Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: CONSPIRACY

  • Laurene Jobs and The Atlantic Go All In

    Laurene Jobs and The Atlantic Go All In

    If CNN and MSNBC can disseminate obvious propaganda and not be held accountable, as they did for three years during the “Russia did it hoax,” then who cares anymore? Facts? Evidence? Logic? Why did we have to go to the Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and The Nation’s Aaron Mate on Russia Gate to discern that it was a mirage. (Click here for details)

    For instance, it was recently revealed through the declassification of depositions before the House intelligence committee that, in February of 2017, the Clinton campaign raised money to further the Russia Gate meme after Trump was inaugurated. (John Podesta deposition pp. 8-9, 12/4/2017) Hillary Clinton is still dodging Tulsi Gabbard’s process servers in Gabbard’s ongoing $50 million-dollar defamation lawsuit in which she is suing Clinton for calling her a “Russian asset” during the primaries. And when a man in a Wisconsin town hall meeting called Joe Biden out for his son’s questionable Ukrainian sinecure—put in place while Biden was still Vice President under Obama—Biden ignored the question and instead challenged the man to a push-up contest, to rising cheers from the audience.

    Deceptions usually trickle downward and must necessarily be both enabled and promulgated by the corporate gatekeepers masquerading as journalists for the pseudo-intellectual class of Whole Foods liberals who cannot seem to internalize their own party’s bankruptcy.

    These are the folks who with a straight face will preach tolerance and inclusion in flurries of inane Facebook “debates” and on online forums, but will attack anyone who doesn’t tow their ideological line when hard-pressed to engage in real debate. These are some of the people who all but put a scarlet letter on a woman in a New York City grocery store this week who didn’t feel like wearing a mask as she bought vegetables. I was all but physically attacked at a Chicago bar a few years ago when I told a drunk patron I didn’t think Russia “hacked the election.” Nothing serious: a few words exchanged, a shove, a few more words exchanged, a nice woman beside me made uncomfortable, etc. But I almost had to fight a fellow taxpaying citizen on U.S. soil outside of a Chicago bar thirty years after the Cold War ended, because I did not believe the “Russia Gate” probe was authentic or impartial.

    Where do Americans get these ideas? Well, some of them get these ideas from places like The Atlantic Monthly. Even the usually reliable and objective James Fallows pushed this Russia Gate meme for The Atlantic. (The Atlantic Monthly, July of 2018, “Trump-Putin Meeting: How Will Republicans React?”) That journal began way back in 1857 over the issue of slavery. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier outflanked the nascent Republican Party. They would brook no compromise with the south. They were abolitionists. James Russell Lowell, the illustrious poet and critic, was the first editor.

    It’s quite a long haul—and fall—from that auspicious beginning to David Bradley and the late Michael Kelly. Beginning in the eighties, Bradley made his fortune as a healthcare consultant. In the nineties, he sold two companies and became a multimillionaire. In 1999, he bought The Atlantic Monthly and made Kelly the editor. Bradley calls himself a political centrist. Michael Kelly was a strong supporter of the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq. In fact, as an embedded reporter, he passed away in that war. Prior to that, as editor of The New Republic, he not only accepted the largely fabricated stories of his contributor Stephen Glass, he defended Glass without investigating the stories. That investigatory job fell to his successor Charles Lane. Under Lane, The New Republic then uncovered a whole slew of stories Glass had made up, either in whole or in part. Glass even manufactured evidence to backstop his fabrications. The new editor had to issue an apology and listed the titles of all the stories Glass had created in whole or in part. Incredibly, Kelly was still defending Glass even after he admitted his chicanery. (Gawker, 4/03/2013, story by Tom Scocca)

    Kelly also mocked those who did not accept the pretexts for the Bush invasion of Iraq. In fact, Kelly tried to make the case that Bush’s war should be accepted by liberals. (Jewish World Review, 10/23/2002, “Anti-War effort Perverts Liberal Values”). He also allied himself with Neocon kingpin Daniel Pipes to create the fusion paranoia theory. This was a true milestone in a war of political and psychological denial by the Power Elite.

    Back in 1995, Kelly wrote an essay for The New Yorker entitled “The Road to Paranoia”. That article was then used by Pipes in his 1999 book Conspiracy. In fact, Pipes spent all of Chapter 8 addressing this idea. He used the following quote by Kelly as a blast off point:

    Views that have long been shared by both the far right and the far left…in recent years have come together in a weird meeting of the minds to become one, and to permeate the mainstream of American politics and popular culture. You could call it fusion paranoia.

    Kelly focused on the Militia of Montana and, specifically, the chief researcher and spokesman for that group, a man named Bob Fletcher. Fletcher postulated a global conspiracy theory that was something of a forerunner to QAnon. What Kelly was driving at was how left and right had beliefs in certain conspiracies. Pipes then adapted it in its broad outlines. This was dubious on its face, for more than one reason. But to give one example, Pipes drew similarities between how the modern militia movement and the Weather Underground viewed the FBI. Kelly’s above quoted tenet, that these ideas now permeated the mainstream, seems quite strained. The MSM and the political establishment do what they can to ridicule these concepts and to marginalize their advocates; never differentiating between which are true, and, therefore, deserve inspection and which are false and should be ignored.

    This is an important point, because it was this kind of automatic disdain that paved the way for one of the most lethal conspiracies in contemporary history. That was, of course, the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney plot to create an arsenal of WMD in Iraq. It included the stamping out of any dissenters, like the late diplomat Joseph Wilson. What was amazing was how much of the MSM got behind a clearly fabricated mythology, which included not just the above personages, but also people like Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. (Click here for details) And Kelly bought into this, with a vengeance. If the reader can believe it, ever since his death, The Atlantic Monthly sponsors an annual Michael Kelly award in journalism. An award named after a journalist who bought the lying Stephen Glass and also the myths about WMD which ended up killing 600,000 people.

    In July of 2017, Bradley sold the controlling interest in The Atlantic Monthly to something called the Emerson Collective. A nice sounding name which is actually run by multi-billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs. Jobs is on the advisory committee to the Council on Foreign Relations and has given loads of money to people like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. (Click here for details)

    Right after this, The Atlantic Monthly printed a cover story by radio host and author Kurt Anderson. It was titled “How America Went Haywire”. That essay—an excerpt from an upcoming book—maintained that Donald Trump’s arrival as president was caused because of America’s belief in conspiracy theories. And this dated from—drumroll please—the JFK assassination! (For a review of that article, click here).

    Anderson managed to do something many historians would think impossible. He tried to draw an arc of American decline without describing the effects of 1.) The Vietnam War or 2.) The Church Committee. Here, the old joke applies: Well, Mrs. Lincoln besides your husband’s assassination, did you like the play? The Living Room War went on for ten years in all its ugliness and sickened much of America with its pointless carnage. The Church Committee explored the myriad crimes of the CIA and FBI: the plots to drive Martin Luther King to take his own life, to exterminate the Black Panthers, and the conspiracies to murder Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro—and those were just some of the highlights. But those two huge events deepened the cynicism of many Americans in what their government was doing and why. And it was all true. Anderson and The Atlantic Monthly decided to ignore those facts.

    One of the things the Church Committee did was delve into the CIA’s attempt to control the media. This was Director Allen Dulles’ scheme termed Operation Mockingbird. It was inspired by Dulles’s reaction in Bern, Switzerland to viewing how the Third Reich controlled the media in Nazi Germany, which, in turn, Joseph Goebbels modeled in part on the ideas of public relations wizard Edward Bernays. Bernays began as a journalist and then helped the Woodrow Wilson administration propagandize America into entering World War I. In 1928, Bernays published his classic work on the subject called simply Propaganda. It was one of the first books to use the phrase “invisible government.” Bernays thought these techniques were not just good but necessary. He later used them to attain riches through Madison Avenue type advertising for huge corporations including cigarette companies. This was while he was trying to break his wife’s smoking habit. (Click here for some information on Bernays)

    As most of us know, one of the things the CIA did was to try and control the media criticism of the Warren Commission. In 1967, the Agency issued a memorandum titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report”. CIA planners clearly state that “the aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.” (CIA 1035-960, “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” NARA Record Number: 104-10404-10376) Thus was born Kurt Anderson’s knee-jerk meme, “conspiracy theorist” in the American imagination. Prior to this, that term had been used quite rarely. As author Lance DeHaven Smith has shown, after this the term broke through the stratosphere to become a meaningless catch all term. The CIA memo stresses the importance of a full-spectrum approach to countering criticism and maintaining the official story. They deem it essential to “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics,” claiming, “book reviews and feature articles are particularly useful for this purpose.” (Ibid) After then explaining to the dispatch’s readers how best to disseminate information to the agency’s embedded Mockingbird assets in the U.S. media, the document lists the five most effective ways to combat critics of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald shot president Kennedy because he was a crazy Marxist lone nut: “Our play should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, ( ii ) politically interested, ( iii ) financially interested, ( iv) hasty and inaccurate in their research, ( v ) infatuated with their own theories.”

    And now the Anderson Gang is back again. The Atlantic Monthly recently ran a piece entitled “The Conspiracy Theorists are Winning” on May 13. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief, “America is losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.” We’d like to address both claims, since The Atlantic Monthly is now apparently running counter-intelligence on the questioning masses.

    First of all, we’d like to thank Mr. Goldberg for the admission, finally, that we’ve won. It’s probably the greatest single admission by the mainstream media we’ve ever seen. After years and years of toiling, of gnashing of teeth, of cries in the wilderness, of evidence, of testimonies, of unredacted documents released through FOIA requests, of Congressional hearings, of whistle blowers speaking out, of declassified memos, of declassified archives, we, the independent research community, have finally won.

    But that’s not really what Goldberg is saying.

    You see, conspiracies don’t exist according to the editor in chief of The Atlantic Monthly. And the only thing worse, according to his latest missive are “theories” about conspiracies. Goldberg implies that everything that has ever entered the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Congressional Record, or the text books in history classrooms from the time of the founding of the United States is a 100% accurate, unexpurgated, unredacted representation of the thousands and thousands of incalculable factors that comprise any major historical event as it happened in real time. To say that conspiracy theories do not exist is, in essence, to say that it is wrongheaded to write that people like Bernays paved the way for the acceptance of the American public to go along with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war in 1917. Are people also wrong who say that President Johnson was planning on declaring war in Vietnam months before he actually did so? When Adam Weishaupt founded the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776, whose entire mission statement was to conspire against entrenched European power structures in secret, he was, according to the legal meaning of acting in concert with others, engaged in a conspiracy. As any criminal lawyer will tell you, if you had the Justice Department, and all state Attorney Generals and all local DA’s order all prison inmates incarcerated on conspiracy charges immediately released you would greatly reduce the prison population of the USA.

    What is a “theory”? Well, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, one definition of a theory is “a hypothesis assumed for the sake of argument or investigation.” Some theories become “the official story,” if they tow the party line at the time of their release. Others become the pejorative “conspiracy theories,” if they, at all, challenge the dominant power structure of their times. We are allowed to admit that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a provocation in 2020, because the Vietnam War, who’s selling to the public was largely based on this lie and the unfolding “official story” narrative, is long over and is now, at best, considered a monumental mistake. Or, it can be safely referenced as a type of political crime that somehow had a benign intent to it.

    If you question anything, in essence, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, you are also “destroying the enlightenment virtues upon which America was founded”. That’s funny. Co-author Michael LeFlem wrote his Master’s degree thesis on the 18th-century Enlightenment under a world authority of that subject, Professor Darrin McMahon, at Florida State University. Tell Dr. McMahon that questioning political realities is “against Enlightenment values.” He might refer you to his excellent book, Enemies of the Enlightenment.

    Donald Trump did not win the election of 2016 because American culture went berserk with conspiracy theories. Nor did he win because of Mr. Putin’s manipulations in America; that idea has been pretty much discredited. In fact, with the revelations of the Michael Flynn case, it has been discredited with an air of finality. Without the complicity of the MSM, through the lens of carrying propaganda, the case against Flynn probably would have fallen apart even sooner. On and on they droned about Russia. But as of late May, there is mounting evidence that Russia Gate was a power play to somehow cover up the failure of the Democratic National Committee to run a fair primary campaign and also the failures at the management level of the Clinton candidacy. In other words, it was those “centrist” Democrats, like Mr. Bradley and Ms. Jobs, camouflaging their tracks.

    If we’re going to be honest, we need to face these inconvenient truths instead of ducking behind our safe-spaces of like-minded propaganda. It does us no good to try and conceal what has happened to the Democratic Party behind a smoke screen of “pernicious conspiracy thinking,” which has now become part and parcel of the Democratic party’s legacy.

    The Atlantic Monthly is part of that oligarchical problem. Let us admit it and Move On.

    Written by Michael LeFlem with consultation and contributions from Jim DiEugenio.

  • Vince Foster, JFK and the Rise of Chris Ruddy

    Vince Foster, JFK and the Rise of Chris Ruddy

    One of the most nauseating characteristics of the New Right is its hypocrisy. For instance, the GOP has historically been the party of sound money and banking. Yet, in their devotion to supply-side/trickle-down economics, it was their party which ran up the national debt to heights no Democrat ever dreamed of doing. And it was a Republican administration which oversaw the worst banking/real estate crisis and economic downturn since 1929. Another example: for all of their pontificating about religion and family values, most of the GOP evangelist preachers endorse a president who had to pay off two former girlfriends to keep quiet during his election campaign.

    Which brings us to the subject of this article. On December 17th, a week before Christmas, a man named Paul F. deLespinasse wrote an article for the conservative website Newsmax. It was titled: “Conspiracy Theories Merit Only Undivided Suspicion”. Mr. deLespinasse began by saying that such theories are meant to confuse the public, “often for political purposes.” As most conservative shills do, he tried to belittle this kind of thinking with a ludicrous example. He said that Nicholas II of Russia faked his overthrow and ruled from the back room. Obviously, he concedes, he made that up out of whole cloth. But the author said since it made sense to his students, he went on and “concocted new conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.” He goes on to mention two truly ridiculous ones about the JFK case. The first was that Joe Kennedy wanted to have Jackie killed so she would not divorce his son while in office. So the father hired Lee Oswald, but Oswald missed. He then writes, well maybe JFK learned that his medical problems would kill him within months. Therefore he staged his own assassination to become a martyr in order to increase the chance his brothers would follow him into office. (In both of these examples, it is still Oswald as the killer.)

    As was his intention, the author then goes on to ridicule any and all other kinds of alternate ways of thinking about certain momentous events: the 9-11 attacks, Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the idea that America never went to the moon. Note the way he has deliberately mixed in events of genuine interest and scholarship with those that amount to piffling: JFK and the moon landings, for instance. Consequently, he concludes that the best way to remain of sound mind is just to ignore “conspiracy theories and regard their propagators as probable cranks.” Which, of course, is what the Power Elite would like the general public to think, so they can continue on their rampage, killing whatever hopes we have of recovering our democratic processes.

    The reason I mention this piece of claptrap is because it was run in Newsmax. For anyone who knows something about that business entity, the irony of the posting of this article is too rich to be ignored. It underscores the hypocrisy I just pointed out. How so? Because the CEO and founder of Newsmax is Chris Ruddy. And Newsmax would not exist if not for Ruddy’s propagation of one of the wildest and most rudderless conspiracy theories of recent decades––namely, that Vince Foster was murdered by sinister forces employed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Why would the Clintons murder their close friend and legal colleague? Well, for any number of reasons. These would include that he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton or he was about to give away the secrets of the Whitewater scandal to Congress. But since there were no secrets to that manufactured scandal, then it must have been the first reason. Even though there was no credible evidence of that either. Note that deLespinasse did not mention the Foster case in his long listing, probably because he was aware that it was Ruddy’s hand that was feeding him.

    II

    Vince Foster was a legal and political colleague of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas. He worked with her there at the Rose Law Firm. By all accounts, he was an effective and successful lawyer. After the 1992 presidential election, the Clintons invited Foster to move to Washington and work for the Clinton administration. He did so, and this turned out to be a serious mistake on his part. Foster was a sensitive soul who was not cut out for what author James Stewart later termed the “blood sport” of Washington DC during the Clinton years.

    It is important to recall an ignored historical milestone at this point. Late in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans had managed to achieve one of their longtime goals. They negated the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time provisions of FCC law. This was quickly followed by ABC moving Rush Limbaugh from Sacramento to New York and channeling him nationwide. Rupert Murdoch had now become an American citizen. His purchase of Metromedia TV and a share of 20th Century Fox around this time would be the kernel that would launch Fox TV. In other words, what David Brock termed “The Republican Noise Machine”—a huge propaganda network––was now in place, well-positioned to amplify and aggrandize the so-called Clinton Scandals.

    The first two out of the box were the Travel Office affair and the Whitewater real estate imbroglio. Foster worked as Deputy White House counsel. He was involved in the first, and tangentially in the second––which was even more of a pseudo-scandal than the first. Foster was also involved in vetting candidates for positions in the administration; for example, the Nannygate episode over the nomination of Zoe Baird for attorney general. Because of the controversy over these instances, in June and July of 1993 Foster came under political attack in the Wall Street Journal. By several different accounts, Foster was now suffering from depression and anxiety over these attacks. (Dan Moldea, A Washington Tragedy, pp. 203-12). His sister recommended he see a psychiatrist, and he called one to set up an appointment. In the meantime, his personal doctor gave him prescriptions for anti-depressants. Foster was so distraught that he thought of leaving Washington and going back to Little Rock. But he felt that this would be admitting defeat. (Moldea, p. 215). On July 20, 1993 Foster shot himself at Fort Marcy Park in Virginia with a handgun given to him by his father many years previous.

    The first investigation of his death was submitted by the U.S. Park Police on August 10, 1993. The police had been supplemented by the FBI and Justice Department. Relying on that investigation and the medical examiner’s findings, they concluded that Foster had taken his own life. But now something absolutely remarkable began to occur. And for this author, it was the first manifestation of the awesome power of the advancing rightwing media.

    To fully understand the spectacle, worthy of the Roman Colosseum, that was about to be unleashed on the national stage, one needs to outline the metamorphosis that the Republican Party had undergone. To do that, one must delve into a brief––but appropriate––historical synopsis.

    III

    Prior to the election of 1960, the two leaders of the Republican Party had been Senator Robert Taft and President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1952, those two had fought a close and bitter battle all the way to the convention for the Republican nomination for president. It was only through a questionable ploy at the convention that Eisenhower managed to win the nomination.

    There are two points that should be drawn about these men in order to understand the subject at hand. First, Taft was a non-interventionist in foreign policy, to the extent that he was opposed to American involvement in World War II, the Nuremburg Trials and the formation of NATO. Second, Eisenhower more than once said that he was not about to repeal FDR’s New Deal. When Eisenhower left office after eight years, the income tax rate was 91 per cent for the highest income earners.

    One last point needs to be made in order to delineate the dichotomy that was to come. Around this time—early to middle sixties––there was actually a moderate wing to the Republican Party. People like Senator Mark Hatfield, Governor George Romney, Senator Charles Percy, Senator Jacob Javits, Governor Raymond Shafer, Senator Charles Mathias, Governor William Scranton, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Congressman Pete McCloskey, these and others constituted a minority, but an influential one, within the GOP. As many have noted, what began to alter the Republican Party, and eventually made its moderate wing extinct, was the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. That nomination brought to the forefront the extreme rightwing elements of the party—the John Birch Society types—who declared war on the moderate elements in the party. Although the Goldwater forces lost, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead in the GOP. Senator Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was against the high taxation rate, and felt President Johnson was soft on communism. He became the first Republican nominee to consciously run on a Southern Strategy, one which was designed to break up the Democratic majority in the south by employing racist symbology. That strategy, plus the fact that Goldwater was from Arizona, began to rebuild the Republican party on a Southern/Western axis.

    This included California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan made a last-minute televised appeal for Goldwater in 1964. And that appeal first put him on the national political map. At that time, the highest political office Reagan had attained was president of the Screen Actors Guild.

    It was not just Reagan who supported Goldwater; it was also William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s Young Americans For Freedom supplied the shock troops for the Goldwater campaign. Goldwater was trounced, but Buckley and Reagan now started to pull the Republican party to the far right. In a blatant effort to exterminate them, Buckley began to defame and run against those from the moderate wing of the party: for instance, Charles Goodell and John Lindsay. The very threat of a Reagan run in 1976 provoked President Gerald Ford to perform the Halloween Massacre. That panic-stricken move, for all intents and purposes empowered the neoconservative movement and triggered the rise of Dick Cheney.

    Once Reagan won the White House in 1980, he began to meet with representatives of the Religious Right in order to incorporate them into the GOP. But as writers like Sidney Blumenthal have noted, this was really a kind of flirtation that never made it to the altar. Reagan never gave people like Jerry Falwell what they really wanted, things like prayer in school or a bill banning abortion. But allowing them tea time was enough incentive to make them attack dogs against the Democratic Party. They therefore were useful politically. (Salon, 10/24/15, article by Neil J. Young.)

    Because of all this, by the nineties, the Republican Party had undergone a stunning metamorphosis. Its philosophy had become the antithesis of Taft’s non-interventionism. The GOP now went looking for wars, such as against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Reagan assailed the War on Poverty by saying that the result of it was that poverty had won. This kind of talk eventually allowed his acolytes like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan to begin the effort to privatize Social Security. Reagan had called Medicare “socialism”. His success allowed the new GOP to do what Eisenhower said he would not: assault the New Deal. (LA Times, 12/8/2017, article by Michael Hiltzik) With the cooperation of Bill Clinton, they almost succeeded at this. (See US News and World Report, 5/29/2008, “The Pact Between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich”)

    The new Republican Party had cultivated a more reactionary base. Through Limbaugh-led talk radio, and people like Falwell, it traded on social conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, so-called family values, xenophobia, veiled racism and hostility toward immigrants (the anchor baby syndrome). The new GOP had no problem in depriving minority groups of their right to vote by scrubbing election rolls, which gave George W. Bush his win over Al Gore in the 2000 election heist in Florida. All of this was amplified and channeled into the Limbaugh/Fox sound machine. It was designed to appeal to what many have called “the angry white man vote.” This propaganda formula was so powerful that it managed to convince millions of working-class Americans that their interests coincided with those of billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and later the Koch brothers.

    IV

    The staggering force of this new apparatus broke dramatically into the open during the rightwing war against Bill Clinton.

    After the first verdict in the Foster case was rendered by the Park Police, unfounded rumors now began to circulate, like the claim Foster’s body had been moved while wrapped in a carpet and there was no exit wound, even though Foster had shot himself through the mouth. As we shall see, these were both false. In fact, the autopsy report described the exit wound at the rear of the skull. But at that time, Richard Mellon Scaife was also in the process of forming the so-called Arkansas Project—hiring people to dig up dirt on the Clintons from their Arkansas days—through the conservative magazine American Spectator, and Limbaugh was now pushing that journal on his radio show. The Foster case and Whitewater were an early instance of the powerful rightwing propaganda outlets bleeding over into the mainstream media. The first book on the Foster case was published in February of 1994, entitled, The Murder of Vince Foster. It concluded that the Clintons had Foster killed. (Moldea, p. 286)

    More importantly, Chris Ruddy was about to leave Murdoch’s New York Post, where he had already written some stories on the Foster case, for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. That newspaper was owned by Scaife. With the creator of the Arkansas Project now his boss, Ruddy had free reign to go after the Clintons and the Foster case. After 12 years of Republicans in the White House, the conservative media barons were intent on bringing down the new Democratic president––and it did not matter how they did it. The incessant work of people like Ruddy resulted in enough buzz for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a respected Republican lawyer named Robert Fiske to helm that inquiry. Opening an office in Little Rock, Fiske employed 15 lawyers and 25 FBI agents. (New York Times, “Muddy Water”, March 24, 1996) After a careful inquiry, during which he interviewed 125 people, Fiske concluded that the Clintons had not wielded undue influence in the Whitewater matter and that the original police inquiry was correct about Vince Foster’s death.

    On the day that Fiske issued his report, President Clinton signed the reauthorization of the Independent Counsel law, with the difference that instead of being chosen by the Attorney General, a special prosecutor would now be picked by a panel of federal judges. The panel was led by Judge David Sentelle. Sentelle was elevated to the federal court upon the request of Senator Jesse Helms. Under the influence of Helms, Ronald Reagan duly appointed Sentelle in 1985. Reno requested Fiske be reappointed. Under the influence of Helms and fellow reactionary senator Lauch Faircloth, Sentelle and his two cohorts declined to do so. (Washington Post, 8/12/94, article by Howard Schneider). In August of 1994, they replaced Fiske with the even more conservative Ken Starr.

    The Foster case was one of the most bizarre and, at the same time, most assiduous instances of a national political paroxysm this writer can remember. The entire effort to manufacture the case was backed by the late Jerry Falwell, the late billionaire Scaife, with people like reporter Ruddy and west coast political hatchet-man Pat Matrisciana. Matrisciana produced the dubious videotape The Clinton Chronicles. That infamous video began the whole fairy tale about the “Clinton body count”. This quartet perfected a combination business/political model that rose to a grand scale, prefiguring the rise of Alex Jones. Falwell raised money for Matrisciana and Ruddy by selling their productions, which then helped produce more films. Scaife paid for the ad campaigns for Ruddy’s pamphlets on the Foster case. By 1997, Matrisciana and Ruddy had a shared bank account worth over 3 million dollars.

    Some of this massive haul was spent on paying off “witnesses” to talk about the alleged crimes of the Clintons. In other words, it was checkbook journalism. This included signing up Arkansas State Troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson. Their contract was designed to pay them to make statements saying that Vince Foster had not died in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. Foster had actually died in the White House parking lot. This concoction quickly collapsed when the person who was supposed to have made a phone call revealing this––White House aide Helen Dickey––testified and proved that she did not learn of Foster’s death until late in the evening, not in the afternoon, which was when Foster’s body was discovered. As reported by Robert Parry, Starr concluded that Dickey was telling the truth and the troopers were not. (The Consortium, March 30, 1998; see also New York Review of Books, August 8, 1996, reply by Gene Lyons to Ambrose Evans Pritchard)

    Just how far would these deceptive practices go? During an infomercial, Falwell interviewed a witness in silhouetted background he labeled an investigative reporter. The mystery witness said that he knew his life was in danger because not one, but two insider witnesses had been killed before he got their stories. They both died in plane crashes. (Note, the idea of neutralized witnesses was apparently borrowed from the JFK case.) The silhouetted “investigative reporter” then asked: “Jerry, are these coincidences? I don’t think so.” It was later revealed by journalist Murray Waas that the mysterious investigative reporter was Matrisciana himself. When the scheme was later exposed, Matrisciana tried to blame the idea on Falwell. (See again Parry, cited above) With this in mind, again note the hypocrisy: the name of Matrisciana’s business outfit was Citizens for Honest Government.

    What troubled me about this outbreak of rightwing profiteering designed to increase political dementia was this: When I once mentioned it in Probe Magazine, I got a letter saying that somehow I was wrong to belittle the efforts of Ruddy and Matrisciana. The author then equated the death of Vince Foster to what had happened to President Kennedy. And that somehow, the “cover-up” around Foster’s death equated to what the Warren Commission did to JFK’s murder. I was disheartened by the letter. If one of our readers could not tell the difference between the political flackery around Foster’s death and the real criminality and cover-up around President Kennedy’s demise, then I was not doing a very good job as a writer or researcher. Either that, or the forces arrayed against me were simply too awesome to contemplate.

    V

    At around this time (1994-95), another Scaife-funded journalistic entity, Western Journalism Center (WJC), began to issue pamphlets based on Ruddy’s writings on the Foster case. These were supported by full-page ads in numerous newspapers throughout the nation, including the Washington Times, Chicago Tribune and New York Times. This writer was given one of Ruddy’s WJC reports by a friend. I immediately began to note even further that the techniques Ruddy was using were reminiscent of what the early critics of the Warren Commission had done. Ruddy was questioning the forensic basis of the prior pronouncements on the case by trying to find errors, misstatements or inconsistencies in those judgments. For example, Ruddy said that, although Foster’s body was found with the gun in his right hand, Foster was actually left-handed. Like so many other Scaife-sponsored “facts”, this turned out to be false. (Sixty Minutes, October 8, 1995). But this did remind me of the strange circumstances in the death of Gary Underhill, one of the earliest witnesses to proclaim a conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 100) So Ruddy seemed to be imitating the early Warren Commission critics. The problem as I saw it was that there was simply no comparison between the circumstances of the two cases—in any manner. And by 1995, two more judgments had been rendered on the Foster case. One by the Senate Banking Committee and one by Congressman Bill Clinger of the Government Operations Committee. Both concluded that the original police investigation was correct. What I found striking about this was Clinger was a Republican and the Senate investigation was completed under the co-leadership of the highly partisan Republican Al D’Amato. (Starr Report on Foster, Section 2, part C)

    This point was rammed home when, once Starr replaced Fiske, Brett Kavanaugh found a way to reopen the Foster case. (See article by Charles Pierce, Esquire, August 3, 2018). As any objective observer can conclude, Ken Starr had a rather unethical reign as independent counsel. More plainly: Starr had an agenda. He also utilized questionable methods in order to fulfill that agenda. (For a rather harrowing look at those methods, see Susan McDougal’s book The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk.) Yet, in spite of this, Starr came to the same conclusion everyone else did. (Although he delayed announcing it for well over a year to keep the controversy brewing.) But he did employ the man who many consider to be the finest criminalist in America, Henry Lee. Lee is noted for his independence. He has bucked the establishment in the OJ Simpson case and the JFK case. Lee teamed up with two other experts, Dr. Brain Blackbourne and Dr. Alan Berman, to certify that Starr agreed with Fiske.

    The beginning of Starr’s Report relies upon the work of two doctors: James Beyer and Donald Haut. Dr. Haut was at the crime scene and Dr. Beyer did the autopsy. Unlike with the JFK case, the doctors identified the wound path with no ambiguities. (Moldea, p. 30) And there was an alignment between the entrance and exit wounds. In other words, there was no impossible Single Bullet Theory to contend with. Nor, as with Kennedy’s head wound, did the bullet come in from one angle and then veer 90 degrees to the right for its exit. (Read it here)

    The Office of Independent Counsel traced the purchase of the .38 handgun as far back as 1913. Henry Lee actually determined how Foster carried the weapon that day. Lee also detected blood stains on nearby vegetation. These investigators, along with the FBI lab, also determined where the carpet fibers on Foster’s clothes came from, which was Foster’s home in Washington and the White House. These two evidentiary conclusions effectively countered Ruddy’s suppositions that, first, the weapon was not traceable, and therefore was not Foster’s; second, that Foster was killed elsewhere––or took his own life elsewhere––and then his body was transported to the park; and third, contrary to what Fiske’s critics reported, that there was a considerable amount of blood at the Fort Marcy Park scene (Moldea, p. 203), thus neutralizing reports saying there was not very much there and consequently Foster must have been killed elsewhere. (See section 6 of the report, part B; see also Moldea, pp. 312-17)

    The work of Henry Lee and forensic pathologist Brian Blackbourne was devastating to the likes of Ruddy and conservative media attack dog Reed Irvine. In addition to the above, Foster’s DNA was found on the barrel of the handgun. There was a bone chip on a nearby piece of brown paper, and through DNA testing it was proven that the chip was part of Foster’s skull. Contrary to another myth, Lee found that Foster’s shoes did contain soil materials and vegetative matter. (See again Moldea, cited above)

    The findings by Lee and Blackbourne were so compelling that when Ruddy issued his book on the Foster case—The Strange Death of Vincent Foster—even critics of conservative orientation, like Byron York and Jacob Cohen, panned the book. The American Spectator, home of the Arkansas Project, also filed a negative review of Ruddy’s volume. (Moldea, p. 320). When Scaife heard about the latter, he pulled his funding for the magazine, which indicated what the whole sorry episode was really about. Because of that, the journal went into a financial tailspin and was later sold to George Gilder. (Washington Post, May 2, 1999, “Arkansas Project Led to Turmoil and Rifts”)

    As the reader can see, the Foster case and Kennedy case are not at all forensically equivalent. Virtually every forensic aspect of the JFK case is genuinely susceptible to challenge. These are challenges that, when followed through on, prove the opposite of what the Warren Commission concluded; this is especially the case with the medical and ballistics evidence, including Oswald’s alleged possession of the rifle and handgun.

    Neither was there any credible evidence that the Foster autopsy was obstructed by officials on the scene. Or that notes were burned and the autopsy was rewritten once or twice. In the JFK case, both David Mantik and Doug Horne have argued that the autopsy we have in the JFK case is likely the third version. (See Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, Volume 3, pp. 851-878) And this change occurred the morning of Sunday the 24th, when Jack Ruby killed Oswald, a murder which guaranteed there would be no trial for the defendant. I won’t even detail the wholesale revisions made in the Kennedy autopsy by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968. But the record shows there has never been a true official forensic inquiry into the JFK case. What Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission did was pretty much a pathetic disgrace. The forensic examination by the House Select Committee on Assassinations was flawed beyond recognition by its use of the junk science of Thomas Canning and the late Vincent Guinn. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 76-82) On top of that, the HSCA concealed much of their evidence, and then misrepresented the evidence that was concealed. (Essay by Gary Aguilar in Trauma Room One, pp. 208-11) This is why, in the upcoming Oliver Stone documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, the public will––for the first time, fifty-seven years after the fact––see a real forensic review of the evidence in the JFK case.

    VI

    I would like to close the crime detection part of this essay with a direct comparison of the findings of a so-called expert in forensics who participated in both the Foster and JFK cases. That man is the late Vincent Scalice. Like many who worked for the House Select Committee, Scalice came out of the New York City Police Department. He was hailed as a fingerprint expert.

    As both Sylvia Meagher and Henry Hurt have noted, there was a timing problem with the discovery of Lee Harvey Oswald’s palmprint on the barrel of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle found at the Texas School Book Depository. On the night of the assassination, there was no print announced by the Dallas Police. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 124) Their identification expert, Carl Day, was supposed to have been working on the rifle at the time it was taken from the police and sent to the FBI. Vincent Drain was the FBI agent who picked up the rifle from Day that evening and shipped it to Washington. Drain told author Henry Hurt that no such print was pointed out to him by Day when he picked up the rifle on the evening of the assassination. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 109)

    What makes Drain’s statement compelling is that when the rifle was examined by FBI expert Sebastian Latona, he said that there were no prints of value he could discern on the weapon. (Hurt, p. 107) Latona was probably the foremost authority on the subject at that time. In conversations with Chief of Homicide in New York, Robert Tanenbaum, he told this writer that every DA in America wanted Latona for his case, for the simple reason that his pamphlet on fingerprint analysis was used by most local police departments as an instruction guide.

    What happened after Latona came up with a negative verdict on the prints shows why the Dallas Police Department was later exposed as the single most corrupt police force in the country. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 196-98) After the rifle was returned to Dallas, DA Henry Wade announced that, presto, they now had a print on the rifle. What made the late arriving print even more suspect was this: After Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby on the 24th, his body was taken to Miller’s Funeral Home in Fort Worth. In 1978, agent Richard Harrison told Gary Mack that he had driven another agent to the funeral parlor with the alleged “Oswald rifle”. His understanding was that this other agent was to get a palm print off the corpse for “comparison purposes”. This makes no sense since Oswald had been fingerprinted three times while in detention. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 1989 edition, p. 444) The owner of the parlor, Paul Groody, later said it took a long time to remove all of the “black gook” from the hand of the corpse. And that convinced him the agents were there to retrieve a palm print. (Hurt, p. 107) When the Warren Commission wanted Day to sign an affidavit to the effect he had identified the print before the rifle was turned over to the FBI, Day refused to execute the document. (Marrs, p. 445) Because of these rather suspicious circumstances, no serious author on the JFK case believed the palmprint was legitimate.

    Then, in 1991, a man named Rusty Livingston entered the scene. Livingston had worked for the Dallas Police, and his nephew Gary Savage later produced a book, called First Day Evidence, based on his uncle’s remembrances and souvenirs. Livingston claimed that, in addition to the palm print, there was a fingerprint Day developed on the trigger guard. He had pictures to prove such was the case. When the late Mike Sullivan of PBS heard about this, he and his crew—which included Gus Russo and Scott Malone––hurried to talk to Rusty and Gary. And this new evidence turned out to be the final sequence for their (quite flatulent) 1993 Frontline special entitled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

    Savage had tried to get a confirmation that the trigger guard prints were Oswald’s from an examiner named Jerry Powdrill. Powdrill’s examination was quite weak; he only said he could match three points. This number is four times less than the usual standard in US courts, and five times less than in British courts. (Savage, p. 109)

    Sullivan was undeterred. PBS then brought in a former FBI examiner, George Bonebrake. He said the prints were not clear enough for identification purposes. But that still did not discourage Sullivan and PBS. They now brought in Vincent Scalice. As Pat Speer notes in his fine article, “Un-smoking the Gun”, back in 1978, when working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Scalice said these trigger guard pictures were not defined enough for identification purposes (Volume 8, p. 248). But now, Mr. Scalice determined the prints were Oswald’s. He explained this switch by saying that he now had more and better pictures to work from.

    As Speer notes, Scalice and Savage were wrong about the new and better photos which allowed the new determination. After separating out blow-ups from originals, Speer determined that Scalice worked from all of two photos––not as PBS said, “a set”. Scalice was also wrong when he said he had only seen one photo of the trigger guard prints while with the HSCA. He had seen more than one while working for that committee. (HSCA Admin Folder M-3, pp. 5-6, at Mary Ferrell Foundation Archives.) PBS was also wrong when they said that the trigger guard prints had been ignored prior to 1993. They had been examined by the HSCA and the FBI. (See preceding link)

    But as Speer points out, although the misrepresentations above were pretty bad, they were not the worst part of the dog and pony show that Sullivan and PBS had produced. Sullivan realized PBS had a problem with the FBI work on the rifle which occurred the very evening of the assassination. So when PBS presented the program for the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in 2003, they wrote the following piece of narration: “The FBI says it never looked at the Dallas police photographs of the fingerprints ….” This statement strongly implies that when Latona examined the rifle for the Warren Commission, he did not have the DPD photos.

    Again, this is false. In his Warren Commission testimony, Latona is quite clear on this point. He states that he did examine photos of the trigger guard area that were sent by the Dallas Police. (WC Vol. IV, p. 21). And he went beyond that. He says that he examined the area with a magnifying glass. (WC Vol IV, p. 20). He then adds that he called in a photographer and took his own photos. He states that they tried everything, “highlighting, side-lighting, every type of lighting that we could conceivably think of ….” Latona also said that he then processed the entire rifle, to the point of dismantling the weapon and breaking down all its parts. He concluded that there were no prints of value on the rifle. (WC Vol IV, p. 23)

    It’s one thing to make a mistake. We all do that. But when you state as fact the opposite of what happened, then the audience has a right to suspect that the producer of the program––in this case Mr. Sullivan––has an agenda. I simply do not believe that every person involved with this program had failed to read Latona’s sworn testimony. Not when this issue was the concluding segment of the show. They had to have read it. But they were so eager to pronounce Oswald guilty that they ignored it. They did not want to explain why the best fingerprint expert the FBI had––using every technique he could muster––could not find a print on the weapon while Oswald was alive; but the most corrupt police department in America did find it after he was dead. If the case had been presented that way, then the audience would have been thinking: “Where did Day’s prints come from?” And they would have been justified in asking that question. As they would have been in asking these questions: What the heck is PBS up to? Didn’t this used to be a reputable network? And also this one: Why is Scalice going along with this cheap charade? (I strongly advise the reader to peruse the rest of Speer’s article, because, if you can believe it, the smelly evidentiary trail of this print gets even worse.)

    After retiring from the NYPD Scalice had become a forensic examiner in the private field. In other words, he was for hire. And, yes sir, after his work for PBS and Sullivan, he later took part in the Foster case. And he joined it with a vengeance. In April of 1995, he issued a report through the WJC agreeing with the idea that Foster’s body had been transported to Fort Marcy Park from an outside location. (Moldea, pp. 249-50). Part of this “analysis” was based on the phony tenet that there was not any soil found on Foster’s shoes. (Associated Press Report of 4/28/95) The problem with this, as we have seen, is that Henry Lee proved it was wrong.

    But Scalice now plunged further into the Foster mire. A few months later, he switched hats and became a document examiner, one specializing in handwriting analysis. Investment advisor James Davidson was friendly with both Ruddy and Republican stalwart Grover Norquist. He also later became a board member of Newsmax. In 1995, Davidson called a press conference. Vince Foster had written a note prior to his death. He had ripped it up and thrown it into his briefcase. It expressed his discouragement with the Washington scene and his disdain for the unfair attacks on him. It was found four days after his body was discovered. Both the Fiske and the Starr inquiries had employed authorities who determined the note was written in Foster’s hand. (See Final Report of Independent Counsel, Volume 3, Part 3, p. 278, published in 2001 and finalized by attorney Robert Ray)

    Well, to counter this, Davidson put Scalice on a panel with two other men, including one Reginald Alton from England. (Alton seems to have been a bit biased against the Clintons; see Moldea, p. 373.) Their analysis differed from the prior ones and said the note was a forgery. That analysis was vitiated by Marcel Matley in the Volume 21 No.1, Spring 1998 issue of the Journal of the National Association of Document Examiners.

    After reading the above analysis, this author is compelled to note that when Scalice offered up his confirmation statement of the Oswald fingerprint for PBS, he did not furnish any comparison charts. This would have been standard procedure for any legal proceeding. As Pat Speer wrote, this should have been easy for him to do, as exemplars of Oswald’s prints were in the record going all the way back to his Marine Corps days. Because of that, and the other points mentioned above, it is safe to suggest that, by the nineties, Scalice was pretty much planning for his retirement. Masquerading as a versatile forensic expert, he was the equivalent of a think-tank academic for hire. With the confirmation bias agreed upon during the signing.

    VII

    As the reader can see, unlike the first generation of critics in the JFK case, people like Chris Ruddy and Reed Irvine had a sugar daddy who was supplying them with bucketloads of cash. This patronage both furthered their endeavors and allowed them to be publicized via full page ads in large newspapers, thus ensuring their information would be available to millions of readers. This is almost the opposite of what happened with writers like Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, Vincent Salandria and Sylvia Meagher. Weisberg was reduced to self-publishing his books after his first. The FBI stopped Lane from publishing Rush to Judgment in the USA, leading to its first being published in England. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, pp. 160-61) Whatever that first generation of critics achieved was largely due to the quality of their work, not to any promotion by wealthy rightwing backers.

    But it was that rightwing backing that kept on advancing further inquiries into the Foster case. And these further official inquiries were all done by those who would be politically in line with the likes of Ruddy and misaligned with the Clintons. Again, this is contrary to the Kennedy case. The Warren Commission was clearly politically biased from the start to attain a no-conspiracy verdict. (See James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, Chapter 11) Once Dick Sprague and Bob Tanenbaum left the the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey attempted to convict Oswald, using a lot of the same dubious evidence the Warren Commission did. (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 63-89). Because of this innate bias, there has never been anywhere close to a real examination of the true circumstances of Kennedy’s death. This bias is furthermore why both of those inquiries proffered the ridiculous Single Bullet Fantasy as the sine qua non of their verdicts against Oswald.

    But forensics was not what the Foster case was about. It was a political crusade. So––as we have seen––facts were not important. When needed, they could simply be made up. (For some further examples of this, see the Salon 12/23/97 article by Gene Lyons.) The idea, as future Solicitor General Ted Olsen told his then ally David Brock, was to publish speculation that even they understood was false, so that it would preoccupy the White House until a new scandal came along. (Washington Monthly, article by Martin Longman, 5/24/16). Can anyone in their right senses say that this stands in any comparison to what authors and activists in the Kennedy case were doing? But the underlying results in the Clinton case seem fairly obvious: it was effective. And it clearly drove Bill Clinton to the right. Which is why he hired the likes of Dick Morris to run his political office and his 1996 campaign.

    The Clinton Wars brought some of the worst political hacks into the MSM. In addition to those I have mentioned, there were Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Floyd Brown, and David Bossie. And it was these characters who further decimated the Republican Party of any political beliefs it previously held under Taft and Eisenhower. They are and were simply shock troops. As congressman Trey Gowdy recently said upon leaving congress, the GOP is about one thing: winning. And since that party has been reduced to the level of Coulter and Bossie, it is about winning through a scorched earth policy, as in the case of Donald Trump Jr. trying to revive the Foster case in 2017. (CNN Report of May 11, 2017 by Andrew Kaczynski) Along with this, there was the constant refrain from the Right that the MSM was too liberal. This, of course, was preposterous. The Power Elite, which has owned the media in America for eons, was never liberal––which is why they cooperated so completely with the cover-ups of the assassinations of the sixties. As Eric Alterman has noted, this refrain about being too liberal was the equivalent of “working the refs” in sports. You softened up the gatekeepers in order to get your message on the field. And it worked. It also caused writers who had formerly been on the left to move right in order to to gain access, one example being the late Christopher Hitchens.

    The Republican Party has become so bereft, so craven by this continuing devolution that it all but ignores the real scandals that have taken place in order to distract the public with these ersatz ones. The heist of the 2000 election, the probable stealing of the 2004 election, the Iran/Contra scandal, the importation of drugs into the USA by the CIA, these all are minimized or ignored by the GOP. In fact, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsay Graham said the fact that the Senate allowed a sexual assault accuser to testify against Kavanaugh was one of the worst things he saw in his political career. Evidently, the Supreme Court and Roger Stone stealing the 2000 election––thus allowing the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis in a phony war––this did not count for anything to Graham. That is how bonkers that party has become. Their aim is to be constantly riling up the base, which does not really understand they are being used as lemmings to ensure policies that will make their lives worse.

    To be clear: I never voted for either of the Clintons. Since I live in the safe state of California, I could vote Green in the general election. I never voted for either one in the primaries. As Robert Reich later noted, the Clintons were really Eisenhower Republicans. I mean, can anyone imagine Bobby Kennedy attending H. L. Hunt’s funeral, like Bill Clinton did Scaife’s? (CBS News, August 3, 2014, report by Jake Miller) My point here is that the political antics that surrounded them was nothing but a cheap and tawdry circus, one which, without Scaife’s money, likely would have never existed. And when all the investigations were done, what real charges were there? Monica Lewinsky. Talk about hypocrisy, as Larry Flynt later showed: the GOP was full of similar instances. (See SF Weekly, 9/15/99, article entitled “Inside Flynt”) To take the hypocrisy of the Lewinsky matter even further: Scaife himself carried on a long affair with a call girl, one which his wife found out about and exposed. (Vanity Fair, 1/2/08, article by Michael Joseph Gross) There were two good books written on the stupidity of all this. First, there is Blood Sport by James Stewart from 1997; and then The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, which came out in 2001. The latter was made into a documentary film in 2004.

    Chris Ruddy rode the tidal wave of ridiculousness. He was well rewarded by his backers for his incessant efforts to aggrandize nonsense and create an aura of mystery where none actually existed: to suggest there was some kind of kill squad employed by the Clintons; that Vince Foster had to have been murdered and then, James Angleton style, the murder was made to look like a suicide; and that this was all over the Whitewater real estate deal in which the Clintons lost money. Today he runs Newsmax, which employs people like Mr. deLespinasse, who ridicules all ideas about conspiracies, but conveniently passes over the Foster mythology in silence. But when Ruddy does run a story and documentary on a possible JFK conspiracy, who is it about? The poseur James Files. (Report on Newsmax by Jim Myers, August 29, 2016). Ruddy has us nailed both ways.

    Donald Trump has complained that he is the most attacked president in decades. Mr. Trump has a short memory. Bill Clinton was. Just ask Chris Ruddy how he did it. And how he benefited so much from it.

  • Vincent Bugliosi, Tom O’Neill, Quentin Tarantino, and Tate/LaBianca, Part 1

    Vincent Bugliosi, Tom O’Neill, Quentin Tarantino, and Tate/LaBianca, Part 1

    Part 1

    A Review of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

    In August of 1969, one of the most sensational murder cases in recent history exploded onto TV screens and the front pages of newspapers. On two successive evenings in Los Angeles, seven people were brutally attacked and killed with both guns and knives. What made the homicides even more gripping was that, on the first night, one of the victims was Sharon Tate. Tate was a popular actress who was ascending in the star ranks at the time. She had done several film and TV roles, including the 1967 movie adaptation of the novel Valley of the Dolls. She was married to film director Roman Polanski. Among his films, Polanski had directed two hits that dealt with macabre subjects: Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. This gave the murders an even higher profile, with a darker undertone. Those undertones were broadened by the fact that the killers had left certain words behind etched in blood: “rise”, “pig” and “helter skelter”.

    For weeks on end, the police and District Attorney’s office could find no productive leads. But in November, they got a call from an inmate at Sybil Brand Institute, a detention center for women. The caller said that one of the fellow prisoners had told her about her participation in the murders. It was that tip which broke open the Tate/LaBianca case.

    His successful prosecution of Tate/LaBianca vaulted assistant DA Vincent Bugliosi into the stratosphere of celebrity attorneys. He now joined the likes of F. Lee Bailey, Melvin Belli and Percy Foreman. It also made him a wealthy man and gave him an almost automatic TV/radio platform nearly until the end of his days: one from which he could pontificate on a variety of legal issues. That wealth and position was largely due to the book he co-wrote on Tate/ LaBianca with established author Curt Gentry. Published in 1974, it was titled Helter Skelter and it eventually became the number one best-selling true crime book. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 70). Those sales were greatly augmented by a two-part TV film that aired in April of 1976. That dual airing set records as far as ratings for a TV film at the time.

    I did not read the Bugliosi/Gentry book until many years after publication. There was something about the sensationalism and assumed collective psychosis that made me leery about the way the story was presented. But, in 2007, Bugliosi published Reclaiming History on the assassination of President Kennedy. That giant tome was so poor that I took Mark Lane’s advice. He said that after what Bugliosi had done with JFK, we should go back and examine Tate/LaBianca. Between my examination of Helter Skelter, and my critique of Reclaiming History, my opinion of Bugliosi as an author and attorney diminished.

    My critique of both the Bugliosi books is contained in my current volume entitled The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. The first chapter of that book contains a biography of Bugliosi along with my analysis of the problems with Helter Skelter. At about the time I began to express my doubts about the earlier book, a writer named Tom O’Neill got in contact with me. We later met and then talked on the phone a few times. Those discussions confirmed for me the serious underlying problems with the Bugliosi/Gentry scaffolding of their bestselling book.

    At the time I met Tom, he was struggling to finish a book he had been contracted out to write on the Tate/LaBianca case. He had been caught up in a dizzying labyrinth for a number of years and was having problems finding his way out. He had piled up a veritable mountain of research on both Bugliosi and the Tate/LaBianca murders and, like myself, he had found the Helter Skelter scenario unconvincing. To remind the reader, what this entails is Charles Manson ordering the Tate/LaBianca murders to begin some kind of race war. After the war, only the Black Muslims would be left standing. Manson and his followers would now emerge from a deep black pit underground. And after having multiplied, they would retire the Muslims and now rule the world. (see DiEugenio, pp. 12-14 for the long version)   I hope the reader can understand how, even in this abridged form, some people could find this concept wanting.

    Tom found a co-writer—Dan Piepenbring—to help him sort out his research and interviews. The book has now been published under the title Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. It is really two books. One is a powerful critique of Bugliosi’s methodology in convicting Manson and the cohorts involved in the murders at the Tate/Polanski home and then the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. There were a total of seven people killed over the nights of August 8 and 9, 1969. At the Benedict Canyon address, in addition to Sharon Tate, there was men’s hair stylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her boyfriend Victor Frykowski, and recent high school graduate, Steve Parent. The next night, in the Los Feliz area, the LaBianca couple were killed. Bugliosi ended up being the lead prosecutor in the case after Aaron Stovitz was removed for violating a gag order. (O’Neill, p. 5) With Bugliosi now in the driver’s seat, he was the one who garnered the media attention for the many months of the trial.

    II

    O’Neill had been a celebrity/movie writer for magazines like Us and Premiere. At the 30th anniversary of Tate/LaBianca he was asked by the latter publication to do an update article on the principals involved who were still alive. It was in doing his preliminary research for that article that he began to understand that not all was as it seemed in what had become the received wisdom on the case. He also found out that Bugliosi was very protective about Tate/LaBianca and his role in it. (O’Neill, p. 7) In one of the most memorable exchanges in the book, the author reveals a conversation he had with newspaper reporter Mary Neiswander. She was one of the very few writers on Tate/LaBianca who actually talked to alleged mastermind Charles Manson and developed a rapport with him. She did her own set of interviews and discovered evidence that contradicted what Bugliosi was eliciting from witnesses on the stand. She also did not buy Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter theory of the crime.

    Neiswander was one of the first local journalists to note that the work of the two investigators on the prior Gary Hinman murder case was crucial to understanding what happened on August 8 and 9. But the LAPD ignored the work of Charles Guenther and Paul Whiteley and they allowed the population of Los Angeles to descend into a state of, as she wrote, “terror stricken, gun toting, guard dog buying crazies.” (Assassins … Serial Killer … Corrupt Cops, e-book version, p. 147) She also noted that, if Manson had not consented to be tried with his cohorts, it would have been very difficult to prove his guilt in a stand-alone case. (Neiswander, p. 161; for this point also see George Stimson’s Goodbye Helter Skelter, p. 405) She then wrote that since the judge would not let him defend himself, Manson insisted on having the worst lawyer in the city defend him. According to Bugliosi, he got him in the person of Irving Kanarek. (Neiswander, p. 175).

    Because of her unusual, outside-the-envelope reporting, Bugliosi decided to attack the woman in public. He said about her that she was “pro-defense, anti-prosecution and she hates police.” (Neiswander, p. 183) She also noted that Bugliosi had actually taken a swing at Susan Atkins in court after she messed up the notes for his summation. She also knew from a secret source that Bugliosi’s prime witness, Linda Kasabian, had been less than truthful on the stand. And this deception tended to undermine his Helter Skelter thesis. (Neiswander, p. 188)

    But there was something between Bugliosi and Neiswander that the reporter did not relate in her book. She told it, however, to O’Neill. As she was prepping a long exposé of the Manson prosecutor back in the eighties, he made her understand that he knew where her children attended school, “and it would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers.” (O’Neill, p. 80) This anecdote is quite telling in two respects. First, it shows a dark side to the prosecutor, one which I talked about in my book and which O’Neill also writes about here. But further, it reveals that Bugliosi was hyper-defensive about anyone questioning his tactics in the Tate/LaBianca case. What was the famous prosecutor so worried about? What secrets was he so desperately trying to protect?

    The author begins his book with a review of the killings at the Tate and then the LaBianca homes. Tate and Polanksi lived at 10050 Cielo Drive, north of Beverly Hills. That home was rented out by talent manager Rudy Altobelli, who was not in the country at the time. He had hired a groundskeeper named William Garretson to take care of the place in his absence. Garretson lived in a cottage behind the main house and Parent was visiting him that night. The LaBianca home was at 3301 Waverly Drive, which was right next door to a home where Manson had actually stayed more than once. The author notes that the LaBiancas were worried since people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around. (O’Neill, p. 23)

    Before getting into the actual centerpieces of the book, I would like to pose some questions about the two murder scenes and the victims. When I met with the author, he told me that there was more to the killing of Steve Parent than met the eye. If there was, O’Neill does not address it in his book. He also said that the ideas about the extravagant wealth of Rosemary LaBianca was a point that Bugliosi had gotten wrong in his book. (DiEugenio, p. 19) Again, if that was an error by Bugliosi, it is not addressed by the author. He said that Altobelli had lost his money and was living in a small apartment paid for by Jack Nicholson. Again, this decline is not addressed, let alone explained by the author. Finally, the daughter of the LaBiancas actually discovered her parents’ bodies that night. She was accompanied by a man named Joe Dorgan. Dorgan was a member of the Straight Satans. This was a cycle gang modeled on Hell’s Angels that was close to the Manson Clan up at Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth. Danny DeCarlo, an important witness for Bugliosi, was a member of that gang. But further, that daughter, Suzan Rae, began to write letters to the main killer, Tex Watson, in 1986. She then argued for his parole at a hearing: the man who had the major role in killing her parents! It was later discovered that Rae lived in an apartment about 200 feet from Watson before the murders. (DiEugenio, p. 20) The author told me that all this was coincidental. I wish he had shown why he was so sure in his text.

    But the main fulcrum of the book is O’Neill’s exposure of what Bugliosi and the DA’s office—led by Evelle Younger—did in its conduct of the Tate/LaBianca case. There were five perpetrators who were on trial for the crimes: Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Manson and Tex Watson. (Watson resisted extradition and was later tried separately.) In what is probably the most significant achievement of the book, the author proves what some have long suspected about the unethical methodology the DA ‘s office used to get a death verdict at the trial, and ensure that Bugliosi’s grandiloquent concept would gain currency.

    III

    The first method involved Susan Atkins. Atkins was talking to almost anyone in earshot at Sybil Brand about the Gary Hinman case. Therefore she thought she could trade her knowledge of Tate/LaBianca for a deal. As Nikolas Schreck notes in his book, The Manson File, Atkins talked about what happened at the Polanski home to at least four people in detention, double the two the DA’s office admitted: Virginia Graham and Roni Howard. And she said things that made the crime scene out to be devilishly psychic in its nature: for instance, that she drank Sharon Tate’s blood and liked the way it tasted. It is interesting to note that she took back almost all of these sensationalist claims in her later book, The Myth of Helter Skelter. (See especially p. 222 of the e-book version.) She also noted that at the Hinman scene, the term “political piggy” was left on the wall in blood, and Bobby Beausoleil (also imprisoned since he was found driving the deceased’s car) made a bloody palm print on the wall to suggest a panther paw. This was a half-baked attempt to blame the murder on the Black Panthers. (Atkins, p. 80, e-book version) Although Manson had cut Hinman’s ear, it was Beausoleil who had actually killed Hinman. There are two motives given for the killing. Bugliosi says it was over an inheritance Hinman had come into. Ed Sanders, in his book The Family, writes that it was over a bad batch of mescaline Hinman had sold Beausoleil. (Sanders, p. 180-184) Either way, since Atkins was there, she was implicated as an accessory to the crime.

    When the word got back that Atkins was talking, she was interviewed by the DA’s office. And this is where one of the most important revelations in Chaos occurs. It powerfully illustrates the links between a corrupt prosecution and a corrupt MSM. Bugliosi did not want to use Atkins as a trial witness since she was implicated in the crimes, including the Hinman case. (O’Neill, p. 244) So a two-stage secret operation was enacted. Atkins’ original court-appointed attorney was replaced—without either her or the lawyer’s consent. Why was this done? Because the DA needed “strong client control”. (O’Neill, p. 246) Yet Atkins was not the DA’s client. She was their defendant. But her original counsel was being removed because they wanted someone who would cooperate with them by controlling Atkins. They went to the judge, and inexplicably, he approved the switch to a man named Richard Caballero who, according to Sanders, later became very friendly with Bugliosi.

    On November 26, 1969, Caballero became the attorney of record for Atkins at her first hearing. The record of that hearing is now gone. (O’Neill, p. 247) Caballero had previously worked in the DA’s office for 8 years. Caballero did something rather odd. He got Atkins to agree to a deal with the DA that was neither signed nor written. Although police chief Ed Davis was sparse with the details of the announcement of Atkins’ cooperation and what she had revealed to the authorities, Caballero became a veritable fountain of information. For the first time, Charles Manson’s name now entered the case as Caballero talked it up for four straight days, saturating the local media. (O’Neill, pp. 248-49) On December 5th, Atkins testified to the grand jury and on that basis Manson, Atkins, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Tex Watson were indicted on seven counts of murder.

    Bugliosi allowed Atkins to record her story at Caballero’s office. After listening to the tape, he noted that what she said there apparently differed from what she told Graham and Howard. Now she said she did not actually kill Tate; she held her as Watson killed her. The DA’s office allowed her to be visited by former members of her Clan, knowing full well that this would probably give her second thoughts about testifying against them. It did. But as O’Neill notes, although he did not admit it in his book, Bugliosi was already in negotiations with Linda Kasabian, a more sympathetic witness, since she did not kill anyone and did not enter either home. Her lawyer insisted on a written grant of immunity—which he got. (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, p. 252). Since Caballero was really representing the DA’s office and not his client, there was no problem in switching witnesses and leaving Atkins with nothing. Kasabian’s attorney, Gary Fleischman told the author that the DA used Atkins for a grand jury indictment and then dumped her; Caballero got away with this crime as he sold his client down the river. (O’Neill, p. 253)

    IV

    But that wasn’t the worst part of the Atkins operation. It was not enough for her lawyer to pollute the jury pool in Los Angeles. Caballero would now blast out his client’s words around the world. He made a deal with “journalist” Larry Schiller. Schiller should be familiar to readers of this site. He was an informant for the FBI on the JFK case. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 361) In 1967, he co-wrote a book attacking the critics of the Warren Commission: The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. As the author notes, Schiller also arranged to have a deathbed confession from Jack Ruby saying he acted alone in killing Oswald.

    Caballero allowed Schiller to listen to and transcribe the tape he had made of his witness. That manuscript was then sold to the LA Times. At 6,500 words it ran to nearly three pages. (O’Neill, p. 254) It essentially cooked Manson’s goose. As the Schiller/Atkins story depicted, he was “a criminal mastermind, a cult leader, a conspiring lunatic.” (O’Neill, p. 254) The ACLU declared it was now impossible for Manson to get a fair trial anywhere in Los Angeles. But Schiller went further and published a quickie paperback book. This was titled The Killing of Sharon Tate and in its various versions featured either Manson or the actress on the cover. He then sold overseas rights in Germany and England.

    As the author points out, the idea that Bugliosi conveys in Helter Skelter—that he was somehow blindsided by the Times story and the book—is quite dubious, because Caballero and his partner Paul Caruso were not only allowed to interview Atkins at his Beverly Hills office, but Caballero went to her cell at Sybil Brand. The sign-in sheet said that the visit by Caballero and a second party was for “future psychiatric evaluation”. Since the second party was LA Times reporter Jerry Cohen, that pretext was bogus. It turns out that Schiller needed more material for the book and Cohen was his ghost writer. Cohen was also a less than heroic figure on the JFK case. He worked with Schiller to talk Loran Hall out of going to New Orleans to be interviewed by DA Jim Garrison. He was essentially the LA Times man on the Clay Shaw trial and was reportedly in the room when Attorney General Ed Meese refused to formally extradite Hall to New Orleans at the request of Garrison. As the author notes, Cohen tried to talk reporter Peter Noyes out of writing a book on the JFK case. (O’Neill, p. 262) In fact, he offered him a job at the LA Times if he did so. Noyes declined. He was soon terminated from his position at CBS News. (See this YouTube video for a summary of Schiller.)

    When the jailhouse interview was over, Caballero asked for the hour-long tape. He then obliterated part of it. On the stand, Caballero admitted that he did so because what Atkins said there contradicted her grand jury testimony. The destroyed tape “contained comments from Atkins suggesting that she’d lied to the grand jury at his direction.” According to the author, the witness said words to the effect, “Okay, I played your game. I testified. I said what you wanted me to say. I don’t want to do it anymore.” (O’Neill, p. 256) Although Schiller took credit for the interview, he was never inside Sybil Brand with Atkins. He later lied about this fact. (O’Neill, p. 258) He waited in the car outside and then Cohen wrote the story at Schiller’s home. In his book, Bugliosi maintains he only found out about this arrangement near the tail end of the nearly ten-month trial. As O’Neill reveals, this is hard to buy, because Bugliosi knew Cohen from before the Tate/LaBianca murders. He was actually working with Cohen on a book about another murder case he had tried. The court could not prove that Bugliosi put Cohen up to the scheme because Cohen dodged subpoena servers and failed to testify about the issue. (O’Neill, p. 258) Some of these legal abuses with Atkins had been exposed by a local TV reporter named Pete Miller. But his reports stopped when Bugliosi visited the station and had a meeting with station management. The prosecutor clearly did not like Miller’s exposure of his designs to pollute the jury pool. Caballero was well compensated for selling out his client to Schiller and Cohen. For example, just the UK rights sold for $40,000, about 200 grand today. According to author Ed Sanders, even though Caballero was being compensated by the public defender’s office, he got the highest percentage of the incoming fees from the escrow account he set up. (see this forum entry from 08/24/2014)

    Because of all this chicanery—which the LA Bar later termed improper and unethical—the author poses a question: What did Atkins actually say before she came under the control of the DA’s office through their proxy Caballero? O’Neill found an official memorandum dated November 18th in the LAPD files. This was the day that Roni Howard first called the police to inform them of what Atkins was saying at Sybil Brand. The author notes some key differences between the memo and what would later become the Atkins official story. He also notes that Howard’s story changed within a week of the original interview. (O’Neill, p. 263)

    First, Atkins originally said the killers were on LSD the night of the murders. When Kasabian testified, she said they were not on drugs. This subtraction took away the defense of diminished capacity. But as the author notes, in a 2009 documentary interview, Kasabian now said everyone had taken speed that night. (O’Neill, p. 263) As I noted in my book, Bugliosi was intent on eliminating the drug angle to the crime in any way. In this early version, Atkins was inside the LaBianca house and participated in the attacks. In the Bugliosi version she stayed outside in the car. And as the author notes, in the first Howard interview there was no mention of any of the Helter Skelter elements of Manson’s race war, except that those words were left in blood on the refrigerator. Atkins did not even mention Manson ordering them to go anywhere or kill anyone. Also, Atkins did not admit to stabbing Tate according to Howard. After Caballero’s arrival, Howard said such was the case and Atkins had talked about the Tate stabbing in detail. (O’Neill, p. 264)

    O’Neill caps this section with a telling point. He writes, “eventually all the killers settled on a story similar to the one that Atkins told after her attorney swap.” Their parole release bids have been based on that concept: namely that they were all under Manson’s control. In one of his last interviews, Bugliosi—who passed on in 2015—said he did not think Manson believed the Helter Skelter concept. The interviewing reporter did not follow up with: Well what was the motive for Mr. Manson then?

    V

    What the DA’s office did with Atkins was unethical and improper. What Bugliosi did to wipe the record clean of any drug influence was deceptive and deprived the accused of a defense. In my opinion, what Bugliosi did with Terry Melcher was probably even worse.

    The son of actress Doris Day, Melcher was a prominent music producer at the time. Through his talent scout Gregg Jakobson, and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, he had heard of Manson and was seriously thinking of producing him and/or making a documentary film about their commune life style.

    One of the most estimable achievements of this book is that it makes clear what others, including myself, had suspected. Bugliosi did a deal with Melcher to conceal the extent of his relationship with Manson. When Rudy Altobelli began to talk to O’Neill, the author pressed him on this issue: Was Manson or anyone from his Clan at the Cielo Drive house prior to the murders? Altobelli got back to Melcher about this line of questioning. Melcher responded with: “Vince was supposed to take care of all that. And now it’s all resurfacing.” (O’Neill, p. 119) The author pursued this angle steadily. He eventually met up with Sandi Gibbons, a reporter turned lawyer. She said that since Bugliosi stole official files for his book, she would copy files for O’Neill. One of the files contained information from a key Bugliosi witness, Danny DeCarlo, which exposed this hidden agreement with Melcher. DeCarlo said that he saw Melcher at Spahn Ranch twice, and once at Barker Ranch, in Inyo County—where Manson later moved his Clan—after the murders. On one visit, DeCarlo said that Melcher drove up alone in a Metro truck and stayed for 3-4 hours. (O’Neill, pp. 121-22) DeCarlo placed these visits in August and September. Yet, on the witness stand, Melcher said he did not see Manson after mid-May of 1969. DeCarlo, a witness who Bugliosi relied upon to a great extent for his case, was never asked about this matter at trial. In fact, in his notes, Bugliosi actually drew lines through this information.

    According to the 1963 Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland, the defense should have received a copy of this interview. When the author showed these notes to Patricia Krenwinkel’s attorney, the late Paul Fitzgerald, he was startled. He had never seen them before, and he recognized Bugliosi’s handwriting. He then added that Bugliosi was quite deceitful during the trial, writing a script that he got his witnesses to follow. (O’Neill, p. 124)  

    Melcher also denied ever recording Manson, and Bugliosi repeated this in his summation to the jury. This was also false. The author found the technician who did the recording for Melcher. (O’Neill, p. 125) Melcher also lied on the stand about Manson and Tex Watson not being at his Cielo Drive home, the scene of the first night murders. Steve Kay, who assisted Bugliosi at the trial, told the author such was the case. And actress Candice Bergen was also there at this time. But Kay told O’Neill Bergen would not talk about it. (O’Neill, p. 108) I hinted at this in The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. I based that declaration on Deana Martin’s book. She was another friend of Melcher’s who was at his home many times. O’Neill tried to say she was not a good source. But at her trial testimony, Martin was not directly asked whether or not she ever saw Manson at Melcher’s. But she did ID Watson, albeit tentatively, since his appearance had changed so much in the interim.

    The point of all this is that when one adds it all up, Manson was probably at Melcher’s as many as three times. Watson was probably there twice. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 18-19) This is likely how Watson knew where to cut the phone lines the night of the murders. And also how to enter the grounds bypassing the front gate. But there is one last point made by O’Neill on this issue. Bugliosi realized he needed at least one connection between Manson and the Cielo Drive location. That came mainly through a man named Shakrokh Hatami. (O’Neill, p. 185) He was Sharon Tate’s photographer. He said that Manson had been at the Cielo Drive house, looking for Melcher. Bugliosi plays this scene up for great effect in his book. Manson does not know Melcher had since moved out to Malibu, and he is chagrined about Melcher not signing him to a music deal or following through on the documentary film. (Bugliosi and Gentry, pp. 229-30) Hatami sends him to the rear house where Altobelli was residing, and Rudy tells him Melcher does not live there anymore. Bugliosi admits to a problem. Hatami says this visit occurred in the afternoon, Altobelli says it happened at night. Bugliosi papers this over and then states that he had now connected Cielo Drive to Manson.

    As presented above, this scenario is specious. In my book, I explained how it was designed to keep Manson away from both Melcher and the Hollywood music and drugs scene. But O’Neill adds something that makes it even worse. In interviewing Hatami, he said he was never sure the man was Manson. He told the author his testimony had been coerced. He added that he really did not like what Bugliosi put him through. In fact, like Marina Oswald in the JFK case, Hatami—who was an Iranian citizen—was threatened with deportation unless he told the story that the prosecution wanted him to tell. Afterwards, it turns out that Bugliosi guaranteed the witness coercion would not be discovered. When he interviewed Hatami—as Captain Will Fritz did with Lee Harvey Oswald—there was no stenographer present, and the session was not recorded on tape. This indicates the perpetrator was covering his tracks. (O’Neill, pp. 186-187)

    This brings up two related issues both of which the author acknowledges. First, Melcher’s perjury was not just condoned by Bugliosi; it appears to be a cooperated-upon enterprise. (O’Neill, p. 88) This is an important point to keep in mind, since, as we shall see, it impacts on the whole Helter Skelter motive issue. Second, in his book, Bugliosi says the reason Manson was there was to find Melcher. (Bugliosi and Gentry, pp. 228-231)   But as O’Neill and other writers point out, Manson knew Melcher was not living there at the time. (O’Neill, p. 87) This makes one wonder if Altobelli was lying also. According to Bugliosi, Altobelli said he only met Manson once prior to this incident and it was at Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s house. (O’Neill, p. 87) But this does not ring true, since author Ed Sanders wrote that Manson knew Altobelli was gay. With Bugliosi, Manson knew that from meeting him just once? And consider: this was back in 1969, when most homosexuals were closeted. This makes Manson’s knowledge even more curious.

    There is one other matter that should be noted about Bugliosi’s unethical conduct of this case. O’Neill discusses an interview he did with Irving Kanarek, Manson’s lawyer. During this interview, Kanarek called Bugliosi an indicted perjurer. This was in regard to the so-called “celebrity hit list”. (O’Neill, p. 111) One of the lawyers in the case had slipped information about a “hit list” that the Manson Clan allegedly had. It included major stars like Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, who they were allegedly going to polish off. This information originated with either Virginia Graham or Atkins. According to Graham, it came from Atkins. It was not credible on its face. For instance, Graham later revealed that Atkins told her they were going to kill Sinatra, skin him, and sell purses made of his skin on Hollywood Boulevard. They were also going to pluck Taylor’s eyes out. (USA Today, May 29, 2015) Bugliosi knew he would never be able to admit this material at trial. As many writers, such as Nicolas Schreck, have noted, if Atkins said it, it was part of her attempt to get someone to call the authorities to arrange a deal for her. I know of no evidence adduced in the later record that such a “hit list” really existed. In fact, the attackers did not even know celebrity actress Sharon Tate would be at the Cielo Drive home that night. (DiEugenio, p. 25)

    But Bugliosi was desperate to publicize the information. He knew it would make the case even more sensational and attract more publicity to both the case and himself. He sent his assistant Steve Kay to interview Graham about it. That tape was then transcribed and, under the law of discovery, Bugliosi gave a copy to each opposing attorney. But that was not enough. Bugliosi was later indicted for sending the transcript to local reporter Bill Farr, who got it in the newspapers. At a preliminary hearing, Kay’s testimony made it fairly obvious it was Bugliosi who sent the transcript to Farr. (DiEugenio, p. 26) That testimony warranted a trial for Bugliosi. But according to Kanarek, the DA’s office realized that if Bugliosi was convicted, it would endanger the prior verdicts in Tate/LaBianca. So they got the judge to grant a motion to dismiss the case due to an arcane technicality. The last thing they wanted to do was discredit Bugliosi and retry a ridiculously expensive and exceedingly long case. In his book, Bugliosi said he did not give the transcript to Farr. This is cow dung. (Bugliosi and Gentry, p. 632)

    As Steve Kay told the author, Bugliosi saw Tate/LaBianca as his meal ticket. (O’Neill, p. 109) It was his way to escape the drudgery and anonymity of being one of 450 assistant DA’s in the Los Angeles office. As noted above, he was already at work with Cohen writing a book on a previous case he had won. That book was later completed and made into a 1992 TV film entitled Till Death Us Do Part. But Tate/LaBianca was a much bigger and more sensational case. So the previous writing attempt was put off. Although he once said he co-wrote the book because no one else would, he had his writing partner, Curt Gentry, supplied with a seat in the court room each day. In other words, they were working on the book before anyone was convicted. (O’Neill, p. 109).

    Not only did Bugliosi see this case as a way to garner fame and riches; he also thought he could gain political position. For instance, at about the time his book was published, he ran for state Attorney General. He also ran twice for Los Angeles District Attorney. He lost all three races. Influential in those losses were two scandals. Both cases made it into the papers during his races for public office and were influential in his losses. (O’Neill, pp. 396-99) As I noted in my book, this is why Bugliosi did not like talking about his failed political career.

    VI

    As outlined above, Bugliosi did not like being questioned on his actions in regard to Tate/LaBianca. According to O’Neill, the prosecutor kept tabs on what the author was digging up. (O’Neill, p. 129) Melcher was also unhappy with his efforts and threatened him with a lawsuit. (p. 135) Bugliosi then sent a 34-page threatening letter to O’Neill’s publisher. (p. 406) This all indicates there was something to hide. O’Neill does an excellent job in exposing the unethical tactics that Bugliosi and the DA’s office indulged itself in to make sure they would ram the perpetrators into the gas chamber. Bugliosi took away the diminished capacity defense by getting Kasabian to conceal the use of drugs that night. The prosecutors completely used and wasted Susan Atkins by taking away her attorney and replacing him with a ringer. They used her without a written agreement to get a grand jury indictment. They then assigned two compromised journalists to sensationalize and market what she had said in order to contaminate the jury pool, not just in Los Angeles, but nationally and internationally. Bugliosi then covered up the real relationship between Manson and his Clan with the recording (Melcher) and film (Bergen) scene in LA. He resorted to the threat of deportation in order to suborn perjury from Hatami. In violation of the Brady rule, Bugliosi hid the important DeCarlo evidence from the defense. It is not an exaggeration to state that, taken in aggregate, Bugliosi should have faced a disbarment hearing for his conduct of this trial. The ends do not justify the means.

    As I said, all of the above work in Chaos seems to me to be quite good. Where I think O’Neill and Piepenbring falter is in the explication of what the actual motive was. When I briefly talked to O’Neill before the book was published, he told me words to the effect that he could not find any drug connection to the crime. After reading the book, this is a puzzling statement. Because he does note some of the drug aspects surrounding the case. For instance, he names the three Canadian drug dealers who Tate and Polanski knew and whom Bugliosi refused to name in Helter Skelter. He notes the dealing association between one of the victims, Voytek Frykowski, and this threesome. He also states that one of the Canadians—Pic Dawson—gained entry to the Polanski circle through a friendship with singer Cass Elliot. He writes that Sharon Tate was beginning to tire of Frykowski and his girlfriend Abigail Folger because of that drug angle. (O’Neill, pp. 59-67) And he brings in a new angle to this. He says that Charles Tacot, an infamous drug dealer with ties to military intelligence, was seen bringing Manson and two girls to a party in Santa Monica at Corinne Calvet’s home. The actress Calvet herself told the author this. If true, it is important since Tacot was close to the three Canadian drug suppliers. (O’Neill, p. 73. Tacot’s name is not in the index to Helter Skelter.)

    But there are some things that O’Neill and Piepenbring leave out. For instance, I could not find any enumeration of the drugs found at the scene of the Tate murders. Even Bugliosi listed that information. (DiEugenio, p. 15) He also does not describe the angle some have used to explain the death of Gary Hinman, which was the bad batch of mescaline capsules that he was supposed to have sold to Bobby Beausoleil. (O’Neill, p. 22; Stimson, pp. 136-7) Bugliosi and O’Neill say the motive was to rob Hinman of a $20,000 inheritance he came into; and that Manson ordered both the heist and the killing. (O’Neill, p. 143) Beausoleil has denied Manson did so many times. What gives his denial weight is that it is a denial against interest, since it would help him with the parole board if he did blame Manson for it. (Stimson, pp. 139-42)

    Another drug issue that O’Neill leaves out is the Joel Rostau angle, which both Schreck and Sanders have written about at length. Rostau was a mob connected Los Angeles drug supplier who had allegedly dropped off some product at the Polanski home that day and was supposed to return that evening. (DiEugenio, p. 16) Some have questioned this information since it comes from Rostau’s girlfriend, and Rostau later denied it. Why Rostau would admit such a thing to the authorities—potentially involving himself deeply in the case— escapes me. They also say well, see, Rostau passed a polygraph test given by the LAPD. This, as we shall see, is ludicrous. Another reason I tend to believe this information is that Rostau was found dead, his body stuffed in the trunk of his car at JFK, on the eve of the trial. Jay Sebring, one of the victims at Cielo Drive, was a client of Rostau’s and one of his clients—both for hair styling and drugs—was Steve McQueen. (DiEugenio, p. 16) Rostau’s girlfriend, the source of the info, worked for Sebring. Why does this have some import? Because after Melcher moved out, Nancy Sinatra complained about the hippie types and open dope smoking at the Polanski housewarming in March of 1969. At another party at Cass Elliot’s, Michael Caine said he was introduced to Manson. (DiEugenio, pp. 17-19) Finally, Ed Sanders wrote that there was evidence entered into the record that one of Manson’s followers had been burned on the purchase of a thousand dollars’ worth of the drug MDA from people at the Polanski home. MDA is the drug Frykowski was importing through the Canadians. Today a thousand dollars is valued at close to seven grand.

    As I noted in my prior discussion of this whole issue, Bugliosi clearly tried to divorce Manson and his Clan from the music/Hollywood/drug scene—to the point that, as O’Neill writes, the prosecutor never subpoenaed Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. (O’Neill, p. 114) Yet it was Wilson who convinced the Beach Boys to record Manson’s songs. It was Wilson who introduced Neil Young to Manson. It was Wilson who was the connecting point between Manson and Melcher. (O’Neill, p. 90) In fact, this Wilson link was so important that the FBI was monitoring Wilson and the Beach Boys after the murders. (O’Neill, p. 126)

    O’Neill and Piepenbring write that, as with Hinman, Manson ordered his Clan to kill those at the Cielo Drive and Waverly residences, i.e., Tate/LaBianca. (pp. 17-23) In his book, Goodbye Helter Skelter, George Stimson vigorously disputes this issue. (Stimson, pp. 210-25) Since, at the trial, there was no defense offered, there was no way to contest Bugliosi’s concept of Helter Skelter, and this is how Manson was convicted. Manson did not actually kill anyone in the Tate/LaBianca case. He was not even there when the murders took place. But in order to make his theory work, Bugliosi had to reel in Manson as the evil ringleader, and Helter Skelter is how he did it. But Stimson shows that, for example, Patricia Krenwinkel was not aware of what they were doing until they scaled the fence at Cielo, and then she thought it was a robbery. The idea was to secure funds to move out of LA and to Inyo County. Linda Kasabian also thought it was a robbery. Bobby Beausoleil never heard of Helter Skelter until the media started parroting it after the killings. In 1993, at a parole hearing for Clan member Bruce Davis, one of the assistant DA’s said that Bugliosi did a fine job selling a theory that almost no one else in the DA’s office bought into. O’Neill writes that Bugliosi consciously forged this bizarre idea by having Clan members testify to this thesis in exchange for lighter sentences and dropped charges. (O’Neill, p. 327)

    Stimson postulates the other major alternative to the crimes, namely that they were copycat killings. The idea was to weaken the case against Bobby Beausoleil, and perhaps get him out of jail. Because Beausoleil had tried to blame the killing of Hinman on the Black Panthers by imprinting a paw on the wall, if the others did the same at Cielo Drive and Waverly, the police would think they had the wrong man and the killers were still at large. This is why similar bloody imprints were left at both the Tate and LaBianca residences. After Atkins was used up and wasted by the prosecution, she stated that this was the real reason for the killings. Krenwinkel realized this was the motive also. Cathy Gilles and Sandra Good, both members of the Clan, also thought this was the reason. Oddly, Stimson concludes it was Kasabian who originally floated the idea. (Stimson, pp. 233-43)

    O’Neill and Piepenbring do not really declare a reason for the murders. But the book strongly suggests that Manson was a cut-out for a combination of the CIA and military intelligence, the idea being he was to incite terror and discredit the left. (See Chapter 14) The book bases this on two concepts. First, the authorities who were supposed to be monitoring Manson after he got out of Terminal Island never busted him for this parole violation; therefore, this must have been cleared from above with some special dispensation. But as Stimson notes in his book, before Manson was released from Terminal Island, he made it clear he did not want to be on a strict parole release. He would rather stay in prison. He did not want to be on a rigid reporting routine. (Stimson, p. 74)

    The book also makes a stab that somehow the infamous CIA mind control agent Jolly West was involved with Manson. But there is no direct connection ever made, and O’Neill admits this. (O’Neill, p. 368) Further, the argument that somehow Manson had absolute control over those at Spahn Ranch is undermined by the many comings and goings of the membership. How could that have happened if Manson had control of them? The book then steers into the JFK assassination, which West was associated with through Jack Ruby’s last prison days. The authors make some pretty amateurish mistakes in this part of the book. For example, Hale Boggs could not have testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, since he was dead before that committee was formed. (O’Neill, p. 384) If the writers were going to go down this path, the assassination they should have studied was not John Kennedy’s, but the Bobby Kennedy case. That was also very poorly investigated and prosecuted by the LAPD and the LA District Attorney’s office, and by some of the very men involved in the Tate/La Bianca case, like David Fitts. The police famously falsified polygraph exams in order to intimidate witnesses through CIA cut-outs like Hank Hernandez. People who they needed to make their lone gunman case, they passed. Those they needed to discredit, they flunked. And there most definitely was an element of mind control to that case. (see A Lie too Big to Fail, by Lisa Pease.) It really surprised me that O’Neill went down this path. It is even more surprising that he never asked me about it since I could have advised him to use the Bobby Kennedy case.

    In sum, this is two books. One is quite good: the part exposing a now discredited Vincent Bugliosi. The second part is not so good: where the authors try to salvage a new case from the rubble of Helter Skelter. But I would still say the book is worth reading. In fact, if one reads it in tandem with Stimson’s book, Goodbye Helter Skelter, those two readings would serve as a healthy antidote to the hoary and pernicious deceptions of Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.

    Go to Part 2

  • The Saga of Eugene B. Dinkin: Part Three

    The Saga of Eugene B. Dinkin: Part Three

    In 1963, PFC Eugene Barry Dinkin, Rose Cheramie, Richard Case Nagell, Joseph Milteer, U. S.  Air Force Sergeant David Christensen, and some others had some kind of advance knowledge that a plot about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was in the works. In this part 3 of my series entitled “The Saga of Eugene B. Dinkin”, I will show examples of some of the “psychological sets” that Dinkin retrieved and presented to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977. Also, I will present info he found about an Air Force Captain named T.D. Smith III.

    Here is a recap of some basic information about Dinkin’s attempt to alert the world to the plot that was in place to assassinate President Kennedy.

    Regular Army Private First Class Dinkin was serving in Mannsweiler, Germany in the 529th Ordinance Group. He held a secret security clearance for his job in the crypto section of his unit. Prior to enlisting, he had attended the Champaign/Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. He and his family had lived in Chicago. His studies at the university included psychology. His duties would have included deciphering cable traffic from the European Commands, NATO, and so forth.

    In the summer of 1963, Dinkin noticed material in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and other print publications that was negative toward Kennedy and his policies, implying that he was a weak president in dealing with the Russians. The examples that he found became more negative:  the suggestion being that if Kennedy were removed as president it would be a good thing.

    By October, Dinkin had found enough information—some of it subliminal—that he was convinced that a plot was in the works. One that was driven by some high-ranking members of the military, some right-wing economic groups, and with support by some national media outlets. (Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew too Much, p. 349)

    He did not tell his superior officers about this information—given that he believed that the military was involved. He did tell quite a few Army friends and some others that I noted in my original article. This information probably got back to Army authorities, because Dinkin was transferred to the Army Depot in Metz, France, where his duties did not require a secret clearance.

    Dinkin’s studies led him to conclude that the plot would happen around November 28, 1963 and that the assassination would be blamed on “a Communist or a Negro”. He then sent a registered letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When he got no reply, he decided to resort to other options. (Russell, pp. 349-50)

    In late October, 1963, Dinkin gathered up the material that he found in psychological sets—which Dinkin would be sensitive to because of his college studies. Psychological sets are a batch of information that is used to induce a particular state of mind in an individual being exposed to the mixture. The sets can be a series of pictures, events, written statements, or a combination of the aforementioned examples used by advertisers and others to implant ideas into the mind of the people that have been exposed to them. In advertising, of course, the goal would be to get you, the target audience, to be interested enough in the product or service that you would buy it.

    In a letter written by his mother to Robert Kennedy on December 29, 1963, she said that DInkin had figured out the outlines of a plot against JFK through what she called semantics studies of various journals, especially the Stars and Stripes military magazine. He predicted the date of the murder to be November 28th.  It should be noted that in his civil suit of 1975, DInkin wrote to CIA Director Bill Colby in July of that year. He requested all information that the Agency used for “subliminal and illusory distortion techniques in visual communications.  Include also any psychological studies regarding the propaganda effectiveness of such techniques.” That letter was not declassified until 1998, the last year of the ARRB’s existence.

    Dinkin took his material to Luxembourg, where he visited the American Embassy. There, he tried to see Ambassador William R. Rivkin, but Rivkin was out of the embassy at the time. The Charge d’Affaires, a Mr. Cunningham, refused to read or keep a copy of the data that Dinkin had with him. (Russell, p. 350) Dinkin did share some of the material with a U.S. Marine guard at the embassy.

    Disappointed, Dinkin returned to his unit. Shortly after his return, he learned that he had been scheduled to take a psych exam. This caused him to believe that his superiors had learned about his visit to the American Embassy in Luxembourg. (Since CIA Stations in Europe are located at or near the embassies, it is likely that the CIA, also knew of his attempt to pass on his assassination material.)

    Shortly after his return to his unit, Dinkin decided to try one more time to get his info to someone who could warn President Kennedy. He went AWOL to Switzerland to find some agency that would help. He visited a number of offices including the newspaper, the Geneva Diplomat, and Time/Life Europe. There, a stringer, Alex des Fontaines, and another female stringer took down the details of Dinkin’s story. (Letter from Richard Helms to the Warren Commission, of May 19, 1964.)  As Noel Twyman has shown, the Helms letter to the Commission was not declassified until 1976.  And at that time, Dinkin’s name was redacted.  It was not released in full until 1992 by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). (Twyman, Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Vol. 4, No. 1)

    There was another source which was used by Helms before he wrote his letter to the Commission.  This was a teletype that was not declassified until 1995 by the ARRB. It was a report by John Whitten, who was the original CIA liaison to the Commission. In that source it was revealed that, about three weeks in advance, Dinkin had predicted the assassination of JFK would take place in Texas. That particular piece of information appears to be missing from the Helms letter. (See Twyman)

    Dinkin also went to Germany, but could not find anyone to pass his info on to the White House.  Even the editor of Overseas Weekly would not take his claim seriously. The editor told him to return to his base in order to avoid an AWOL charge.

    When he returned to his unit at Metz, France, he was arrested and delivered to the stockade by the Army.  This was on November 13, nine days before the assassination. He was then placed in a mental hospital in a closed ward. After the assassination, and while Dinkin was in custody, he was visited by a man who identified himself as a Defense Department official. This man questioned Dinkin about how he knew about the assassination. The official also asked Dinkin for his research material, saying that he would give Dinkin a receipt. Dinkin told him where the material was stored at his barracks. Later when he was able to go to the barracks, he discovered the data was gone and the official did not return to give him a receipt. Had the FBI and Secret Service wanted to identify the DOD official, they could have easily done so. Since Dinkin was in the stockade, anyone visiting him would have had to provide identification and then sign in. The FBI and Secret Service, working for the Warren Commission, did not interview the soldiers, embassy officials and others that Dinkin had shared his information with.  The Paris Legation of the FBI inadvertently acknowledged the fact that Dinkin had told his story to several entities. Not long after his psych exam, Dinkin was ordered to report to Walter Reed Army Hospital in the Washington, D.C., area.

    Here I will describe some of the examples of “psychological sets” that Dinkin found in various print media sources.

    One psych-set demo Dinkin found that had an implied threat to the president was in the July 2, 1963, edition of Look Magazine. The title of an article inside was, “Why Kennedy’s in Trouble”. The title was inside a black border, but the print title was colored blood red.

    The article inside the magazine referred to President Kennedy as a new Adam. The analogy would be that Kennedy, like Adam being kicked out of Eden, would be kicked out of his place, the White House. The inside title, “Why There’s Trouble in the New Frontier” is partly colored blood red.

    A second example Dinkin deemed significant was from July 5, 1963 edition of Life Magazine. In it, there is a photo of President Kennedy riding in a motorcade in Germany. JFK is standing in the limousine looking back and to the side. There is a dark spot/defect on the back of his head that looks like a chunk of his scalp is missing.

    Inside this edition there are pictures of the president’s visit to Ireland. In one of the photos, there is a gravestone with the name John Kennedy on it. 

    Another article was in the October 15th edition of Stars and Stripes, titled, “Prospective Bosses Fire Jack with Enthusiasm.” The men in both articles resemble Lee Oswald, they are both named pierce/peirce, which can mean putting a hole in something.  President Kennedy was often referred to as “Jack.”

    On the management staff of Life Magazine, during the time that Life bought the Zapruder film and kept it from the public for more than 10 years, was C. D. Jackson. Jackson was President Eisenhower’s psychological warfare expert. Jackson would have known executive staff in all of the print media where these psychological sets were found by Dinkin. If Jackson was instrumental in the handling of the purchase Zapruder film and subsequent unusual happenings to the film at that very powerful magazine.  For instance, their refusal to depict the rearward head moment of the president as he was struck at Z frame 313. And their explanation of a frontal neck wound in Kennedy by saying he was turned around looking at the Texas School Book Depository when that bullet struck.  As they must have known, Kennedy is never rotated like that in the film.

    While her son Eugene was in the psych ward of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Mrs. Dinkin wrote to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. In the letter, she noted that Eugene had asked her to write to Robert Kennedy.  Mrs. Dinkin said that Eugene knows through his semantic studies how the assassination was planned and that if you can send someone to talk to him some very important information may come of this. Her letter did not reach Robert Kennedy, but was intercepted by Assistant Attorney General  Herbert “Jack” Miller.  At this time, Jack Miller had been appointed liaison to the Warren Commission by Deputy Assistant General Nicholas Katzenbach. Miller coordinated the investigation in Dallas into the murder of the President.

    Ironically, if the FBI had conducted an honest investigation, Miller as liaison would have been the perfect person for Mrs. Dinkin to have contacted. However, with Miller in control, the FBI hid much important information, did not interview witnesses that could have substantiated Dinkin’s foreknowledge of the plot, and kept many of the films and photos that were taken during the shooting in Dealey Plaza from the public.

    Miller, in his answer to Mrs. Dinkin’s letter requesting that someone from the Justice Department go to Walter Reed Hospital to talk to Eugene, lied to her by saying that the Justice Department could not contact Eugene, because he was in the military. President Johnson’s Executive Order creating the Warren Commission gave the FBI, the investigative arm of the Justice Department, the power to find and collect all information about the assassination from any and all agencies.

     (In 1967, as James DiEugenio details in Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, during New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s re-investigation of the murder of the President, Miller attempted to sandbag Garrison’s probe.)

    During the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation into the murders of President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Eugene contacted Jacqueline Hess, the Asst. Director of the committee. He offered to help the investigation by providing information that he had found. He was not called as a witness and his offer of information was rebuffed by a form letter from HSCA Director Robert Blakey.

    There are significant differences between Dinkin’s military record and the information that the FBI supplied to the Warren Commission. I will cover that and some other series.

    I hope eventually that Mr. Dinkin gets the posthumous recognition that he deserves.

  • NewsBuster: Busting Up the JFK-Assassination Research Findings

    NewsBuster: Busting Up the JFK-Assassination Research Findings

    NewsBuster is a media watchdog that styles itself as “Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias.” It runs as a kind of blog of the Media Research Center (MRC), founded in 1987 by American conservative writer and activist Leo Brent Bozell III, and based in Reston, Virginia. Bozell was the nephew of the late conservative columnist and TV personality William Buckley. Before starting the MRC, Bozell ran the Conservative Political Action Conference.

    This MRC blog is having a good time amidst the mainstream media meltdown as Robert Mueller’s Russia Gate probe was completed without any evidence of Trump-Putin collusion during the 2016 elections. One of its contributing writers, Jeffrey Lord, has branded the reaction of MSM against Attorney General William Bar as “grassy knoll media attack,” after Barr added to the no collusion finding that there had indeed been spying on the Trump campaign.

    According to Lord, “grassy knoll” was once upon a time an American slang reference to the “conspiracy theorists” who argued that President John F. Kennedy was not killed by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, but by “assassin or assassins firing from the grassy knoll” in Dealey Plaza. Adding insult to injury, Lord asserted that the Warren Commission “concluded otherwise as there was no proof, but this didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists.”

    Ever after, Lord pointed out, “grassy knoll” became a part of the American vernacular indicating that someone was a bit of a wacko, and a theorist of whatever was just a nutty conspiracy. He seems unaware of the fact that the Warren Report only got one thing right, as Jim DiEugenio remarked in his introduction to the series on its 50th Anniversary, namely that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And that was because the occurrence was captured live on TV.

    In contrast to Lord, most Americans refuse to swallow the Warren Commission’s pill since the very day of the killing, as Gallup has been tracking decade after decade. Nonetheless, questioning the lone gunman hypothesis has become ingrained in the American culture not as a matter of opinion, but as a simple examination of the evidence.

    Witness Accounts

    Literally hundreds of people witnessed the shooting at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. The Warren Commission failed to do any rigorous and systematic analysis of their accounts. Nor did it lend any credence to those who said the shots came from the grassy knoll. A survey by History Matters found that 52 witnesses placed the source of the shots there, 48 at the Texas School Books Depository (TSBD), 5 in both locations, 4 elsewhere and 37 couldn’t tell. But most of all, 21 witnesses with crime scene training —from Secret Service men to Dallas Police officers— said their reaction to the gunfire was to go search the grassy knoll. The Warren Commission ignored all their testimonies and reported there was “no evidence” of a shot from there.

    Forensic Analysis

    Instead of focusing on the X-rays and photographs, the Warren Commission also admitted into evidence a drawing that did not accurately depict Kennedy’s head wounds. The Zapruder film contradicts the drawing, which has Kennedy leaning forward in a wrong position and the path of the bullet through the head wounds descending from back to front, as it would have been fired from the TSBD. The Zapruder film’ s frame before the fatal shot shows Kennedy in the right position and so the path of the bullet clearly rises from back to front.

    Thusly, Lord faces the devastating dilemma of all the advocates of the Warren Commission. If the drawing accurately represents Kennedy’s head wounds, then the Zapruder film was altered, hence conspiracy, hence cover-up. On the contrary, if the Zapruder film is authentic, then the drawing is a false representation, hence conspiracy, hence cover-up.

    A Homeopathic Approach

    Ironically, Lord fell into the delicate position of taking the grassy knoll reference with a blatant bias in a blog expressly devoted to expose and to combat bias.

    The grassy knoll is linked neither to a wacko, nor to a nutty conspiracy theory, but to the conspiracy fact proven (and overlooked by both the U.S. government and the MSM) by mere observation of the Zapruder film: a shot from the front entered at Kennedy’s right temple and blew out his right occipital, followed by instant back spatter and a back and to the left movement like a billiard-shot response in accordance to the basic laws of physics.

    Conspiracy and cover-up in the JFK assassination are not theoretical questions, but findings derived from serious research. What we have with Mr. Lord is a right-hand-thread wingnut trying to tighten the MSM —due to their bias on Attorney General Barr— by distorting the actual meaning of the grassy knoll in modern U.S. history, which is the claim of transparency and facts in the JFK assassination, as Lord himself is supposedly doing regarding the Trump-Russia collusion.

    Addendum

    It should be noted that in the matter of the JFK murder, left at times meets right. Michelle Goldberg has written for Salon, The Nation and The American Prospect. On April 19, 2019, Goldberg wrote an editorial for the New York Times about the Mueller Report. She wrote that she had desperately hoped for clarity,

    ….a rough public consensus on what had happened in the 2016 election and its aftermath, akin to the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John Kennedy….A set of facts that serious people could agree on, leaving conspiracy theories at least somewhat marginalized.

    Please observe that whereas Lord praises the Mueller Report for his political agenda of exonerating President Trump, Goldberg praises it for her agenda of impeaching Trump. Which makes their mutual reference to the Warren Report even sillier. Especially with both writers holding up the report as a model of clarity capable of dispelling rumors or countering other renditions of the crime. Goldberg is even more humorous when she writes that the report presented “a set of facts that serious people could agree on”. This is the last thing the report does.

  • The Hidden Hand: The Assassination of Malcolm X

    The Hidden Hand: The Assassination of Malcolm X

    “I know, too, that I could suddenly die at the hands of some white racists. Or I could die at the hands of some Negro hired by the white man.”

    ~ from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

    Conspiracy theories have engulfed the four major American political assassinations of the 1960s since inception. Even before the controversial Warren Commission was empaneled, reasonable doubts emerged about Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

    Within days of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968, his confidantes and constituents expressed skepticism over government claims that James Earl Ray, an ill-educated, inept stick-up artist from the south side of St. Louis acted alone.1

    When Robert F. Kennedy was felled inside a Los Angeles hotel during a campaign stop on June 6, 1968, many Americans questioned the official version about a poor Palestinian immigrant shooting the presidential candidate in the back of the head, primarily because key eyewitnesses stated that Sirhan Bishira Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired.2

    More than half a century later, government accounts stick to the “lone assassin” theory in those cases despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Most Americans harbor the delusion that every government but their own assassinates its citizens on occasion.

    Only in the fourth case, the assassination of Malcolm X, is there incontrovertible proof of conspiracy. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, a charismatic African American revolutionary, was shot to death inside New York City’s Audubon Ballroom just seconds after greeting a crowd of about three hundred. To many, the assassination was the predictable culmination of a battle between him and the black separatist sect that ousted him eleven months earlier.3

    Once home to Rabbi Max Koppel and Congregation Emes Wozedek in the 1930s4, the Audubon was located in a Washington Heights neighborhood bordering Harlem, where Malcolm had until recently headed Muhammad’s Mosque Number Seven. (Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska in May 1925.)

    Now an orthodox Muslim, Malcolm used the Audubon for weekly rallies sponsored by his newly formed group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The group was patterned after the Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963 with the goal of uniting African nations that had recently wrestled their independence from American, Russian, and European colonialism.

    Both the OAU and OAAU had a common goal: to promote Pan Africanism as a vehicle for alleviating economic, social, and political oppression. Sensing that his organizational skills, intelligence, and understanding of American politics could be instrumental in altering the world’s geopolitical landscape, African, Asian, and Latin American leaders had begun appealing to Malcolm X to champion their causes.

    An electrifying orator, Malcolm had impressed Third World leaders during two extended trips to Africa in April and July of 19645. The first trip occurred weeks after his official break with the so-called Nation of Islam, a quasi-religious group promoting segregation in a quixotic quest for a separate nation within America exclusively for African Americans.

    Malcolm X drew large crowds during rallies in Harlem. His popularity was seen as a national security risk by the FBI.

    Malcolm quit the sect in March 1964 after discovering that Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the NOI who claimed to be a divine prophet, had fathered over half a dozen children by at least six of his former personal secretaries, some of them teenagers. Muhammad denied the allegations and blamed Malcolm for spreading malicious “rumors,” precipitating helter-skelter plots against Malcolm, former national representative of the NOI.

    Nearly a dozen attempts were made on his life between December 1963, when Malcolm was suspended as spokesman for the NOI, and February 1965. He was ostensibly excommunicated for describing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” (At the time, the Central Intelligence Agency was suspected of the actual or attempted assassination of numerous Asian, African and Latin American heads of state, among them Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, and Fidel Castro of Cuba.6 As such, Malcolm postulated that American violence against foreign leaders had boomeranged and claimed the life of an American president.)

    Newspaper account of the suspension of Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam in December 1963.

    But the underlying cause of his suspension was a scandal that had shaken Malcolm to his core. In 1962, a rumor began circulating that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children by several of his secretaries. Since nonmarital and extramarital sexual relations were verboten and grounds for expulsion, almost no one in the sect believed it, and certainly not about their “infallible” messiah (Muhammad claimed to have been educated by God in “the person of Wallace D. Fard,” founder of the Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1931.) For them, anyone making such an outlandish claim was a demonic hypocrite “worthy of death.” Like the majority of NOI members, Malcolm ignored the salacious gossip. In the fall of 1963, however, the rumors were confirmed by three unimpeachable sources: Wilfred X Little, minister of the Detroit NOI mosque and Malcolm’s oldest brother, and Wallace Muhammad, Elijah’s son and putative heir to the throne upon his father’s demise. The third source was none other than Elijah himself.7

    UPI story broke in early 1964 about paternity suit filed by two young black women against Elijah Muhammad, the married leader of the Nation of Islam.

    In explaining his actions during a private meeting at his Chicago mansion, Elijah said that his extramarital affairs were merely the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. “When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David,” he said. “You read about Noah, who got drunk—that’s me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things.”8 Weeks after recovering from the paralyzing shock of the confession, Malcolm suggested that Elijah permit his ministers to tell their assemblies that his moral transgressions were akin to what other prophets had done and yet held favor with God.

    Thinking that Elijah had approved, Malcolm told several prominent ministers that the rumors were true, and that they should explain it in biblical terms to followers. Several ministers, among them Louis X [Farrakhan] of Boston, called Muhammad and told him that Malcolm was one of the “hypocrites” spreading the rumors about the secretaries.9

    Louis Farrakhan denounced Malcolm X in Muhammad Speaks newspaper as the “chief hypocrite” in the Nation of Islam and said that Malcolm was “worthy of death.”

    Elijah summoned Malcolm to his home in Phoenix and castigated him for telling them. Malcolm apologized, saying that he thought he had Elijah’s approval. Elijah retorted that he had in no way approved of Malcolm’s suggestion and said that his three-month suspension for the JFK comment was now indefinite. A few days after the meeting, Elijah contacted several prominent East Coast members of the NOI and said that Malcolm was the sect’s chief hypocrite and that it was therefore time to “close his eyes.”10

    Declassified FBI memo summarizes wiretapped telephone conversation between NOI leader Elijah Muhammad and a Boston mosque official in which murdering Malcolm X is discussed.

    Several attempts to kill Malcolm soon followed. When he discovered from a prominent Muslim that Elijah had sanctioned the plots to kill him, Malcolm publicly denounced the Nation of Islam and warned that any further attempts to harm him would be met with the biblical justice. He vowed to exact an “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.”

    Malcolm was bearing a heavy cross when he arrived at the Audubon on February 21. The war with Muhammad had taken its toll; it was one man fighting a legion of zealots. Associates were alarmed by his appearance that morning. They recall him looking haggard, anxious, and exhausted.

    The most notable attempt to kill him had occurred seven days earlier. Around two o’clock on Valentine’s Day, Molotov cocktails crashed through bedroom windows of his tiny Elmhurst home. If his four-year-old daughter had not been awakened by breaking glass, Malcolm and his wife Betty would have perished along with their four daughters. Betty was pregnant with twin girls.11

    An around-the-clock harassment campaign which followed the bombing had unnerved Malcolm. He told several colleagues that he could understand why Elijah Muhammad wanted him silenced, but he could not fathom the religious leader approving the murder of women and children to accomplish that goal.

    He was debilitated by the fire not only because of the near-death of his entire family, but because, he said, the fire revealed that the NOI’s attempts were being aided by the New York Police Department, the New York Fire Department and possibly even the federal government. “The police in this country know what’s going on. This is a conspiracy that leads to my death,” he said at a press conference.12

    A few hours after the fire, investigators claimed that they discovered an unlit Molotov cocktail on a dresser in his daughters’ bedroom. The explosive concoction was in a whiskey bottle. Police officials insinuated that Malcolm might have set the house on fire because he had been evicted days earlier by court order. NOI officials who filed the lawsuit repeated the claim, noting that Malcolm’s home legally belonged to the sect.

    New York Police Department and Nation of Islam both argue that Malcolm X firebombed his own house.

    Malcolm and Betty dismissed the speculation as nonsense. To begin with, Betty replied, they would never have alcoholic beverages in their home. Malcolm said angrily that only a madman would set fire to his home with his family asleep inside. Moreover, a black fireman who secretly met with them said that he saw a white man in a firefighter’s uniform place the Molotov cocktail on the dresser after the fire was extinguished. The revelation nearly caused Malcolm to have a psychotic break, the reason being that he knew his death was both imminent and inevitable if governmental forces were in cahoots with the Nation of Islam. A close friend noticed his agitated state and arranged for him to see a doctor to get something to help him sleep.

    On the evening of February 20, Malcolm checked into a downtown New York hotel under a pseudonym. Nearly undone by the arson attack, he took a sedative and fell asleep. His rest was interrupted, however, by the loud ringing telephone. “Wake up, Mr. Small,” the caller said before hanging up. The call was ominous because only his wife and two close aides knew where Malcolm planned to stay that evening. Unbeknownst to him, a group of Muslims had shown up at the hotel a few hours after he checked in, demanding the desk clerk to tell them which room Malcolm X was in. The clerk said he knew nothing about Malcolm X being there.

    At three o’clock on February 21, with his wife and children looking on, Malcolm stood at the podium on the ballroom’s stage. “As Salaam Alaikum,” he said, meaning “peace be with you.”

    Suddenly, two young black men seated in the middle of the room stood up and started arguing. “Niggah,” one of them said, “get your hand out of my pocket!”

    “Hold it, hold it, hold it,” Malcolm pleaded. Three young black men on the center front row stood up, removed firearms from underneath their coats, and fired at Malcolm. Two were armed with handguns while the third had a sawed-off shotgun. A tall tout black man with the shotgun crouched before the stage and fired twice, striking Malcolm in the chest. Three pellets landed near his heart. The force of the blasts hurled Malcolm backward, and his head hit the stage with a loud thud.

    During the ensuing pandemonium, the shotgun assassin wrapped up his weapon in a jacket and dropped it on the ballroom floor as he escaped. The assassin with the German Luger fired at crowd members trying to capture him as he made his escape. The third gunman wasn’t so lucky. He was shot in his left thigh by a member of Malcolm’s security team. As he fell, he dropped his .45 automatic and was tackled and beaten by the crowd.

    On the afternoon of the assassination, police were conspicuous by their absence. On past Sundays, there were nearly two dozen officers present in and outside the Audubon. Police arrived as people dragged the man outside. As police tangled with Malcolm’s supporters for custody of the assassin, the other two assassins and the two men who caused the initial distraction escaped.

    Thomas Hagan, the wounded suspect, refused to divulge the name of his accomplices. Eyewitnesses, however, gave police descriptions consistent enough to lead them to Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, lieutenants in the Harlem mosque where Malcolm was minister until his ouster. Butler and Johnson were well-known as enforcers with a reputation for brutalizing wayward Muslims.13 In fact, they were awaiting trial for attempted murder of Benjamin Brown, a NOI defector who had recently opened his own storefront mosque. When the defector refused to remove a photograph of Elijah Muhammad from the front window, Butler and Johnson went to his home. After he opened the door, Johnson shot him at point-blank range in his chest with a rifle. The defector somehow managed to survive the blast.

    Butler was arrested on February 26 and Johnson shortly thereafter. All three suspects pleaded not guilty. Following a joint trial one year later, a jury found them all guilty of the assassination and each received a life sentence.14

    Case closed, or so it seemed.

    Butler and Johnson both steadfastly denied involvement in the assassination. Their case was buttressed by some of Malcolm’s chief aides, who claimed that it would have been virtually impossible for Butler and Johnson to have entered the ballroom that day without detection by the OAU’s security team.

    But Johnson and Butler had shaky alibis. Both men, incredulously, claimed to have been immobilized by leg injuries at the time of the assassination. Johnson’s case was helped somewhat by eyewitness accounts, nearly all of whom described the shotgun assassin as a tall, stout, dark-skinned black man sporting a short beard.15 Johnson had a caramel-colored complexion, was of average height, and clean-shaven but for a pencil mustache. Conversely, eyewitnesses described Butler perfectly. One of them, Sharon X Poole, even said that she recognized him as a fellow member of the Harlem mosque.16

    Although Norman 3X Butler denies involvement in the assassination of Malcolm X, he appears on film outside the Audubon Ballroom moments after the murder, attempting to get a look at Malcolm X’s body.”

    For ten years, there was little to refute the official version of the assassination. Malcolm X was killed as a result of a feud with Elijah Muhammad stood as gospel despite suspicions by his admirers and Third World leaders of American government involvement.

    In March 1971, white radicals broke into the FBI’s document storage facility in Media, Pennsylvania and made off with a goldmine of files detailing the agency’s decades-long clandestine wars against political and social organizations of every hue and stripe, the Ku Klux Klan and Nation of Islam among them.17 A counterintelligence program—COINTELPRO—which started in the 1950s to combat the spread of Communism in America, soon engulfed thousands of groups, even the benign National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

    When several thousand pages were released from the COINTELPRO operations against Malcolm X in the early 1980s, they revealed a massive campaign against him and the Nation of Islam. The initial campaign, started in 1953 (a year after he was released from prison), was intended to retard the astronomical growth of the Nation of Islam.

    They also show that in 1964, following a complaint by White House aide Benjamin H. Read that Malcolm’s affiliations with Third World leaders were damaging American foreign policy in Africa, the Central Intelligence Agency was asked to consider killing Malcolm X.

    White House official Benjamin H. Read asked the CIA to consider treating Malcolm X the way it did hostile foreign leaders.

    Richard Helms, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, told Read that the CIA had serious qualms about killing American citizens but would nonetheless explore the possibility of neutralizing Malcolm.18 The FBI had been spying on the Nation of Islam since the 1940s after its male members refused to register under the Selective Service Act. By 1964, it had informants in the highest ranks of not only the NOI but inside Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity as well.

    In addition to being under surveillance by the CIA and FBI, the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (nicknamed BOSSI) had Malcolm under close surveillance and had several high level informants in the OAU. At least one of them, Eugene “Gene” Roberts, was a member of Malcolm’s security detail and on duty at the hour of reckoning.

    Gene Robert (in circle) was an undercover NYPD detective who infiltrated Malcolm X’s organization and became part of his main security detail.

    Malcolm X had been on around-the-clock surveillance by the FBI for more than six months before his assassination. Transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversation between Malcolm X and other prominent black activists are included in the files, some of them heavily redacted.

    Declassified FBI documents include a detailed account of the FBI sending anonymous letters to Elijah Muhammad’s wife and NOI ministers across the country about Elijah’s extramarital activities. Bureau agents bragged in several memos about starting the disputes which led to the ouster of Malcolm from the NOI and fomenting a war between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad.19

    The FBI was alarmed that Malcolm X had begun courting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders following his ouster from the Nation of Islam in March 1964.

    While the CIA and State Department have been reticent to release many documents from their files on Malcolm X, those released thus far reveal an urgent counterintelligence campaign to “neutralize” Malcolm X after several African and Arab countries offered him financial support in 1964 and vowed to support his petition to the United Nations in which he accused the United States government of violating the human rights of African Americans.

    Along with Che Guevara, the physician-turned-revolutionary who played a major role in Cuban revolution of 1959, Malcolm X was expected to be one of the preeminent attractions at the Second Asian-African Congress commencing on February 26 in Algeria. The conference was postponed due to the overthrow of Ahmed Ben Bella, an event most reputable historians attribute to the CIA and British intelligence.20 Ben Bella and Malcolm had become friends, and the Algerian leader was a staunch supporter of both Malcolm X and the civil rights movement.

    The CIA was concerned about Malcolm X’s impact on US foreign policy in Africa.

    Declassified FBI and CIA documents suggest that the American government was extremely eager to prevent Malcolm from attending at all cost. He was assassinated five days before the aborted assembly. As it happens, Malcolm’s assassins were recruited in late June 1964, within weeks of the White House’s request to the CIA to handle Malcolm X the way it did hostile foreign leaders.21

    In April 2011, Newark NOI member William Bradley was identified as the shotgun shooter. The day after the New York Times asked the Justice Department whether it would investigate the allegations against Bradley, a spokesman said that there was nothing the FBI could do because no federal laws had been violated.

    William Bradley (standing, in circle), the man who fired the shotgun at Malcolm X, was captured on film outside the Audubon as he attempted to free assassin Thomas Hagan from police and angry Malcolm X supporters.

    That was, of course, an egregious error. The assassins had traveled from New Jersey to New York to assassinate Malcolm X. Traveling across state lines to commit murder is a federal crime. And under both federal and state laws, there is no statute of limitations for murder.

    The Justice Department’s hasty decision to reject reopening the case involving the civil rights movement leader Malcolm X was predictable. After all, it was revealed more than three decades ago that the man seen in the famous Life magazine photo administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Malcolm X was none other than Gene Roberts, an undercover detective for BOSSI. Moreover, a top aide to Elijah Muhammad was linked to the FBI. Although he has denied any involvement with the FBI and the Malcolm X assassination, prosecutors of Malcolm’s assassins had an eyewitness willing to testify that the aide met at the Americana Hotel with the assassins the night before the assassination.

    Notes

    1 Schechtman, Jeff. “The Plot to Kill King: A Look at Who Really Killed Martin Luther King,” April 4, 2018. https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/04/04/the-fbi-in-peace-war-and-assassination/.

    2 “The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination,” https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Robert_Kennedy_Assassination.html

    3 Drash, Wayne. “Malcolm X Killer Freed After 44 Years,” April 28, 2010. http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/26/malcolmx.killer/index.html

    4 Lowenstein, Steven M. Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). pp. 109-110. Also see:   http://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/audubon-ballroom.   Rabbi Mas Koppel, founder of the Emes Wozedek Congregation, was murdered in 1974. Seigel, Max H. “Neighbors Call Slain Rabbi Friend to All,” New York Times, December 18, 1974, A49.

    5 Jacobs, Sean. “When Malcolm X Went to Africa,” June 2011. https://africasacountry.com/2011/06/malcolm-x-in-africa1/

    6 “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” (1975). https://cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp83-01042r000200090002-0

    7 Haley, Alex with Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965) See, in general, ‘Chapter 16: Out.”

    8 Ibid.

    9 Ibid.

    10 FBI Main file on Malcolm X, memo dated March 23, 1964.

    11 “Malcolm X’s Home is Firebombed in 1965,” (reprint) New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/malcolm-x-home-firebombed-1965-article-1.2529655

    12 Scott, Stanley. “Recalls Prophetic Words: Newsman Witnesses Murder of Malcolm X,” Desert Sun, February 22, 1965, pA6.

    13 Newman, Andy and John Eligon. “Killer of Malcolm X is Granted Parole,” New York Times, March 19, 2010, A13.

    14 “Three Men Convicted of the Assassination of Malcolm X in 1966,” New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/men-convicted-murder-malcolm-x-1996-article-1.2558206

    15 Based on documentary footage from local television news in the archives of the University of Los Angeles Film School.

    16 Kihss, Peter. “Malcolm X Shot to Death at Rally Here; Three Other Negroes Wounded—One is Held in Killing,” New York Times, February 22, 1965, A1.

    17 Mazzetti, Mark. Burglars Who Took On FBI Abandon Shadows,” New York Times, January 7, 2014, p. A1.

    18 CIA file on Malcolm X, memo from Richard Helms dated August 11, 1964.

    19 See, in general, the FBI New York Field Office file on Malcolm X and the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations file on Malcolm X.

    20 Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

    21 The assassins, all of them from the Newark mosque of the Nation of Islam, was recruited in late June 1964, according to Thomas Hagan.

    Also of interest:

  • The Alex Jones Affair

    The Alex Jones Affair

    Alex Jones has been featured prominently in the news of late for a number of reasons. None of them very flattering to his cause.

    Jones has been removed from several social media sites, e.g., Facebook, Apple’s App Store, YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify. Twitter was holding out on removing him. But under pressure from the MSM and Congress, they also decided to remove him. This is probably related to the fact that Jones has been involved in several legal actions of late.

    Early last year, Jones was threatened with a libel suit by James Alefantis who owns the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria.   Jones had been pushing the wild Pizzagate conspiracy theory. A month later, Jones retracted his accusations and apologized. The same thing happened with Chobani yogurt. He accused them of employing refugees and being connected to child sexual assaults and a rise in TB. Again, Jones was threatened with a lawsuit. Again, he issued a retraction and an apology.

    But perhaps the most infamous accusations Jones has made concern the Charlottesville racist rally and the Sandy Hook shootings. In 2012, the latter took the lives of 20 first graders and 6 adults. Like Jim Fetzer, Jones took the stance that the incident was a government-backed hoax, and that the families of the murdered students were actually actors. And as with Fetzer, this accusation is wild, unfounded and easily shown to be ersatz.

    The parents’ lawsuits are based on the charge that in the five years since the event, they have been harassed and threatened by those who listen and buy into the radio and TV speeches of Mr. Jones. In fact, just recently, Jones has been accused by the lawyer for one of those plaintiffs of removing evidence from his site, Infowars, in which he did more of the same. (The Independent, August 18, 2018).

    This year, Brennan Gilmore also sued Jones. Gilmore took a video in Charlottesville of a car smashing backwards into anti-racist protestors at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. That assault killed Heather Heyer and injured almost 20 other persons. Gilmore happens to live in the city and was on the scene when it happened. He gave his cell phone video to the police and posted it on social media.

    As a result, Jones’ Infowars began to broadcast that ‘They had known CIA and State Department officials in Charlottesville … first being on MSNBC, CNN, NBC. The mayor is involved. … Everybody is a cut out.” They then insinuated that several of the participants in the operation were on the payroll of George Soros. (see this Washington Post article)

    Gilmore has stated that he has also been harassed and threatened by some of Jones’ listeners. And for the same reason. Jones accused him of being part of some kind of false flag operation in order to enable a coup against President Trump. (watch here)

    This is a complex and sensitive subject. Yes, there is the first amendment, which we all value and treasure. But as more than one writer has noted, the first amendment is not absolute. One cannot use it to harm another citizen or endanger his health and well-being. And this may be why these corporate entities heave decided to back away from carrying Jones: fear of legal exposure.

    As the New York Times has reported during his recent divorce proceedings, Jones had become a millionaire due to his radio and TV programming. His programs are distributed nationally though Genesis Communications Network to almost 100 AM and FM radio stations. It is estimated that he has about 2 million weekly viewers/listeners. The Rolling Stone estimated that he has a larger online following than Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh combined. (March 20, 2011)

    This site (CTKA) has reported on Alex Jones several times in the past. Our main author on that subject was Seamus Coogan. Seamus took the time to actually listen to the man’s program for hours on end and to investigate his various web sites. To say the least, when it comes to the JFK case, Jones does not review his information very well. What makes that so puzzling is that there is more good information out there on that case than almost anything else Jones covers.

    Jones is a very successful showman. No one plays the outrage card as well as he does. I saw him do this firsthand in Dallas at the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Dealey Plaza had been completely cordoned off at all intersections. The police guarded the obstructed entryways. Jones had pinned up signs outside that area that accused Lyndon Johnson of killing Kennedy—he had bought Barr McClellan hook, line and sinker—and was yelling at the police guardians with his famous bullhorn. To put it mildly, I failed to see how this helped our cause.

    Jones has made millions off the exposure of his radio and TV shows and his online presence. He knows how to market products to the millions of visitors he gets each week. The reason he gets those visitors is not because of the quality of information he broadcasts. In fact, once the reader reads Seamus Coogan’s articles, he will see that Jones has very little aptitude for scholarship. That is not what he is about.

    What Jones has tapped into is the aimless skepticism that much of the public, especially youths, have about both the MSM and our political system. He often calls them discredited. Which is largely accurate. The problem with Jones is simple: So is he. It is one thing to blow apart the MSM. That is pretty easy. But with his millions, Jones could have built a true alternative to them, on the order of the late, lamented Ramparts magazine. He did not. In fact, he has failed to construct any kind of credible alternative: either in his work or his overall political philosophy. In his admiration of Donald Trump, he comes off as some kind of gadfly conservative Libertarian. One who is so maniacally pro-gun rights and NRA, that when you push the right buttons, he loses control and becomes his own worst enemy. (watch here)

    But the main problem for Alex Jones is the basis of his information. As Seamus shows, he is so scattershot in his approach and so careless in his renderings that he is hard to take seriously. Which is why he fails to offer any viable alternative.

    Of course, there is an element of national tragedy in all this. Pity the country that has to choose between Jones and CNN.

    ~Jim DiEugenio

    From the CTKA archives: Seamus Coogan on Alex Jones

     

  • Jim DiEugenio on the King Trial and Media Coverage

    Jim DiEugenio on the King Trial and Media Coverage

    OHH:

    James DiEugenio is the editor and publisher of kennedysandking.com and he’s the author of The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. He’s also a noted researcher of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. People are aware there was a civil trial in 1999 led by the King family in which the jury found that the assassination was a result of a conspiracy.

    I’ve been wanting to talk about this case for a long time so I found an article that Jim wrote at the time about the media’s reaction to the trial’s outcome.

    It’s sort of a timeless subject to see how the press deals with events that run counter to their narratives, and Jim is always brilliant at dissecting the tropes that the media uses to kind of get around things that run counter to what they want to say. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today but it’s a wider subject and I think we’re going to go a lot of places with it. But thank you Jim for talking today.

    JD:

    David, the article that you wanted to base this interview around was in Probe Magazine in the January/February issue of 2000.

    [see

    The Media Buries the Conspiracy Verdict in the King Case

    ~kennedysandking]

    I wrote the article and it’s about the media’s treatment of the conspiracy verdict in the civil trial in Memphis conducted by William Pepper in December of 1999.

    OHH:

    So William Pepper, who was James Earl Ray’s lawyer, and who was an acquaintance of Dr. King.

    JD:

    Now, the remarkable thing about the treatment of the verdict is this: the mainstream media did not have any reporter there for anywhere near close to the whole expanse of the trial. I know this for a fact because James Douglass, who was reporting on the trial for Probe Magazine and he filed his report with us a few months earlier. In fact, I think the prior issue. He was there every day.

    OHH:

    James Douglass, he’s the author of JFK and the Unspeakable.

    JD:

    Him and a local friend he knew from Memphis were the only people there for the majority of the days of the trial. He said nobody was there. Not one other single person was there every single day and most of the reporters were there for two or three days and then left. So here’s my question: How on earth do you discuss a trial where you didn’t have a reporter there? Well, this is something that was really kind of startling even for the MSM. So we decided to go ahead and round up these views of the trial and prepare an article for them, about them rather, for Probe, which is what we did. The New York Times—

    OHH:

    Before you … Can you just kind of briefly tell what the facts of the trial and just briefly what they found just for people who aren’t familiar with it.

    JD:

    The trial itself was what is termed the civil trial, which means one private party is suing another private party over what’s called damages. So in this particular case, it was the King family bringing the charges against a man named Loyd Jowers who owned a tavern in Memphis at the time. Now, in 1993 Loyd Jowers had gone on national television with Sam Donaldson on ABC and talked about his part in a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King. He said that his role was to receive the murder weapon from the guy running the show and then give it to an assassin and then have the assassin give the rifle back to him and then he would go ahead and give it back to his aider and abettor, who had given it to him in the first place.

    JD:

    Now, as time went on, William Pepper worked more and more on this angle and by around 1996-1997, he was ready to go ahead and reopen the King case as a criminal trial. In other words, the state versus defendant on a murder charge. So he actually did try and get the case reopened upon two sets of new evidence. One was the Jowers presentation, the other one was forensically to try and show that the murder weapon in evidence was not the weapon that was used to kill King.

    What happened was what the people in Memphis did not want it to happen. In other words, the power brokers in Memphis did not want this to happen. The judge who the case was assigned to, Judge Joe Brown, actually was in sympathy with Pepper trying to reopen the case.

    OHH:

    Judge Joe Brown, he later became the famous TV judge but he’s a very interesting character. I think if you have a chance, Len Osanic of Black Op Radio at blackopradio.com has several good interviews of him in his back catalog. If you go to his website you can find those interviews and get your hands on those. They’re really excellent. I suggest people listen to those.

    JD:

    So he actually was going to go ahead and sanction rifle tests to see if the rifle in evidence was actually the rifle used to kill King. They did a round of tests and they came back inconclusive. There was a scar in the track of the rifle on these tests that was not reported in the first round of tests done by the FBI. It was hard to explain how that got there. So Judge Brown was going to sanction a second round of tests. Did the scar come from a buildup of residue in the rifle in the intervening years? Because if it didn’t, then it’s not the rifle that killed King because that wasn’t there.

    So Brown said, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go ahead and have a solution, a chemical solution, which will not damage the rifle barrel at all and we’re going to use that to clean the rifle barrel and then we’re going to retest. If the scar is still there, then I don’t think we have a match.” When Judge Brown said he was going to do that, the city of Memphis rose up in rebellion against him. The local DA’s office, the state attorney general, the major media, theMemphis Commercial Appeal. To make a long story short, what ended up happening was that the same thing that happened to Jim Garrison back in 1967 on the Kennedy case, the same thing that happened to Richard Sprague in 1976 on the JFK case, and the same thing that happened with Gary Webb in the late 1990s on the CIA and crack cocaine.

    So what happened was that when Brown was on vacation, there was a kind of unauthorized invasion of his office by a guy named Mike Roberts in cahoots with a Judge named John Colton. Colton was the guy whose court the original case was assigned to way back there in 1969. But during a routine rotation, it had been assigned to Brown in the ’90s. Colton and Roberts went ahead and hijacked the files out of Judge Brown’s chambers while he was on vacation. Judge Brown was very angry about this; he blamed in it on local Republican politics but this was more or less the beginning of the end for Brown’s reinvestigation of the Kennedy case. Excuse me, of the Martin Luther King murder case.

    Once he got back, he was removed from the case by the appeals court. The local prosecutor, John Campbell, was overjoyed at this because now the case would not have to be reopened and he wouldn’t have to go ahead and retry the case on a criminal ground. Now, I should add here that when this happened, when the criminal case was finished in Memphis, it more or less coincided with the death of James Earl Ray. He passed away around this same time period. Now, all the great work that Bill Pepper had done on this case … He wrote that good book, Orders to Kill. He had done all this wonderful research in Memphis, found these new witnesses.

    It seemed that it was now essentially going to go down the drain. Because now of course there was no defendant and the case, as far as being a conspiracy, was pretty much wrapped up in Memphis.

    So, the people you have to give the credit to for keeping the thing going and getting it into a civil court is the family of Martin Luther King. I don’t think there’s any question about that. They decided to go ahead with the case and they decided to file a civil suit in Memphis against Jowers. This trial took place in the latter part of 1999, I believe in November and December of 1999. I think the verdict came in on December the 8th of 1999.

    There’s actually a book that contains the entire transcript of the trial, it’s called The 13th Juror. A literal cascade of information came out at this trial. I mean, it’s really kind of incredible when you go ahead and look at all the great stuff that Pepper was able to introduce into the court record. Just to give you some highlights. There’s a fascinating couple of witnesses by the name of Floyd Newsum and Ed Redditt and a third one Jerry Williams who testified how somebody called off the private body guards that King usually had when he came to that city. They all said they really don’t know how the heck it happened.

    But whenever King had come to Memphis, and he had been there before a few weeks earlier of course, for the sanitation workers strike, he had his own private security detail. He also had a surveillance detail that his people would just watch out from across the street to see if anything was coming up. That whole detail was called off on this particular visit.

    Now, what Pepper did at the trial is he coupled that evidence with the testimony of a man named Leon Cohen who was a friend of the manager of the Lorraine Motel, Walter Bailey. Cohen testified that Bailey received a call from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta the night before he arrived in Memphis, and the request was to change King’s room. Bailey was not interested in doing that. In fact, he didn’t want to do it, but the guy insisted that they wanted to change the room from an inner courtyard room to an outside balcony room.

    Now, I don’t have to tell you how important that is. I think anybody who knows anything about the King case understands how important that is. Because if the room had not been changed, then the assassination could not have taken place. At least not the way that it actually did, from allegedly a rifleman across the street hitting King as he comes out to the balcony of his room.

    When you couple the stripping of the security with the changing of the room, things start getting really kind of fishy, don’t they? So, in other words, now what Pepper did is he went ahead and he began to bring witnesses in who questioned the official story of where the fatal shot came from.

    See, if you believe the Memphis authorities, the shot came from a place called Bessie’s Boarding House, which is right above Jim’s Grill which was Jowers’ place. It came from a communal bathroom about something like about 210 feet away. First of all, who the heck would ever want to use a communal bathroom if you’re an assassin? Because what that means of course is that anybody could knock on the door or come in and want to use the bathroom or be waiting for you when you ran out. That’s got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.

    What Pepper did is he brought in about three witnesses who disagreed with the location of the shot coming from Bessie’s Boarding House. These were Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter was one of them. Solomon Jones who was King’s chauffeur driver and Maynard Stiles who his testimony was really interesting. First of all Caldwell and Jones both said they thought the shot came from below the balcony, these bushes below the balcony. Now, Maynard Stiles received a phone call the next morning saying that the bushes had to all be trimmed and cut down. Get this, the next morning, he gets an order from the parks department saying, we want all the bushes trimmed and cut down.

    In other words, the next morning, they weren’t there. In other words, the idea of trying to say that the shot came from the bushes below was now really hard to make stick because there weren’t any bushes.

    OHH:

    This is a crime scene. They’re uprooting a crime scene…

    JD:

    Isn’t this really something? The next step in the trial was … By the way, I think you’re beginning to understand why the media didn’t want to talk about this trial. Was the testimony of a guy named Arthur Hanes. Arthur Hanes was going to be James Earl Ray’s original attorney. He was going to defend him back in 1968. Eventually what happened is that James Earl Ray made a terrible mistake and he got rid of Hanes and replaced him with Percy Foreman which, as Ray later said, was probably “the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

    But Hanes was prepared to go to trial, which Foreman was not going to do. So Hanes decided to do some investigation, which Foreman also did not do. And he found a witness by the name of Guy Canipe who owned a five & dime store underneath Bessie’s Boarding House. Because the strongest evidence against Ray was that he supposedly dropped a bundle of his belongings as he was running from the scene and this included the rifle. Canipe said to Haynes, “That bundle was on my foyer, my exterior foyer 10 minutes before the shot went off.” Now, you don’t get very much better evidence than that. In other words, somebody was trying to frame James Earl Ray by depositing his items there.

    Now, another very interesting witness that they produced was a man named William Hamblin who knew a cab driver named James McGraw. James McGraw was called to Bessie’s Boarding House to pick up a guy named Charlie Stephens. This was around the time of King’s assassination. He is supposed to drive him home because the guy was stone drunk. He said that when he went into the room to try and pick up Charlie Stephens that he looked into the communal bathroom across the way. He said the door was wide open. There was nobody there at that particular time. And he said Charlie Stephens was dead drunk. Of course, Charlie Stephens is a guy who was going to identify Ray as the assassin coming out of that bathroom for the authorities in order to get him sent back from London to the United States. How could he identify him, if the guy was dead drunk?

    Now, there was also evidence at the trial produced about the mysterious guy named Raoul. Raoul is the guy who James Earl Ray said that he met up in Canada in 1967. Raoul hired him in Montreal rather, in Montreal, Canada in the summer of 1967. Ray said he hired him to do odd jobs for him like delivering things, picking things up and he would do this all throughout the country from the east coast to the west coast. The whole idea was to try and locate Raoul because Jowers said that the guy who dropped off the rifle to him on the day of the assassination was Raoul, this same guy.

    So what happened is that Pepper decided to go ahead and try and find other witnesses who knew of this guy named Raoul and had seen him before, and to see if the witnesses all matched up—and they ended up doing that. In fact, Pepper went ahead and he found at least three witnesses who identified the very same picture of this guy named Raoul to the point that Pepper actually thought that he found Raoul. Who was living … It was either New York or Philadelphia in 1997. But he would never answer the door, he would always send his daughter or his wife to answer the door, he would never answer the door to be interviewed.

    If that’s not good enough for you, there was also some very interesting evidence introduced about the role of the military intelligence in the stalking and perhaps the shooting of King. Dougl Valentine is a pretty prominent author about CIA operations who wrote a book called The Phoenix Program in 1990. That of course was about the notorious program in Vietnam to snuff out and torture and kill sympathizers of the Viet Cong. When he was doing that book, Doug talked with some veterans who had been redeployed from Indochina to do surveillance on the ‘60s anti-war movement in the United States. He found out that the army’s 111th military intelligence group kept King under 24-hour a day surveillance. Its agents were actually there in Memphis in April of that year when King was killed.

    From this information, they reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, fired and walked away.

    OHH:

    There are a couple things. There’s the Doug Valentine interview on Porkins Policy Radio which I will put a link to in the comments.

    JD:

    Now, what’s so interesting about that is that, also produced at the trial was a guy named Carthel Weeden who was a captain of the fire station across the street from the Lorraine Motel, the place where King was gunned down. He testified that he was on duty the morning of the 4th, April 4th and two US army officers approached him and they wanted to look out for the motel. They carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. So Carthel Weeden showed them the roof at the fire station. He left them at the edge of the northeast corner behind the parapet wall. And from there of course you had a bird’s-eye view of the motel. In other words, the on the scene evidence matches with the information that Doug Valentine had dug up.

    So that’s very interesting, and a lot of people would consider it quite powerful. He also got a guy named Jack Terrell who had worked for the CIA during the illegal war against Nicaragua. Who knew a friend of his, a guy named J.D. Hill and J.D. Hill had actually been a member of the army sniper team that was supposed to shoot a so-called unknown target on April 4th. They were supposed to take up positions in Memphis but that mission was suddenly canceled. When he heard what happened to King the next day, he realized what he was going to be there for.

    All of this stuff came out including, and I have to mention this as the final summary of the trial, a guy named Walter Fauntroy was a very good friend of King’s. He had worked for the House Select Committee [on Assassinations] in the 1970s. The House Select Committee did an inquiry into both the King case and the JFK case. Fauntroy said that when he left Congress he had the opportunity to read through voluminous files on the King assassination, including stuff he had never seen before. He said among this material that he saw were reports from J. Edgar Hoover. He learned that in the three weeks before King’s murder, Hoover had a series of meetings with people in the CIA and military intelligence about the Phoenix Operation.

    So Fauntroy, of course, asked himself: What would J. Edgar Hoover be doing having meetings about The Phoenix Operation if he’s running the FBI in the United States? Kind of puzzling, isn’t it? He also discovered that there had been, like the other witnesses said, that there had been special agents and military intelligence officers in Memphis when King was killed.

    So Fauntroy decided that he was going to write a book on the subject. When the word got out that he was going to write a book, he was investigated and charged by the Justice Department about violating financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer couldn’t believe this because this was a technicality on a misdated check from years before. But he got the message. We’ll get you for something if you go ahead and write this book.

    So Fauntroy didn’t write the book. So that’s how big the cover-up is in Washington on this particular case. As I said, what happened is that Pepper ended up winning the case. And, in fact, the jury came in within two hours after the presentation was over and they said that there was a conspiracy in the King case. Now, I should add, to Pepper’s credit, that’s the second time he did this. Because back in 1993, he had done, and I have to say this, a very well done mock trial, for I believe it was HBO. That mock trial on the King case back then I thought was much better than the one done later with Vincent Bugliosi and Jerry Spence for Thames Television on the JFK case. It was much more realistic.

    For example, in that particular case, you actually had James Earl Ray able to take the stand. It was much more of what you would actually have seen if there had been a real trial. So Pepper won that particular case and now he won this particular case in 1999. And he was robbed of his opportunity to actually do the criminal case by the removal of Judge Joe Brown. So in other words, the guy had a pretty sparkling record.

    After he won this civil trial, the media had to find a way to go ahead and discount that because of course if it’s allowed to stand, it shows the public is right about this stuff. That James Earl Ray did not shoot King, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot JFK, that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy. So this would have been another indication that all those, as they call them “wacky conspiracy theories”, are actually correct.

    So what did they do? Number one, they did not send any one single reporter to the trial to stay there day in and day out. Not one. But then they went ahead and … Let me add to that. Not even the local newspaper.

    OHH:

    Right. Not even the Memphis paper.

    JD:

    Right, the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Not even the local newspaper had their guy there every day. A guy named Mark Perrusquia. What Jim told me after I go, “Jim, how did he file these reports then?” He goes, “Jim, Marc Perrusquia was very, very seldom in the courtroom. What Marc would do is he would wait all day outside and wait for me to come out, and then I would have to brief him on what happened that day in court.”

    So Jim Douglass was giving the Memphis Commercial Appeal their information to print on the King trial. That’s how bad… to me, nothing illustrates just how bad the mainstream media is on these cases.

    But without having somebody there, they still had to find a way to go ahead and discount what had happened without reporting on it. Well, The New York Times decided to bury their story on page 25 and they reported well: What does this mean? There was a vast conspiracy that it was alleged but not proved. I have to tell you David, I think what I just summarized is pretty good proof that there was a pretty big conspiracy in the King case. But if you don’t report on it, then you can say that it was a vast conspiracy that was alleged but not proved.

    OHH:

    Well, when the jury accepts it, does not that mean it’s proved? Don’t know.

    JD:

    Same thing in the L.A. Times, they placed a story on page 24 and they also tried to go ahead and discount the verdict. They even put their resident black scholar, a guy named Earl Ofari Hutchison, they assigned him to write an editorial and his column said that Bill Pepper was one of those who has “worked up to victim hit angle especially hard.” He said that “James Earl Ray himself had stoked conspiracy flames by saying that he was framed and recanting his guilty plea.” Here it is, here’s the final summary by Earl Ofari Hutchison. “But despite the Memphis verdict, the evidence is irrefutable that Ray was a triggerman.”

    Now, how you can come to that conclusion without mentioning what went on in the courtroom is really, really hard to believe. But that’s how extreme and that’s how uninformed and that is how stubborn these people will be in order to stay with the MSM.

    Then there was the US News & World Report which said that “William Pepper was a man prone to bizarre conspiracy theories.” It said the Shelby County DA’s office was not at the trial. Well, of course not because it was a civil trial. It was not a criminal trial. So you’re not going to have the office there. Then they got another mainstream media guy David Garrow who wrote an article and said, “We don’t know who precisely aided and abetted Ray, but anybody who doesn’t accept Ray as the gunman is from Roswell, New Mexico.” Well. That’s an old one. That somehow if you believe in conspiracies, then you also believe in aliens coming here from other planets, abductions and all this other stuff.

    OHH:

    If you can believe someone was shot you also believe in Martians.

    JD:

    Then if you can believe it, to knock it all off, what happened? They got Jerry Posner, who was not at the trial, to go ahead and visit all of the major shows and to write a column that was distributed throughout the country, going ahead and criticizing the trial. I really couldn’t believe that but it really did happen. This is what he says, “The Memphis trial wasn’t a search for the truth but a ploy to obtain a judicial sanction for a convoluted conspiracy theory embraced by the King family.” I won’t even comment on that. “Lloyd Jowers is a man considered to lack credibility by every local, state and federal prosecutor who looked at the matter.” That’s what he says next. Then he says that “only the state prosecutors and their report in the case are credible because they said there was no conspiracy.”

    As I just mentioned earlier in the show, it was very obvious that the local DA’s office was an extension of the state DA’s office, and did not want to do the case at all. Because they, I think, sensed that if Brown had been allowed to go ahead and finish up the rifle test, that would have proven that that particular weapon was not the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Martin Luther King. Then he has to get personal, Posner says, “The pursuit of Jowers by the Kings will only diminish their standing as the first family of civil rights and permanently damage their credibility.” Then of course, they actually put him on a couple TV shows to go ahead and do the same thing.

    I don’t remember anybody saying, “Were you at the trial, Jerry?” I don’t remember anybody saying that. They never challenged his credentials to go ahead and write about an event that he had never seen. So that’s how crazy this thing got. By the way, let me add another point. The fact that the Commercial Appeal was not there, that meant that nobody was getting any day-to-day updates while the trial was going on. Because also, as Jim Douglass discovered, CourtTV—it was called CourtTV back then, it’s called TruTV now—they pulled out of the King case three days before the trial began. They were going to be set up and cover the case. So you would have had a video and audio record of the case. But Jim told me, “Jim, I couldn’t believe it, three days before the guy said we’re pulling out.” I asked him why, he said he didn’t know why. I mean, isn’t that really bizarre?

    So if anybody ever tells you that the media in this country is not rigged, that the media in this country is not controlled, that the media in this country is not one-sided, this is a great, great example that, that is all a bunch of BS and it’s all true. This coverage of the King case is wonderful evidence to prove everything that we’ve been saying all along about how bad the media is in this country. It was just … By the way, I have to add. When Jim Garrison conducted his trial of Clay Shaw back in 1969, both the local papers the States-Item and the Times-Picayune covered that trial. In other words—and what I mean is this—they had a reporter right down there in the courtroom every single day and they would rotate the reporters.

    Then when the breaks came, they would go ahead and transfer their notes over the phone to the main office of the newspaper and then that is how the day-to-day reports got in … I know this because I talked to somebody who actually was there, Jack Dempsey who covered the trial. So day by day, you would get daily reports if you wanted to watch that trial. Of course, if you want to subscribe from out of town, you could have followed the trial by their mail subscriptions. They’re mailing the paper to you. You couldn’t do that in this trial. That was such a disgrace. Thank God that, I think the King family, went ahead and I think they put up the transcript on the King website. Or the other way you can get it is from that book The 13th Juror.

    But Jim Douglass for Probe had the only contemporaneous report on all that terrific evidence that Pepper was producing at that trial, and that is just an utter disgrace. That our little magazine that we did on a five and dime budget was the only place you could read a summary of the King juror’s case because everything else was this BS that I’m telling you about or the Gerald Posner twisted stuff, from a guy who wasn’t even at the trial. This is what I mean about the media in this country. So excuse me if I get a little angry about it but I think I’m pretty justified in getting angry about it. This is a perfect example of why people don’t believe the mainstream media anymore and they deserve it.

    OHH:

    And this is the era of or that was in 1999. I mean, that wasn’t long after the OJ Simpson trial where that was on day in and day out on the news 24/7. So it wasn’t like courtroom drama was out of fashion.

    JD:

    Well, let’s put it this way. The King trial, I believe, was so important because the unearthed evidence that Pepper got, pretty much confirmed everything everybody who really studied that case believed. That King towards the end of his career … Let’s not forget this. King was killed something like about three weeks before the Poor People’s Campaign was supposed to begin. That was supposed to be his, remember 1963 in the March on Washington, this was supposed to be … That was for civil rights. This was supposed to be for economic rights. And I don’t think there’s any coincidence that the Poor People’s Campaign failed whereas The March on Washington succeeded.

    If you take out King as Vernon Young said in that HBO special, King in the Wilderness, he says, “After King was killed, things kind of fell apart.” No surprise. That’s another thing to remember about that, and also the fact that is what Pepper was saying, if Valentine is accurate, then the war in Vietnam with the Phoenix Program kind of directly impacted King’s murder. They transferred the operation to the United States, stateside.

    Now, I advise everybody, if you really want to try and understand this, I’ve kind of just skimmed it. But if you get the Probe CD, I think that has … I’m positive. It has Jim’s article in it. Or if you want to get the book, The Assassinations, that has Jim’s article in it.

    If you had to boil it down, its like a three-sided conspiracy between the CIA—I believe Raoul was a CIA operator—military intelligence as the hitmen, and the mob—a guy named Frank Liberto supposedly paid Jowers $100,000 to go along with the conspiracy. Now, today $100,000 doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it’d be the equivalent back in 1968 of about 850 grand. So he got paid off really to just give somebody a rifle and give back somebody a rifle and that’s essentially how it worked. So I give Jim Douglass all the credit in the world for being the only guy in that trial day after day and he assembled a marvelous report on it.

    [The reader may also refer to this special we ran in 2017 which features Jim Douglass’s Probe article as well as links to David Ratcliffe’s annotated version of the trial transcript:

    https://kennedysandking.com/martin-luther-king-articles/martin-luther-king-jr-day-2017

    see in particular:

    https://kennedysandking.com/martin-luther-king-articles/the-martin-luther-king-conspiracy-exposed-in-memphis

    ~ kennedysandking]

    OHH:

    I think that was great. I think it was a great overview of the case and the media’s reaction to it.

    JD:

    Thank you so much David.

    OHH:

    Great. Thanks.

    JD:

    Bye-bye.

    This transcript has been edited for grammar and flow.

  • VICE News Botches the King Case

    VICE News Botches the King Case

    What is one to make of a scenario whereby a journalist on the “fake news” beat of a highly-capitalized upstart media empire posts material which is not only factually-challenged but actually proposes the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King have been motivated by selfish money interests and are easily led? Well, anyone who is unfortunate to encounter the VICE News article “A History of the King Family’s Attempt to Clear the Name of James Earl Ray”, from January 2016, can read it for themselves and discover what to make of it on their own.1 This review will offer a contextual response.

    VICE News is a subsection of VICE Media, which in turn was an outgrowth of VICE Magazine. VICE Magazine built a cachet in the 2000s as it was distributed free of charge and available in various bars, eateries, video stores, record stores, and the like which catered to a younger hipper clientele. The magazine was glossy, slick, full-color, and relatively substantial, with most editions averaging about 100 pages. Most notably, VICE’s content specialized in an edgy cynical amorality, veering at times into exploitation, which was somehow appealing and seemingly appropriate during the dark days of the W. Bush administration.

    From modest beginnings in the 1990s, VICE Media has since become a global presence with thousands of employees, a virtual network with numerous online platforms and streaming entities largely focused on its cultivated younger demographic. VICE News was launched in 2014 as a multi-platform news and information service, partnered with HBO and enjoying a wide international presence both in content and reach. However, despite claims that VICE’s news department would apply critical scrutiny to the state of the world, at a “certain level of seriousness”,2 VICE News has received criticism for biased coverage by its reporters in Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela, and other geopolitical hotspots,3 and also has been criticized for adopting tabloid-style simplifications of complex subjects, relying on “exaggerated characters that create an extreme view of reality.”4

    A brief examination of a recent VICE News story may help identify some of the worst tendencies of this brand’s take on journalism, and also help put the article of concern in due context. A May 4, 2018 posting was titled “Trump Just Pulled Funding for Syria’s ‘White Helmets’ Rescue Group”.5 In reporting an unexpected cut in funding shortly after the White Helmets participated directly in the aftermath of a disputed “gas attack” in Syria’s Douma region, the author lists a number of familiar talking points concerning the integrity of the controversial organization, leading him to state: “Though their work has largely gained them international recognition as brave rescue workers, they’ve come under attack from a propaganda campaign pushed by Russian state media to discredit their work.”

    This assertion of a Russian state media propaganda campaign gets sourced to a December 2017 opinion article from The Guardian: “How Syria’s White Helmets Became Victims of an Online Propaganda Campaign”, written by Olivia Solon.6 Solon claims that negative publicity attached to the White Helmets is simply a collection of “half-truths” and “conspiracy theories” propagated by Russian state media and repeated uncritically by a motley group of anti-imperialists, alt-right bloggers, and malicious “Twitter bots”. Evidence of the alleged “Russian influence campaign” amounts to a review of clusters and patterns of online activity, which appears to resemble the clusters and patterns of effectively all online activity featuring breaking news and analysis. In effect, Solon herself spins a conspiracy theory, which is repeated uncritically by the VICE News writer.

    More accurately, the single article which did the most to establish awareness of the controversial aspects of the White Helmets appeared on the Alternet site in October 2016, written by Max Blumenthal.7 Blumenthal, in the guise of an actual journalist, traced the funding streams, identified the myriad organizations which directly connect to the group, and made the case that, rather than simply a neutral volunteer rescue agency, the White Helmets have a second primary task producing audio-visual evidence of presumed Syrian government atrocities, which integrates seamlessly into a larger coordinated apparatus used to shape public opinion towards a regime-change policy in Syria. The White Helmets, therefore, could be accurately described as a propaganda operation. Blumenthal noted the group operated exclusively in “rebel” zones, including areas held by UN-designated terrorist groups out-of-bounds to other NGO personnel and journalists. Blumenthal’s article was widely shared at the time and the information he presented has not been disputed. Therefore, the focus on an alleged “Russian” propaganda effort can be seen as a dubious misdirection. The VICE News author disagrees, referring to his own attempt to investigate: “The first three results for a ‘White Helmets’ search on YouTube are videos posted by RT, Russia’s state news agency.” Case closed.

    Examining this brief VICE News article, the following pattern or tendency is suggested: the journalist appears unaware of the history and context of his subject; in place of history or context, the journalist echoes an objectively biased mainstream or establishment source; the journalist is lazy and content with one side or position to a story; in the face of controversy, the journalist will employ the term “conspiracy theorist”; the journalist will refer to results from unsophisticated Google searches or cite unscientific statistical data of his own making.

    Unsurprisingly, these tendencies are also on display in the 2016 article on the King family and the civil trial. The author is Mike Pearl, whose byline is lately associated with a VICE News subject header called Can’t Handle The Truth, which often is concerned with debunking the distribution and dissemination of false information (aka “fake news”). Many of his numerous stories are innocuous renderings of current trending information, presented in the irreverent VICE style, with often snappy enticing headlines. Chronologically, the King article appeared a few days after Pearl posted his “The Ted Cruz Birther Question Just Became a Central Issue in the 2016 Campaign”, and the day before Pearl posted “Has This Microbiologist Found the Answer to Antibiotic Resistance?”. The story presumes a “stranger than fiction” approach with the tag “Martin Luther King’s son and convicted killer were on friendly terms.”

    That the author probably doesn’t know much at all about this particular story is revealed in the second sentence of the article: “(Ray) was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport of all places …” (emphasis added). While yes, that might seem unlikely, other details of Ray’s flight are even more so, particularly the mystery of how he found the resources for his international travel and how he managed to secure the false identity he was travelling with. The author does not seem aware of either of those two pertinent issues, which factor directly in an appraisal of Ray’s position and therefore directly to the “surprising” fact the King family “briefly devoted their lives to his cause.” According to the public statements of the King family, they devoted that time in hopes of establishing a true record of the death of their husband and father (and part of that effort might, yes, “clear the name” of the designated assassin). The author assumes a more limited view—that the family “allied themselves with the legal team hell bent on freeing Ray” and were “utterly sold on the most daring claim made by any of the King conspiracy theorists: not just that Ray hadn’t acted alone, but that he wasn’t even involved.” That this “daring claim” was articulated by close associates of King in the 1970s, and was a focus of the work by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in those same years, seems to be something the author is not aware of.

    This is not surprising, as can be quickly discerned by examining the author’s sources, which appear as links dispersed across the body of the story. The first link, apparently the source of the initial paragraphs, arrives at a BBC News “On This Day” story which reprints coverage from Ray’s conviction on March 10, 19698. An “In Context” sidebar attached to the story notes that “federal authorities insisted there was no evidence of a cover-up” (which is technically true, although information from the FBI and Memphis police compiled by others seems to provide exactly such evidence), that Ray had “a fanatical hatred of black people” (strongly denied by those who knew him), and that forensic tests in 1997 on the rifle “proved inconclusive” (not exactly correct, as the testing was in fact curtailed to prevent any conclusions). So, here too is the BBC contributing its own half-truth fake news on this controversial topic.9

    The author then turns his attention to the aforementioned “hell bent legal team”, namely attorney William Pepper, with one of the most egregious slurs since Vincent Bugliosi: “Pepper, who has in recent years devoted himself to the 9/11/ truther movement …” Most anyone aware of Pepper knows that recent years had seen him finish the third of his books on the King case, represent Sirhan Sirhan in a series of extensive court challenges, and research a proposed book on political assassinations through history. Not aware of this, the author instead consults a YouTube search of his own, which discovered a talk by Pepper from 2006 as the keynote speaker at a conference titled “9-11: Revealing The Truth, Reclaiming Our Future,” where he discussed his direct experience with a government cover-up and conspiracy in the King case.10 To claim that someone is “devoted” means to “give all or most of one’s time or resources”, a standard to which a single keynote address does not apply. The author apparently does not have a dictionary, or is simply careless with language, a poor trait for a journalist. William Pepper’s own website might have served as a better indicator of what he was up to, but perhaps the YouTube searches are what VICE’s editors believe their young demographic want. Still, even on YouTube, there are many more relevant examples of Pepper’s work.11

    This is followed by the author presuming motive in a scenario he seems to know little about, influenced presumably by an opinionated news story which appeared in the Washington Post in January 1995 concerning the then current dispute between the King family and representatives of the local Park Service over the future of the King Historic District in Atlanta.12 Written by veteran Post reporter Ken Ringle, the piece takes every opportunity to question the judgment and ability of the King family while portraying their opponents as model citizens with the best intentions. The information in the article presents the viewpoints from only one side in the dispute, which should raise red flags to a trained journalist considering using it as a source. Instead, the author accepts the article’s portrayal of King family members at face value and then proceeds to sketch out his own conspiracy theory postulating that Dexter King had become focused on “ways to derive revenue from the work and likeness of his father,” and this may have motivated his interest in Pepper’s work. The author appears unaware that Pepper was friends with Martin Luther King in 1967-68, that Pepper worked directly with King on a possible third-party political campaign in late 1967, that Pepper’s work as a journalist in Vietnam in 1966 had directly influenced King’s policy of opposition to the Vietnam War, and, again, Pepper’s own interest in the conspiracy aspects of King’s death were generated by close associates of the King family in the 1970s.13

    The author proceeds with a brief summary of the 1999 civil trial in which he complains that some information presented to the court “flies wildly in the face of accepted wisdom”, wisdom which he associates with the opinions of author Hampton Sides.14 The author makes light of the civil trial verdict, and stresses the Justice Department conducted its own probe which found “no conspiracy at all”, allowing him to cue the applause line: “unsurprisingly, (this) doesn’t impress conspiracy theorists much.” The Justice Department refused to test the “weight of all relevant information” in an adversarial courtroom at the King civil trial, which belies the confidence expressed by its report.

    This is simply a terrible article, although it is not apparent that the author holds specific animosity towards the King family or William Pepper, and might instead be reflecting a personal attitude towards “conspiracy theorists” assisted by his limited grasp of the historical record. More recently, Pearl wrote about the mandated JFK document release acknowledging there is “still quite a lot of unexamined and important history there,” even as he insists there is “zero proof” Oswald was in fact a patsy.15 Nevertheless, he maintains—in a VICE kind of way—the newly released information provides a “good example of deep-state shit the public has an interest in knowing.” Which is true, but the VICE News quasi-journalist crew are not really going to be the best sources to consult.

    If there are conclusions to be reached, I would suggest they rest less with the inadequacies of the author’s journalistic practice, and more with the core function of VICE News itself. It is part of a capitalized company whose core business is to exploit the value of its consumers: a lucrative hard-to-get young demographic. VICE Media is worth an estimated $6 billion based largely on the appeal of its “brand”. It has received capitalization from Hearst, Murdoch, A&E Network, and recently $400 million from Disney and $450 million from private equity firm TPG Capital. VICE (despite its origins in Montreal) is a version of a classic American business story: the upstart winner which, when examined up close, is much less than the sum of its marketing strategies. If the journalism does not meet professional standards, it is because journalism is not the actual product VICE News is peddling.

    Notes

    1 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/av38ab/a-history-of-the-king-familys-attempt-to-clear-the-name-of-james-earl-ray.

    2 See the Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Cult of Vice” from 2015.

    3 For example, watch this Mint News interview on how VICE often promotes official narratives.

    4 “About That VICE Charlottesville Documentary”.

    5 https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xw7edn/trump-just-pulled-funding-for-syrian-white-helmets-rescue-group.

    6 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories. The Guardian has an established partnership with VICE Media.

    7 https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/how-white-helmets-became-international-heroes-while-pushing-us-military.

    8 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/10/newsid_2516000/2516725.stm.

    9 According to The Guardian’s Olivia Solon, two half-truths and an incorrect assertion is certain proof of a Russian disinformation campaign.

    10 https://youtu.be/bXgPnaQKcyw?t=2703. The term “9/11 Truther” is just the latest in a long series of “conspiracy theorist” smears, often employed as a form of ridicule. That the 9/11 events were subject to a massive cover-up and that strong evidence of what might constitute a high level conspiracy—including the failure of America’s air defense systems and the CIA’s deliberate withholding of information ahead of the attacks—has been hiding in plain sight since that day.

    11 Another poor trait for a journalist is bad reading comprehension, which the author displays as he misattributes the name of Ray’s handler Raoul to the civilian shooter in back of Jim’s Grill as he summarizes Pepper’s book Orders To Kill.

    12 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/01/16/whose-dream-is-it-now-the-family-of-martin-luther-king-is-battling-the-government-and-atlanta-is-losing/04369405-b416-48d7-8670-93c728146c4a/?utm_term=.bebe4720b36d.

    13 https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf.

    14 Hampton Sides is described as an “enemy of conspiracy theorists everywhere,” and the author links to a Newsweek article by Sides which serves as a source for many of the James Earl Ray references in his VICE News article. Sides’ 2010 book Hellhound On His Trail is reviewed here.

    15 “The JFK Conspiracy Shows Us What’s Dumb About Today’s Fake News,” Oct 28, 2017.

  • How The Atlantic Monthly and Kurt Andersen Went Haywire

    How The Atlantic Monthly and Kurt Andersen Went Haywire

    atlanticAs this web site has explained at length, the MSM has been completely unable to deal with the assassination of President Kennedy in any kind of rational or evidentiary manner. Since the recent presidential election touched upon the JFK case, we posted two columns dealing with it. (Click here for one published during the election and here for one dealing with the aftermath) From those two articles the reader will understand the historical factors that allowed Donald Trump to claim his victory much more clearly than the long story on the current cover of the Atlantic Monthly.

    That article was written by author and radio personality Kurt Andersen. Andersen is the current host of Studio 360, a radio program carried by WNYC in New York City. I have never listened to the show, and after reading this article, I never will. It is a weekly journal devoted to arts and culture. And that is the approach Andersen took in this essay. His rather ambitious aim is to try to explain how the last fifty odd years of American history gave us Donald Trump.

    The problem is that Andersen is not a historian. In any sense of that word. And his essay does not really deal with the political or economic history of that time period. Like the program he hosts, his essay (actually an excerpt from an upcoming book) is really a cultural history. It dates, of course, from the Sixties. And on the first page, Andersen makes it clear where he is coming from and how rigged his work will be. He says that America experienced the equivalent of a national nervous breakdown in the Sixties, and in his view, we are not cured yet.

    Our intrepid chronicler now gears down into what one of his main themes will be: the danger of widespread belief in conspiracy theories. After concluding that too many people do believe in conspiracy theories, he then says that this has allowed America to mutate into a Fantasyland where the public does not know what to think or believe.

    Why does Andersen use the Sixties as the point of demarcation for his Fantasyland mutation? A few pages later the motive becomes clear. According to our guide, the Left began believing in these constructs because of the JFK assassination. He traces this back to Thomas Buchanan’s book, Who Killed Kennedy? published in 1964. He leaves out the facts that 1.) Buchanan’s book was originally published in France, which is where he was living at the time, and 2.) that other writers had addressed problems with the official story prior to Buchanan’s book being published in America. This allows Andersen to avoid the fact that it was not just Americans who had doubts about the JFK case—the rest of the world did also. And secondly, that respectable journals like The New Republic and The Nation had also voiced doubts about the JFK case before the publication of Buchanan’s book. And that, in 1966, Life Magazine actually devoted a cover story to the problems with the Warren Commission, entitled A Matter of Reasonable Doubt. Or that, in 1967, the Saturday Evening Post featured a cover story based on Josiah Thompson’s harsh critique of the Warren Commission, Six Seconds in Dallas. It was not just Buchanan and Mark Lane.

    Let us now turn to a piece of absolutely essential cultural history—which Andersen also leaves out. The late Roger Feinman showed, with CBS internal documents, that in 1967, several reporters and mangers at CBS News wished to explore the problems with the Warren Commission’s evidence. This attempt was crushed at the executive level, most notably by CBS President Dick Salant. (see Why CBS Covered Up The JFK Assassination) That counter to a genuine journalistic effort was largely motivated by the fact that Salant’s administrative assistant was Ellen McCloy, Warren Commissioner John McCloy’s daughter. By the use of both carrots and sticks, the entire trajectory of the subsequent four-night CBS special was completely reversed by this upper level decision. Feinman demonstrates step by step how this proceeded with CBS’s own documents. Somehow, Andersen did not think that was an important piece of cultural history, even though it informs us about cultural gate-keeping.

    What does Andersen think is important? Walter Sheridan’s 1967 NBC hatchet-job on Jim Garrison. No kidding. Andersen says that this infamous special, in which producer Walter Sheridan used bribes and threats to coerce witnesses, discredited Garrison’s ideas. (For an exposé of Sheridan’s reprehensible tactics, see Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 235-258) Andersen ignores the fact that the program was so one-sided, so much a broadcast disgrace, that the FCC allowed Garrison to respond under the provisions of the Fairness Doctrine. Andersen also ridicules the idea that the owners of NBC, the Sarnoff family, sanctioned the program, when such has been proven to be the case. (ibid, p. 239)

    But actually, Andersen’s argument is even worse than that. It’s not enough for him to ignore what was really happening in media boardrooms, or in New Orleans. He now says that all this doubt about JFK’s death was really caused by the Jungian psychic need to reject the idea that President Kennedy could have been killed by “just one nutty loser with a mail-order rifle.” He then throws in Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Which shows how far down he is scraping. That essay has virtually nothing to do with the JFK case. Hofstadter focuses there on the movement that brought Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964. Hofstadter tried to dismiss it as odd, eccentric rightwing solipsism. Oh, how wrong he was! For that movement would revive itself 16 years later to elect that B movie actor Ronald Reagan. Like others, Andersen just wanted to use the title as another smear device.

    On page 84, Andersen briefly halts his cascade of smears and mischaracterizations and comes up for air. After describing some American films of the seventies, e.g., Chinatown, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, he allows himself this thought: “Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break in and its cover up were an actual criminal conspiracy.”

    Perhaps nothing shows just how much Andersen has stacked the deck than those two sentences. First of all, he carefully does not describe the expanse of the Watergate plot. When it was over, 69 people were indicted, 48 were convicted, and Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the face of certain impeachment. Later, Alexander Haig arranged a deal with former Warren Commissioner and new president Jerry Ford. Nixon would be spared a trial with a pardon. Which, according to most polls, helped sink Ford’s short-lived presidency.

    Second of all, Andersen fails to reveal how the press found out about “the infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups”. Probably because he does not want to print the two words: “Church Committee”. If he did so, he would open up a Pandora’s Box that would largely burst the Fantasyland fairy-tale he is spinning. The Church Committee did much more than expose the infiltration of left-wing groups. It exposed CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, like Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Further, members of that committee—i.e., Senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker—wrote a report that showed how the FBI and CIA had misinformed and misled the Warren Commission.

    But there is even more to this story that Andersen fails to tell. The Church Committee sprang to life because its predecessor, the Rockefeller Commission, was largely seen as ineffective. In the wake of Watergate, many in Washington—like Senator Howard Baker, and future Senator Fred Thompson—thought that the official inquiry had not fully explored the role of the CIA in that crime. Therefore the Rockefeller Commission, led by Ford’s Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, arose. But this body was perceived by many, even the New York Times, as being a set-up. After all, Warren Commission lawyer David Belin was the chief counsel, and people like Ronald Reagan were on the Commission. Therefore, at a closed press briefing, Ford was asked why he had arranged things as he did. He replied that there were certain things that had to be concealed from the public. When asked what he meant by that, Ford blurted out, “Like assassinations.” (See James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 194) Ford is very likely talking about the JFK case since, at around this same time, he revealed to French Premier Giscard d’Estaing that, while on the Warren Commission, he had determined that some kind of organization had killed Kennedy, but he could not determine which one.

    But that is not all that Andersen leaves out about the discoveries of the Church Committee. Consider the following:

    1. He does not mention the attempts by the FBI to drive Martin Luther King to suicide.
    2. He does not mention the campaign by the FBI to exterminate the Black Panthers.   (For a summary of this, see Government by Gunplay, edited by Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian)
    3. He does not mention the explorations by both the Church and Pike committees concerning CIA control of the media. This was later summarized and expanded upon by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone’s, “The CIA and the Media”. (Click here for that article)

    Actually, Andersen loads the dice even more. How can anyone write an essay about the 50-year decline of America’s belief in its media or institutions without mentioning the Vietnam War? Well, Andersen can. What is his longest mention of that incredibly divisive issue which essentially ripped America apart for the better part of a decade? He talks about Norman Mailer’s 1967 book, Armies of the Night, where student protesters attempted to levitate/purify the evils inside the Pentagon. Forget about 250,000 wounded Americans, and 58,000 killed, or over 4 million total dead as a result of a war that should never have been fought.   Andersen says a few pages of Mailer’s book is what we should remember about that terrible epic tragedy, during which the American public was being lied to endlessly on almost a daily basis.

    By painting such a foreshortened picture, Andersen can leave out the ten years of nightly TV broadcasts, daily newspaper headlines, and weekly magazine cover-stories which pummeled the public with words and images about the Vietnam War, Watergate and the exposes of the Church and Pike Committees. It was not the American people who suffered a nervous breakdown from frivolities like the UFO phenomenon. It was the acts of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, plus the exposure of abuses by the FBI and the CIA, that shocked the country and drove down the public’s belief in government. (See the chart in The Assassinations, p. 634) And that was a natural reaction to that continuous montage of horror stories. None of this was part of a fantasy. It was all too real.

    What Andersen does not understand, but Michael Parenti does understand, is this: Reality can be Radical. Those ten years exposed a huge systemic failure. And the media was a part of it. One only has to recall how difficult it was to get the true story about the My Lai Massacre exposed. And how the Pentagon and Richard Nixon then did all they could to pardon the killers. But further, as Nick Turse demonstrates in his book Kill Anything that Moves, there were many other atrocities that the military purposefully covered up. For as Colonel Robert Heinl wrote in a famous article in Armed Forces Journal, the American army collapsed in Vietnam by 1969. (Click here) Yet Nixon kept the war going for four more years and actually expanded it into Laos and Cambodia. That is history that Andersen, again, ignores.

    Did things get better after that? Well, there was the Iranian hostage crisis; the American backing of radical Moslems—which included Osama Bin Laden—to fight the Russian invasion of Afghanistan; Reagan’s interventions in Central America and the El Mozote Massacre (where more people died than at My Lai) and which was also covered up; the Iran Contra scandal; the heists of the 2000 and 2004 elections, which allowed the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy disaster to befall this country since Vietnam. Again, somehow none of this is important to cultural historian Andersen. Maybe the author ignores it since none of it deals with the paranormal, it’s all real. But with his loaded dice, the former counts more than the latter.

    Which brings us to the payoff of the article. That includes three themes: Fake News, the rise of the Internet, and the victory of Donald Trump. I think Andersen wants us to believe that somehow the first two resulted in the last. But as anyone who watched that election closely knows, such was not the case. The whole Fake News phenomenon arose after the election. And it’s a much more complex phenomenon than Andersen portrays it to be. As he does with many issues, Robert Parry had done the best reporting on this flashpoint. (See here for an example)

    The use of the Internet probably did help Trump’s campaign, but not in the way that Andersen thinks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, used a little-known company called Cambridge Analytica to micro-analyze social media data and target trends and tendencies with voters. (Click here for a good article on this) Using this data he was able to detect weaknesses in Hillary Clinton’s and the Democratic Party’s supposed fortress: the Northeast Rust Belt. In an interview Bannon did the day after the election, he said Trump’s strategy was twofold: 1.) They had to hold the south, that is, North Carolina and Florida, and 2.) They had to win some states in the Rust Belt. This is why Trump visited Michigan almost twice as many times as Clinton, and why he honed his message as one of economic nationalism—rounding up illegal immigrants, building a wall, tariffs on Chinese imports—this countered Clinton’s failed use of identity politics, e.g., Alicia Machado.

    Bannon realized that Clinton could not effectively counter that Electoral College strategy. The reason being that her husband’s record on fair trade was pretty much indefensible. As many have commented, Bill Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway ran a very astute and pointed campaign. The Clinton campaign had much more money, many more workers, and much more favorable media. And they still lost. The problem was not just campaign tactics. Hillary Clinton simply could not fire up her own base the way that Bernie Sanders could have. Which is another factor that Andersen leaves out. Sanders outflanked the Democratic establishment almost as effectively as Trump did the GOP. Did he do that with Fake News? Or an alternative reality dealing with UFO’s and the levitation of the Pentagon? Further, according to a pre-election poll, Sanders would have beaten Trump fairly soundly. Which renders Andersen’s silly article even sillier.

    But what happened afterwards also renders the article silly. Trump’s ratings have cratered since he was elected. Is that also due to Fake News? No. It’s because America has realized that Bannon’s campaign was really a sales pitch. Which Trump, a real estate salesman, managed to deliver perfectly. Trump and the Republican Party really have no solutions to the complex issues that have assaulted this country: like the gutting of the Middle Class. Past his campaign slogans and themes, Trump simply has no vision for America. Except to make the health care problem even worse and cut more taxes for the wealthy. The real mystery about Trump is how he changed paths so radically from 2000 until today. If one recalls, when he was pondering a presidential run for the Reform Party ticket, he was much more moderate in his policies, more like a Democrat. No reporter ever tried to explain this paradox.

    Of course, Andersen mentions the Trump/Roger Stone accusations of Ted Cruz’s dad allegedly being in a photo with Oswald in New Orleans. Yet Trump endorsed the Warren Commission verdict of Oswald being the lone assassin. And it was people in the JFK community, like David Josephs, who showed that Trump was wrong about that identification.

    Yes, there is a crisis of confidence in this country. And yes, it has gotten worse over time. And, as mentioned above, for very good reasons. And as Larry Sabato showed in the polling for his book The Kennedy Half Century, and as Kevin Phillips showed in his volume, Arrogant Capitol, it began with the issuance of the Warren Report. Most people today think that the Warren Report was wrong, and something went awry with the country after the Kennedy assassination. And they are right (e.g., Vietnam).

    Andersen’s ridiculous essay is a pile of smoke and mirrors designed to distract from that fact.