. Of course, I could be wrong and you are right that only a test would confirm it, or negate it.


I enjoyed your posts about Germany, especially the one about Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the one on how the Germans you met dissed Tom Hanks' upcoming HBO series. I have two questions here: 1) Is Hanks really considering still going through with it, after all the buzz? and 2) Why do you suppose the National Archives refuses to release the records on George Joannides the CIA guy who tried to set up Oswald? - Murray, in Enid, OK

A.  Hanks definitely plans to go ahead, from all accounts I've heard. But he's also wise to try and stay under the radar until the immediate premier because he likely knows how it will be skewered by those in the serious research community. This is why there really isn't that much "buzz" - except on a few blogs like mine, which let's face it - don't have the audience of Politico, Daily Kos or Buzzfeed.  Maybe very soon they will catch wind of what Hanks is up to and scrutinize him and his self-professed reasons for doing it. (Which I still believe make for sophisticated brainwashing)

As to why the National Archives refuses to release the Joannides' files, it's fairly obvious: if the government was involved at any level in the assassination - and it's pretty clear it was - then they'd surely want to suppress anything that would impugn guilt or association. This also serves another purpose: keeping the process of ambiguation ongoing. That is, by not releasing anything definitive most people (not in the research loop) are kept guessing and their doubts keep growing: 'Hmmmm....maybe I'm wrong and Oswald is guilty after all!'. Indeed, recent polls now show only 59% reject the Warren Report compared to 73% a few years earlier. Ambiguation works because most people, average citizens, aren't confident enough of their sources or their own research to stand with a position and so flow or blow whichever way the last pundit heard or seen on the tube blows.

Look for the 'Oswald did it' reactionaries (including embedded CIA and NSA assets)  to pump up the volume of their PR- disinfo cant as we approach Nov. 2nd  this year, since it's the 50 th anniversary. The astute reader, however, can obtain a number of excellent antidotes for his brain, mental health by obtaining books such as James Douglass' 'JFK and the Unspeakable' and the new book, Dallas 1963 (available by Oct.) which shows what a nasty, reactionary place Dallas was ca. 1963 and why it wasn't Oswald that put up those ten thousand or more "Wanted for Treason" posters.  I am also planning to have my scifi novel, The Lancer Expedition, out at least by early October, and will keep readers informed.



After all your posts on fracking, I am really REALLY worried about it! I've seen Gasland II but is there any book you can recommend that is worth reading?- Cary B., Tampa, FL

A. I would say it's Robert Heinberg's Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Endangers Our Future.  Recall Heinberg is the author of The Party's Over, which warned of the imminent approach of Peak Oil (and the consequences - which we're seeing all over now) years before it happened. Thus, I'd actually advise getting both books because to me, they represent a continuity of argument. Peak Oil transpired when the easiest available, high EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) oil bottomed out, now we're forced to put up millions of natural gas and shale oil frack wells to make up for it. Most people don't even know that the natural gas taken from all the wells marring the countryside isn't even for American use, it's dispatched overseas to places like China where the market price for natural gas is much higher than in the U.S.


You've written a lot on the NSA mass spying stuff. What is your opinion of the Bradley Manning verdict and what do you think will become of Snowden?- Albert H., Detroit


A. Personally, I believe the Manning verdict (20 odd "espionage" charges) was nonsense,  but the judge did get one thing right: tossing out that idiotic "aiding the enemy" charge. As Chris Hayes' explained last night ('All In With Chris Hayes'), had THAT stood, we'd all(using the internet) be in a bad situation, because anything we ever wrote, say in a blog,  complaining about the country, how it does things, its aggressive military empire, the killing of JFK in a coup d'etat, the inequality, the Wall Street vultures, and infrastructure decline - found later on an al Qaeda laptop- could have us condemned for "aiding the enemy". It is total horse manure and based on the egregious use of the 1917 Espionage Act, in the era where the U.S. first began to get neurotic about "Reds". This was after the Russian Revolution, and the resident capitalists in the U.S. had just begun to get paranoid about "Reds" or anarchists, especially making complaints about U.S. entry into WWI.

It is incredible that Obama, a constitutional scholar and former prof, would even remotely consider resorting to this draconian measure to try to stifle speech and let's admit it - letting the people know what their gov't is doing in their name in these misbegotten "wars".   I have to believe, as I wrote earlier e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/one-blog-every-citizen-needs-to-see.html, that Obama is so fearful of the shadow players who really run things, that he feels he has no alternative. After all, what happened to JFK 50 years ago still conveys a terrifying message to any sitting president not to rock the boat. JFK did, in multiple ways, and he paid dearly.

My other problem with the "justice" thrown at Manning is that it ignores the true traitors (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Gee Dumbya etc)  who got us into an illegal war in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands, as well as condoning the practice of torture on dozens of people - violating the Geneva conventions. WHY let those bastards go while you pile on to Manning, who merely exposed war crimes? Hell, the man did us all a favor showing how low the militarists will go to preserve their war -spy state. But such is the nature of "law" and "justice" now in this nation that the traitors escape it and the patriots get prosecuted. It's nuts! NO wonder 44% of the American population is certifiably mentally ill!

As for Edward Snowden, another TRUE patriot, as opposed to the state terrorists who try to claim the label, I believe he will ultimately get asylum in Russia and live there. I certainly don't believe he'd be dumb enough to turn himself in despite those ridiculous promises not to torture or kill him. And the Russians will make no deals unless they can get something out of it, like some of their own (e.g. Viktor Bont)  returned. Quid pro quo.


I just read a book, How We Survived Prostate Cancer,  by Victoria Hallerman, which was depressing as she related the horrible after effects of the brachytherapy radiation treatment her husband received and how he totally lost his sex drive. Is this book really serious? How does it compare to your experience?  - Abby W., Des Moines, IA

A.  Hallerman's book was written before  high dose rate brachy  (using the "IPSA" contouring procedures) became available. Hence, the method she described was still based on the actual implantation of radioactive iodine seeds into the prostate which of course, wrought havoc on the poor guy having it done - ok, many of them. Such was the case with her husband, for whom the burning at urination was so bad he apparently screamed aloud in agony - even when using urinals in restaurants.  Well, when you place 100 odd seeds into the prostate this is what can happen.

In my own case, I received one high dose (1920 CGy) which was geared to a specific region and which targeting could be done superbly because of the IPSA (inverse planning) contouring program (that avoided bladder, rectum) which had been perfected at the Univ. of California at San Francisco Helen Diller Cancer Center, see e.g.

http://radonc.ucsf.edu/research_group/jpouliot/pages/ipsa/ipsa_hdr.htm

 The bottom line is that the method her husband received and that I received is like comparing chalk and cheese. My total treatment (administered by the hDR afterloader) lasted barely 20 minutes, though granted the prostate implantation surgery lasted about an hour. But the worst effects I had - burning urination, frequent bowel movements- were gone within 2 weeks. His lasted months. Bear in mind Hallerman's husband also had to go on a regimen of hormone therapy to try to reduce the size of his prostate from 95 grams to about half - so the seed implantation could be done properly. The hormone treatment itself is what apparently stole his sex drive, as it would any male's.

Questions to Ask John Brennan(I): About Those JFK Files

The arch-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, harbored in Miami for a number of years. We need to know also his role in the CIA-engineered bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 off Barbados in October, 1976.


As former Assistant CIA Director John Brennan gets set to be grilled in his now (CIA Director) confirmation hearings, some questions need to come front and center. I will deal with several of the main ones in this and a subsequent blog. I believe this is crucial because Brennan was Assistant  CIA Director when the Bushie torturers were running amuck and the stage was being set to create even more terrorists with drone strikes that often took out civilians, women, kids. Never mind Obama’s often saying “we need to put this behind us” – the moral tenor of a genuinely moral nation demands accountability and responsibility.  If we ignore that, or let it pass out of expediency, we're no better than the Third Reich.


So let me begin with question 1: If confirmed, are YOU going to release the remaining JFK assassination files – especially the ones on George Joannides which would show conclusively how Lee Oswald was being played as a patsy?

This is especially germane now, as the news has come forth (Jan. 13, in assorted AP releases to dozens of papers) that two of Robert F. Kennedy’s offspring, Rory and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. related to Charlie Rose in an interview (conducted at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas) that their dad never bought into the Warren Commission Report. According to Robert Kennedy Jr., his father thought “the Warren Commission which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was a ‘shoddy piece of craftsmanship” and he added that he too questioned the report.

Well, I mean, seriously – WHO wouldn’t? 200 material witnesses never called to testify, including: the reporter who found the alleged sniper’s nest, the woman who saw Officer J.D. Tippitt shot and by a heavy set short man – not Oswald, a soldier who felt the air percussion of a bullet whiz by as he stood with his camera on the grassy knoll, and at least five witnesses, including an Air Force officer – that observed an Oswald double.

Then we have the added poppycock of a supposed bullet making seven wounds in two men and emerging pristine or nearly so, on a Parkland Hospital stretcher. Then we had the spectacle of a bullet-pocked limo being disassembled and dispatched to Ohio and the brain disappearing between Parkland in Dallas, and Bethesda. Add to that an alleged assassin's rifle (6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano) which had to be substituted for to try to replicate the alleged shots in WC trials, since the purported original had shims out of whack in azimuth - so couldn't hit the broad side of a barn! How many coincidences have to occur before people are given credit for some basic common sense?

So, no, the Warren Commission was never set up as a “government commission” but as LBJ’s creature, to enable his full oversight-control and to provide an expedient political resolution by which assorted covert players and special interests could all wipe their paws clean. The nation, and especially the power brokers, could then  move on without getting into messy conspiracies, made especially easy after Oswald was shot and killed.

In the aftermath, those of us in deep politics also were aware that because Bobby never bought into the Warren hogswill, he sought independent outlets to do their own research. Through contacts assisted by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, he met with French Intelligence who provided their own report that later emerged in 1968 as the book ‘Farewell America’ written under the pseudonym of’ James Hepburn’. Readers can access the book here: http://www.jfk-online.com/farewell00.html


After Bobby was himself assassinated in June 1968, CIA and other black ops sought to tar the book and its basis, as they have done the past 45 odd years with all other rigorous works disclosing conspiracy.

This is why getting hands on the CIA's  Joannides files is so very important, especially in this 50th anniversary year. We’ve waited too long as it is and the American people deserve the truth concerning what was effectively a coup d’etat which saw the takeover of the U..S. and its executive branch by a massive Military Industrial complex and national security state.

Those of us in the research community also know that most of the "Oswald-Castro did it" tricks emerged at the time George Johannides was the Chief of Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami . Almost all his energy was directed to: a) implicating Oswald in the assassination by a strategy of "sheepdipping" (see John Newman's excellent 'Oswald and the CIA') and b) processing disinformation from pseudo -double agents and deliberate false sources to implicate Castro, the Soviets, Oswald or all three.

The entire effort was to set up assorted straw men to take the eyes off the real culprits, and most of us believe the CIA was a key player – certainly in the subsequent cover up and disinformation campaign. One of the most recent disinfo efforts incarnated in Brian Latell’s book: 'Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine'. It bears the veneer of some new insider info, but in fact is merely another in a long line of CIA DISINFO, churned out over the years, and supported by CIA assets and networks to try to convince the American people there was no conspiracy in the JFK assassination and Lee Oswald was the lone gunman.

We also know some enclaves of the entertainment industry are part of the disinformation process, as confirmed by the plan to televise a 13 -part HBO series later this year (produced by Tom Hanks) that will attempt to bolster Vince Bugliosi's obsessive hack baloney in his 1600+ page "Rewriting History' that Oswald acted alone. Has Hanks had CIA assistance, (as well as Bugliosi’s) in creating his 13- part bull pockey? We don’t know, but what we DO know is that the CIA had agents seeded in the news media for decades, putatively acting as “journalists” (actually as anti-conspiracy 'gate-keepers'), and documented by Kathryn Olmstead in her book Challenging the Secret Government (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996)

In the midst of all this BS all we ask is that Brennan, if and when he becomes Director, release those files!
Brennan’s answers are also important given the National Archives basically told JFK Assassination researchers to go take a long walk on a short pier, (see e.g. http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/national-archives-to-jfk-file-seekers.htmlafters) seeking specific records mandated for release.

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. Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, writing a book about the impact of JFK’s assassination on American politics, remarked after the National Archives(June, 2012) refusal to release files this year :

“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.”

Hence, the main question we need at least one spined Senator to put to Brennan.

A second ancillary question is whether Brennan plans to release the files concerning the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in October, 1976 off Barbados’ SW coast. All other existing files, including from Venezuelan intelligence, point to CIA involvement and featuring hired anti-Castro thugs from Alpha 66 – a notorious Miami bunch that has worked in league with the CIA for decades . According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Alpha 66 creator Orlando Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.


The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said. Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it, or that the same Cuban renegades whose associates (from the Bay of Pigs invasion)  conspired in the JFK hit were part of it. The CIA Report went on to read:


“"Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

Note in the preceding the sanitizing of the language, the use of "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language". Warren Hinckle and William Turner note in their excellent book, ‘Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK’ (p. 384, Thunders Mouth Press, 1992) go on to note that:

“Two men who had deplaned in Barbados, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano, were interrogated after joking about the bombing in a Barbados taxicab. The two were employed by Luis Posada…and confessed that Posada and (Orlando) Bosch had supplied them with two bombs, which they planted on the Cubana aircraft.”

The authors added  that “the CIA hand in the terrorist destruction of the Cubana airliner materialized two weeks later” when a CIA double agent named Ignacio Rodriguez-Mena blew the whistle on them, evidently enraged as he might have been on the flight except his wife was late arriving at the departure terminal. Interestingly, Rodriguez -Mena was also the person former CIA spook Latell tried to implicate as sending a hidden signal to off Kennedy, back in 1963.  Kennedy's own words in a Nov. 18, 1963 Miami speech:  "the small band of conspirators" was to be the "green light" for a 'go'. Retrospective vendetta? Who knows?  

But researcher James Douglass has exposed this subterfuge in his book ( JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters , p. 251:

“The CIA, by reversing the meaning of Kennedy's speech to motivate its own hired assassin, created a dogma of disinformation that it would disseminate for decades.....that the Miami speech was meant as an encouragement for murder, not dialogue".

THIS is why we need answers, otherwise we will continue to inhabit a fool's paradise where the elites spout bromides about "freedom" but the national security interests can do whatever....whenever.

For a solid account of the Cubana Airliner bombing (including a video) and why no one should ever believe squat on what the CIA or its lackeys has to say about Castro being involved in the JFK assassination, go to:

http://morallowground.com/2012/10/06/on-this-day-1976-the-bombing-of-cubana-airlines-flight-455/