Some Posts Remembering Rev. Martin Luther King

A sampling of current and past blog posts remembering the Rev. Martin Luther King:

Peace & Justice

Honestly Reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of White Lies

Excerpt:

The ubiquitous white lies of our times obfuscate the depth and meaning of King’s message. The annual tradition of sharing favorite MLK quotes, which enters into full swing during the celebration of his birthday, is so fashionable that everyone but the most extreme racists will participate, and even many of them will too. Donald Trump’s racist career does not preclude his participation. His defenders throughout the GOP have cynically done so as well. 

Back in 2011, then-House majority whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA 23^rd) posted this to mark MLK Day:

Today we celebrate the life and work of a great man who has left his imprint on our nation and this world for generations to come: Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us to love one another, accept each other, celebrate our differences, and remember that which brings us together – we are all God's children and we are all charged with making this world a better place. Dr. King dedicated his life to this effort, and as we honor his memory, we must ensure that we too are always striving to make a difference.

That was then; now McCarthy and virtually all elected Republicans support Trump no matter how egregious his racialized statements and policies, e.g., calling refugees fleeing war zones “animals” and urging crowds to tell elected representatives who are people of color to go back to their countries of origin (all but one of them born in the US, but let’s not let the facts get in the way of a great racist chant). Send them back! Send them back! Um, sure, like Detroit, the Bronx, Chicago—the places three of them were born? 

The Poor People’s Campaign is still struggling to find ways to alleviate the conditions of poverty—everywhere. The US enters into “free trade agreements” promising to help people, but the deals tend to increase poverty on both sides. NAFTA, for example, has left persistent poverty and increased unemployment in Mexico, and reduced wages while costing 100,000-700,000 jobs in the US
. The agreements work well for elite owners, not so much for millions of workers.

FBI, King and the Tremors of History

Excerpt:

And then there was his stand against the Vietnam war: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increased in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

These words, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, a year to the day before his assassination, drove LBJ nuts. Who did King think he was? He got his civil rights legislation! Now here he was, opposing America’s noble war."

Social Justice and Activism

r. King’s Radical Revolution Of Values

Excerpt:

Some politicians who invoke Dr. King this holiday will try to reduce his memory to an emoji they can paste onto their platitudes. But Dr. King was a troublemaker, in the best sense of the word. He knew what it meant to create tension, and discomfort, and disharmony.

While he lived, Dr. King was the target of almost unimaginable hatred and condemnation. It rained down on him from the streets of Southern towns and the corridors of FBI headquarters, from the boardrooms of bus companies and the booths of Boston diners.

Dr. King preached communication, but experienced excommunication – from that cozy world of ‘insiders’ who may argue but will never risk their lives or careers for higher ideals.

The Conspiracy to Assassinate Martin Luther King ... - Brane Space

brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-conspiracy-to-assassinate-martin.html

Excerpt:

William F. Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book) arrived on learning that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

In the preceding, Pepper observes that:

"Martin King was killed because he had become intolerable.  It was not just that he opposed the war and was going to the bottom line of a number of the major corporations of the United States, those forces that essentially rule the world at this point in time - the transnational entities. But more importantly, I think the reason is because he was going to bring a mass of people to Washington in the spring of '68 and that was very troubling. "

Yes, LBJ Ordered The Hit On Rev. Martin Luther King ... - Brane Space

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/04/beyon-any-reasonable-doubt-lbj-ordered.html

Excerpt:

This "James Earl Ray did it"  twaddle could be accepted - more or less - up until  the Jan. 1998 Baltimore Sun revelations which referenced the U.S. Army's admission that its intelligence agents had monitored the public appearances of Rev. King in Memphis.  These disclosures then could be seen to dovetail with earlier revelations (from William Pepper's 1995 book, Orders to Kill)  that an Alpha 184 unit had been in Memphis and the purpose was not at all benign. They were to serve as backup to a hired contract killer (via New Orleans' crime boss, Carlos Marcello) - but more on this later. For the moment readers can refer to the image of the attached orders issued to the 20th AFG Alpha 184 team members.  Let me note before moving on, that such orders could not have come from any old government lackey or official, not even J. Edgar Hoover or then Attorney General, Ramsey Clark.  No, they could only have come from the top dog himself, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

For those who've been involved in deep politics research, and especially got their "baptism" with the Kennedy assassination, it's abundantly clear the lone nut assassin in the King case is another  cover story. In fact, all the evidence - including from LBJ's role in the Kennedy assassination - masterminding the plan from Big D-   we know he is the one who also engineered the King assassination. And why not? He'd already gotten away with the first assassination via the cover fraud "investigation" known as the Warren Commission, which even  54 years later has gullible twits buying it lock, stock, and barrel. Emboldened by that, why not take down Rev. King too - who'd become a gadfly over the Vietnam War?
The incredulity of too many in the face of these facts traces to how King has mainly been erected as a civil rights totem in the last 50 years. This hyper emphasis has minimized his fierce pacifism - especially against the Vietnam War- which brought him into direct conflict with Johnson.  An April, 1998 Baltimore Sun piece by Colman McCarthy  ('A Fierce Advocate of Pacifism') summarized how King had been turned into a one-dimensional Milquetoast by the media:

"All the textbooks, for sure, carry excerpts from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. After three decades of being sentimentalized into an historical relic mummified by the formaldehyde of nostalgia, King has been marginalized in ways never thought possible while he was around to defend himself."

McCarthy, like Pepper, cites the powerful moral voice against Johnson's war - and yes, it was his war, given he signed the original NSAM (273) formalizing it, and then confected the Tonkin Gulf incident to justify a massive troop commitment. (Again for more on the backstory of LBJ's  NSAM 273 check out this link:

http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM273.html )

Brane Space: Why Rachel Maddow Is Wrong on James Earl Ray

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/09/why-rachel-maddow-is-wrong-on-james.html

Excerpt:

No less an esteemed author than James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable')  has held all of us to account for not seeing that all the 1960s assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X) were interconnected and done by the National Security State. Also, each one, according to Douglass, made the next one easier because we all became susceptible to the anti-conspiracy mindset and thereby enmeshed in the media's lies that "one lone nut" was involved each time. Hence, to the extent we gave the media apparatchiks a pass we became accomplices and parties to the "unspeakable" - a term first coined by Thomas Merton meaning incomprehensible evil. Douglass' implication was that the Deep State factored into each assassination and it required deep politics to get beyond the hand waving, and BS stories confabulated by media - most of which was infected by national security trolls (please Google "Operation Mockingbird'.) It was the responsibility of each of us to rip the veneer of lies and deceptions away and probe the document base to the truth.


In an earlier blog post (March 8, 2014), I noted that deep politics is usually too much for network commentators (including the so-called "liberals" on MSNBC) to handle.  In a way this is understandable because  many Americans, as I've often observed, are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics (the dark underbelly that surface politics barely touches)  which is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". Thus, network sensitivities will be oriented toward not pissing off that Middle Mind too much, or forcing it too far from its comfort  zone and belief system.

Maddow, while a sometime incisive narrator, often blows it on key issues. For example, numerous times in 2013-14 one beheld Maddow avoiding like the plague Obama's chained CPI proposal for cutting Social Security. She didn't wish to "go there" because she didn't want to be seen as an Obama basher.  Then there were other Maddow shows  - specifically segments on guns- where she kept the false narrative going that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed John F. Kennedy e.g.   http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/rachel-maddow-again-lies-about-lee.html
By hewing to the "Oswald did it" faction of the Middle Mind, she chose to play it safe in her narrative, rather than risk being called a "conspiracy theorist" or tin foil hat wearer. But by doing so she showed: a) she didn't truly grasp the lying nature of the deep state to use cover stories and b) preferred to bamboozle her audience rather than inform them.

Why Rachel Maddow Is Wrong on James Earl Ray - Alleged Assassin of Martin Luther King

"Rachel may be smart, but she needs an editor to keep her from repeating each notion five times before she ever quite gets to the point, and she could also lose that cutesy bullshit she does about mixing cocktails and other nonsense designed to make her seem hip to her coeval."
- Jaime O'Neill, writing on the liberal pretensions of MSNBC

No less an esteemed author than James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable')  has held all of us to account for not seeing that all the 1960s assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X) were interconnected and done by the National Security State. Also, each one, according to Douglass, made the next one easier because we all became susceptible to the anti-conspiracy mindset and thereby enmeshed in the media's lies that "one lone nut" was involved each time. Hence, to the extent we gave the media apparatchiks a pass we became accomplices and parties to the "unspeakable" - a term first coined by Thomas Merton meaning incomprehensible evil. Douglass' implication was that the Deep State factored into each assassination and it required deep politics to get beyond the hand waving, and BS stories confabulated by media - most of which was infected by national security trolls (please Google "Operation Mockingbird'.) It was the responsibility of each of us to rip the veneer of lies and deceptions away and probe the document base to the truth.


In an earlier blog post (March 8, 2014), I noted that deep politics is usually too much for network commentators (including the so-called "liberals" on MSNBC) to handle.  In a way this is understandable because  many Americans, as I've often observed, are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics (the dark underbelly that surface politics barely touches)  which is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". Thus, network sensitivities will be oriented toward not pissing off that Middle Mind too much, or forcing it too far from its comfort  zone and belief system.

Maddow, while a sometime incisive narrator, often blows it on key issues. For example, numerous times in 2013-14 one beheld Maddow avoiding like the plague Obama's chained CPI proposal for cutting Social Security. She didn't wish to "go there" because she didn't want to be seen as an Obama basher.  Then there were other Maddow shows  - specifically segments on guns- where she kept the false narrative going that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed John F. Kennedy e.g.   http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/rachel-maddow-again-lies-about-lee.html

By hewing to the "Oswald did it" faction of the Middle Mind, she chose to play it safe in her narrative, rather than risk being called a "conspiracy theorist" or tin foil hat wearer. But by doing so she showed: a) she didn't truly grasp the lying nature of the deep state to use cover stories and b) preferred to bamboozle her audience rather than inform them.

In two earlier episodes of her show this year, around the time of the Confederate flag brouhaha, she interjected Jack Kershaw, supposedly one of the lawyers for alleged Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray. She then presented - to emphasize her point Kershaw was a racist (and by extension his client - hence the assassin with a motive) graphic images of a garish and ghoulish statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the Ku Klux Klan). Maddow's intent was clear:

Jack Kershaw was a brazen racist who idolized the founder of the KKK

James Earl Ray originally hired Kershaw as his lawyer.

Ergo, James Earl Ray had to be guilty of killing King - for racist motives.


However, as with Lee Oswald, Maddow is also in the dark on Kershaw's shady background and how he actually played Ray. As reported in Wikipedia:

"Kershaw convinced Ray to take a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy. The magazine said that the test results showed "that Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone." Ray fired Kershaw after discovering that the attorney had been paid $11,000 by the magazine in exchange for the interview and hired Mark Lane".

Playboy, in fact, did not have the expertise (at least its designated interviewer) to make that determination  and in any case it was conducted inappropriately without Ray or a genuine lawyer present for counsel - as opposed to an exploitative bloodsucker.

Kershaw's racism and role is also what a former black FBI agent (Donald Wilson) would have called a "red herring" as it had nothing to do with the actual case. Wilson, let us recall, was the agent who discovered James Earl Ray's abandoned white Mustang a week after King's killing -in an Atlanta parking lot. Inside the car he also discovered a set of papers, one of which had the name "Raul" written on it, and on another paper the phone number of the Atlanta FBI office.  Wilson withheld the papers and ten years later resigned from the Bureau ('The Assassinations', p. 479). In 1997, he copied portions of the uncovered papers and delivered them to the King family.

According to Wilson (p. 491, op. cit.):

"In my opinion King's assassination was not a black-white issue. It had nothing to do with racism.  The stories you read about whether Ray was or wasn't a racist are immaterial. That's a red herring. King wanted to redistribute the wealth of this country. That was a big turnaround for him. Now that got the attention of the shadow government people. A decision was made, he had to be eliminated"

Factoring into King's campaign for economic equity was his campaign against the Vietnam War which put him into Johnson's sights.  Johnson, ultimate architect of the war (via his National Security Action Memorandum 273 - then concocting the Tonkin Gulf pretext), could not have Martin Luther King 'crossing' him on Vietnam and fomenting protests against his policies. He also regarded it as 'backstabbing' after giving (grudging) support to King's Civil Rights program.

Further, Jack Kershaw was only one of dozens of Ray lawyers, and the more important counsel for him was William F. Pepper. It was he who finally brought the case  before a court- 32 years after King's murder- that "extended the responsibility for the assassination beyond the scapegoat James Early Ray to the United States government" according to James Douglass (Op. cit., 'The King Conspiracy in Memphis', p. 497)

Pepper, author of Orders to Kill, in a speech he gave on Feb. 4, 2003,  noted that what incepted his investigation into the King killing was an article  by journalist Steve Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.  It dealt with the infiltration of the civil rights movement and black leaders by U.S. military intelligence.

The article showed that what transpired in the 50s, and 60s was a continuation of what had seized the American security state zeitgeist since the Russian Revolution. That is, that blacks were regarded as the prime candidates for being recruited as communists because they had the most motivation for revolution against the imperious white -controlling state.  Hoover suspected Rev. King was in this category as well, and used that to justify hounding him.

Pepper noted that "one paragraph" in particular caught his eye. It noted that on the day of Rev. King's  assassination there was in place a Special Forces Alpha 184 team, and no one understood at the time why this 6-man  sniper unit was present in Memphis. Pepper then approached Tompkins, observing this introduced a whole other dimension to the case - which was now not nearly as closed as the media would have had us believe.

Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book) arrived on learning that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

In the preceding, Pepper observes that:

"Martin King was killed because he had become intolerable.  It was not just that he opposed the war and was going to the bottom line of a number of the major corporations of the United States, those forces that essentially rule the world at this point in time - the transnational entities. But more importantly, I think the reason is because he was going to bring a mass of people to Washington in the spring of '68 and that was very troubling.

The military knew that once he started out bringing the wretched of America to camp out in the shadow of the Washington Memorial - and go every day to see their Senators and Congressmen - to try to get social program monies put back that were taken out because of the war- and they got rebuffed again and again they'd become increasingly angry. It was the assessment of the Army that he would lose control of that group."

Pepper goes on to indicate that had the event spiraled out of control there would not have been enough troops available to quell the violent (they suspected) results. Hence, taking out King removed the threat of instability.

My additional take is that LBJ wanted King's voice silenced once and for all. He'd gotten too much attention on the Vietnam issue, and it undermined LBJ's "great legacy" - having already taken control of all of Kennedy's ideas and programs and pushed them through. Let's also bear in mind the Army itself would have done nothing without the go ahead from the "commander- in-chief".

Sadly, all Maddow's good work (such as her documentary, 'Why We Did It' on the shady origin of the Iraq war) is overshadowed and undermined by her reluctance to delve into the deep politics of our history. Because without that deep politics understanding, including that Oswald was a pawn used by the national security state to gain power, her work echoes a shallow grasp of the political dynamics at work and the hidden forces subverting those dynamics, i.e. buried within the 'Deep state', see e.g. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-c-koehler/54637/outing-the-deep-state


This is perhaps the most deceitful deep politics abuse of all, given the deep state and in particularly its national security operatives,  were responsible for carrying it out. The  cover-up of the facts by nominal liberals like Maddow.  is  perhaps understandable given that LBJ was the plausible architect of the hit, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/lbj-was-reluctant-warrior-it-doesnt.html

And Libs, desperate for would-be "canonized" heroes, are often prepared to latch on to anyone - given all the columns and pages Ronnie Raygun has managed to suck up. But LBJ,  given his venomous background in TX, is absolutely the wrong choice for any exaltation.

That he would extend his treachery to eliminating Martin Luther King. Jr. for his anti-Vietnam War and economics crusade, is therefore not beyond the pale.

Scott Aaronson: In Over His Head on JFK Assassination (Part Two - Rebutting His 20 Reasons for 'Oswald Dunnit')

I now examine Scott Aaronson's "20 Reasons" to assert Lee Oswald was the lone gunman in the JFK assassination, based on what he calls "general principles" but which I call out as slacker principles: do as little as possible- avoid any details, attend to the worst possible "investigators" (Gerald Posner), and in general let ignorance trump facts at every turn.  Basically, Aaronson brings to bear a smug laziness that he'd never use if he wanted to publish a paper, say in the Physical Review (one of its fine journals).  He does this because he treats JFK assassination research akin to a kiddie hobby or pastime.


1.   Conspiracy theorizing represents a known bug in the human nervous system. Given that, I think our prior should be overwhelmingly against anything that even looks like a conspiracy theory".

This is not a reason but an assertion, that needs to be proven, demonstrated. Aaronson really ought to know better than to trot such bollocks out for public consumption, as if he's even an expert in the human nervous system.  Where has this been published? (He puts out a link to a cartoon -as if any intelligent person would accept that)  In what peer-reviewed journal of neurobiology?  Further, the fact this is psycho-babble is patently clear by the fact he puts all possible conspiracy  examples under the same umbrella - from faked lunar landings to Joe Klein's example (in the recent TIME - see Part I) of the feds buying up ammo to raise the prices so gun owners can't afford it - to the JFK assassination. In this way, he demeans the event and insults the people who've done serious research including Peter Dale Scott, James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable'), Mark Lane and many others. In this way he actually insults the memory of the 35th President.

2. The shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby created the perfect conditions for conspiracy theorizing to fester. 

In fact, the shooting of Oswald showed most of us at the time, who had the intellect to see it, that whoever was in charge of the assassination made sure the one person who might shed light wouldn't live to say anything. Only much later (30 + years) did the file release from the JFK Records Act confirm out worst fears - that Ruby was commissioned to kill Oswald as part of ZR/Rifle and Staff D, the super secret assassination program run under spook William Harvey- assisted by James Jesus Angleton.  See e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-second-assassination-today-fifty.html

"Fester"? Well, yeah - the Operation Mockingbird disinformationists in the media had festered for years allowing the anti-conspiracy memes to spread far and wide! (Yet Aaronson doesn't seem to have even heard of Mockingbird). It wasn't until actual documents could finally be released (LBJ had originally sealed them until 2039)  under the 1992 JFK Records Act that headway could be made.

3. Other high-profile assassinations to which we might compare this one—for example, those of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Yitzchak Rabin…—appear to have been the work of “lone nuts,” or at most “conspiracies” of small numbers of lowlifes.  So why not this one?

Because the EVIDENCE doesn't indicate it! Moreover, the evidence is now compelling that Martin Luther King was also assassinated in a conspiracy, as well as Robert Kennedy.

In the case of the King assassination, the breakthrough came with William F. Pepper's book Orders to Kill,  Pepper learned  that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave on the subject 12 years ago:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

The mechanics and basis  of the conspiracy for Robert Kennedy's assassination and using Sirhan B. Sirhan as another patsy was superbly described in Patrick Nolan's book,  CIA Rogues Killing Kennedys (Chapter 7 - 'Sirhan Bishara Sirhan - An Involuntary Pawn'.) Nolan's breakthrough came via released files and also managing to find security personnel at the Ambassador Hotel at the time and interviewing them. This also conforms with James Douglass' take (op. cit.) that all three were killed as part of the same extended plot masterminded by the national security apparatus.

The meme that all conspiracies are lone nut done is also stupid. For hundred of years - from the time of the Borgias - assassinations have occurred in Europe and few Europeans -whether German, Swiss or Italian, buy the codswallop they were done by lone nuts. As Rolf, a former Spezialdienst in Switzerland put it while we were in St. Gallen:  "Believing lone assassins were responsible for all the assassinations in Europe is to us like a child believing a single man - St. Nicholas- could deliver all presents around the world in a single night before Christmas. It's stupid!"

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/germans-tom-hanks-wasting-his-time-with.html

Further point: Aaronson attempts to show that Clay Shaw, the subject of the Jim Garrison case, was innocent and his reputation was slandered by conspiracy freaks. He is totally wrong. Years later, with release of files under the JFK Records Act, it would become evident that Shaw was indeed a CIA Contract Agent. As CIA Doc. (JFK 1993: 6.28.16.07.26.560280) notes (Why couldn't Aaronson obtain this?) :

"A memorandum marked for files says that J. Monroe Sullivan, #280201, was granted a covert security  approval as of 10 December 1962 so he could be used in Project QKENCHANT [Clay L. Shaw has #402897]"

Under the CIA  banner QKENCHANT one is cleared for intelligence procurement. Such clearance meant you were a safe contact  for the Agency and hence could be used as a "cut out" , with the CIA giving you only a certain amount of information. Clay Shaw then, had the ability to recruit other agents, thereby granting them security approvals. From the available files disclosed long after Garrison's efforts ended, Shaw used his QKENCHANT clearance to "plan or coordinate CIA activities" as well as "initiate relationships with non-Agency persons or institutions." In this guise, Shaw was effectively part of the CIA's clandestine services with Covert Security Approval, working under cover. 

Again, why didn't Aaronson try to obtain the file instead of shooting from the hip with a red herring? The answer - as with his other questions - is he wasn't prepared to do the grunt work! It's easy to spin off nonsense from one's keyboard and not bother with niggling details!

4. Oswald seems to have perfectly fit the profile of a psychopathic killer (see, for example, Case Closed by Gerald Posner).

Citation of Posner's idiocy is one of the first markers the serious researcher uses to confirm a person writing about the assassination is on the wrong track. Assorted investigators have been able to  assess just how closely Posner adhered to the known facts in his book. One of the earliest scrutinizing efforts was The Posner Report- A Study in Propaganda: One Hundred Errors in Gerald Posner’s Case Closed – Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by David Starks. Starks draws on the published reports and documents of true experts like Peter Dale Scott, Dr. Gary Aguilar and Martin Shackelford. The Report skewers Posner’s claims and effectively discloses a hack who made “hundreds of errors” in his pell-mell rush to judgment- likely part of the mandate first elucidated in CIA document 1035-960 * (which I doubt Aaronson even knows about).

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

http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm

Those who take the time to examine, study the examples in the link will become aware of an unnerving lack of attention to detail and a penchant for what appears to be deliberate misrepresentation. Indeed, Posner’s entire case appears to be erected on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations, gross distortions and shoddy methodology

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

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

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

And further:

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

Not surprisingly, many ordinary researchers as well as professionals (e.g. Harold Weisberg) contend Posner is likely a disinformation hack, possibly for the CIA, and perhaps even part of its notorious “Operation Mockingbird” propaganda machine which infected the U.S. Media from the 1970s.

More to Come!

* CIA Document 1035-960

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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