The Sixth Decade begins…

So the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and the murders of officer Tippet and Lee Harvey Oswald has passed. And what a bust it turned out to be. In terms of information, there was good stuff around. Survivor’s Guilt in print at last, Jim MacBride’s massive tome about Tippet (albeit with 100 pages of autobiography first), a lot of interesting conspiracy-related material on the internet, much of it well-made videos, forums full of educated if bad-tempered research and speculation…

But as far as the mainstream media were concerned, it was 1964 all over again. One would think that there had never been a House Committee on Assassinations, or an Assassination Records Review Board, or an enormous quantity of high-quality written research which proves, at very least, that a viable case against Oswald was never made, and that no one person murdered the President and caused multiple wounds in the Governor of Texas on that terrible day.

No, as far as the BBC, ITV, the New York Times, The Guardian, the Smithsonian Magazine, and all other reputable media were concerned, the Warren Commission has regained its status as a towering edifice of rectitude, equalled only by the Kean Committee, Congress, and the NSA as guardians of truth and democracy.

I wrote a piece for The Guardian about Hollywood’s evolving and regressing attitude to the assassination, comparing EXECUTIVE ACTION, JFK and THE PARALLAX VIEW to the historical travesty (and lousy movie) that is PARKLAND. My little offering was relegated to the internet-only Guardian (which pays a lot less than the print edition), while every article in the print newspaper took as a given that President Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone assassin.

ITV ran a documentary which told us the same thing – that Oswald murdered Kennedy, acting alone – and who was there to nail the coffin of the dead man shut? Ruth Paine! Shedding a tear for the cameras, the woman who found Oswald his job at the Texas School Book Depository and provided (after the DPD had searched her house) a variety of evidence to convict him once he was dead, was suddenly available for interview. Funny how she wasn’t around when the ARRB were taking depositions…

Channel 5 in the UK ran a Canadian-Australian documentary which proposed that JFK was killed by an accidental shot fired by the Secret Service agent with the Armalite rifle. This was the ultimate “coincidence theory” since it posited that two men, who didn’t know each other, acting independently, one by chance, both shot the President within six seconds. Well, stranger things have happened… No, they haven’t, actually. At least this doc wasn’t a total wash since it addressed the issues of the Secret Service commandeering the President’s corpse, and the Pentagon controlling the second autopsy at a military hospital in Washington. But it was also cranky and dependent on badly acted “mockumentary” reconstructions.

So the mainstream media gave us the Warren Report’s warmed-over corpse as truth, and dissenting research was relegated to the blogosphere or – in the case of me and Tony Frewin – to the upstairs bar of a pub in Camden, dissecting the Zapruder film for a small but alert audience…

Still, I must thank my British publisher, Oldcastle Books, for flying me over there and setting up several very nice events, including one at FACT in Liverpool, and another at Waterstones’ in Oxford; and also my dear friends from St Johns College for turning out to support me and my book on the 50th anniversary day.

PARKLAND, at least, got terrible reviews, whereas an independent documentary by Shane O’Sullivan dealing with Oswald and his history was well received. KILLING OSWALD is a decent piece (if hampered by similarly clunkety “dramatic reconstructions”) featuring interviews with Dick Russell, Joan Mellen, John Newman, some ancient anti-Castro Cubans, and one sententious fellow who receives far too much air time, gets his facts wrong, and claims all reasonable resarchers believe “the Mob” did it.

For the record, there is no evidence whatsoever that Oswald was connected to the Mafia other than the old canard that his uncle Dutz was a bookmaker (resurrected here by the fact-mangler). Dick Russell revisited the Richard Case Nagell story at length, which was a pity. Dick is a scrupulous researcher, but he relies too much on Nagell’s truthiness, which is open to doubt. Nagell promised to provide corroborating evidence for his claims that he was a Russian agent, hired to rub out Oswald, and that he sent registered letters to J. Edgar Hoover and CIA warning them of a conspiracy to kill the President, but he never did. There is no evidence for Nagell’s claims of three plots to murder Kennedy – alleged anti-Castro Cuban plans to blow up the President in the Orange Bowl in Miami, kill him at a movie theatre in LA, and shoot him in Washington or Baltimore – other than Nagell’s unsubstantiated assertions. If one is going to believe Nagell and present his story as fact, why not treat Judyth Vary Baker – who claims to have been Oswald’s girlfriend in New Orleans – as a credible source, and interview her as well?

A more rounded picture of Oswald would emerge had the filmmakers found more interview subjects. What about people who believe that Oswald was a Russian spy? Edward Jay Epstein is still around. Was he asked for an interview? And what of JohnArmstrong, who believes there were two Oswalds, Harvey and Lee, and makes a compendious case for it…

John Newman comes over best in KILLING OSWALD, for he speaks well and what he says is evidence-based. It’s weird to see Watergate burglar Eugenio Martinez – who had no connection with Oswald – interviewed, and hear nothing about his partner in crime, E. Howard Hunt, who was connected to Oswald in new Orleans, and who confessed to participating in a CIA conspiracy to murder Kennedy. Hunt is dead, but the son to whom he confessed is still alive.

Since she appears in file footage, it would also have been splendid to see the documentarians interrogate Ruth Paine, and enquire about her proximity to CIA, how she found Oswald his job at the Book Depository, and where all that evidence came from after the fact. But this may be asking too much from his elusive benefactor.

The scenes of Oswald in his brief captivity are very strong; as is his press conference, where he denied his guilt and repeatedly asked for a lawyer. But where was Jack Ruby, caught on video in the Police Station, and photographed after Oswald was marched away, correcting Henry Wade when he misidentified Oswald’s membership of the FPCC?

I think the documentary’s thesis – that Oswald was ‘set up’ to provoke an invasion of Cuba – is correct, but KILLING OSWALD points the finger at the Mob, which is odd. The Mafia didn’t control the Secret Service or the President’s autopsy; and if the thesis is correct, then the US military are implicated to a much greater extent, on the basis of Operation Northwoods (a Pentagon plan to fake terrorist acts on US soil so as to provoke a foreign war) — as the documentary’s final scenes – juxtaposing Kennedy’s “peace speech” with scenes of the Viet Nam war – imply.

KILLING KENNEDY is playing in British cinemas at the moment, and can also be seen, for a modest price, on vimeo. Unlike the other documentaries mentioned here, it’s well worth the price of the admission!

(Apparently WordPress has begun placing advertisements below the text of blogs such as this. If you see one, please ignore it. I receive no revenue from it, and it has nothing to do with me!)

Conspiracy Theory as Naive Deconstructive History

This eminently sensible article, by Floyd Rudmin, a member of the Psychology Department, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway, was first published a few years back by Exterminating Angel Press.

I’m pleased to reprint it here, by permission of the author:

“Conspiracy theory” is usually used as a pejorative label, meaning paranoid, nutty, marginal, and certainly untrue. The power of this pejorative is that it discounts a theory by attacking the motivations and mental competence of those who advocate the theory. By labeling an explanation of events “conspiracy theory,” evidence and argument are dismissed because they come from a mentally or morally deficient personality, not because they have been shown to be incorrect. Calling an explanation of events “conspiracy theory” means, in effect, “We don’t like you, and no one should listen to your explanation.”

In earlier eras other pejorative labels, such as “heresy,” “witchery,” and “communism” also worked like this. The charge of “conspiracy theory” is not so severe as these other labels, but in its way is many times worse. Heresy, witchcraft, and communism at least retain some sense of potency. They designate ideas to be feared. “Conspiracy theory” implies that the ideas and their advocates are simple-minded or insane.

All such labels implicitly define a community of orthodox believers and try to banish or shun people who challenge orthodox beliefs. Members of the community who are sympathetic to new thoughts might shy away from the new thoughts and join in the shunning due to fear of being tainted by the pejorative label.

There is currently a boom in books on conspiracy theory, most of them derogatory, as is evident in some recent titles: Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics; Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to the X-Files; Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From.

Within popular US culture, there is also now a boom in movies, novels, and web sites that feature conspiracy theories. The apparent popularity of conspiracy theories is often cited as a cause of concern, that our society is breaking down. For example, Canadian journalist Robert Sibley has said that conspiracy theory is “a nihilistic vortex of delusion and superstition that negates reality itself.”

I think that just the reverse is true. There is nothing insane or sinister about conspiracy theory research. It is rather matter of fact. A wide range of ordinary people from many walks of life take an interest in the political and economic events of our era. They think things through on their own, use the library, seek for evidence, articulate a theory, communicate with other people with similar interests. It is heartening that some citizens invest time and effort to unearth and expose some of the conspiracies that damage our society, our economy and our government.

But it certainly does seem that some historians and journalists are quite frightened of conspiracy theory and its wide popularity. Those are the two professions whose job it is to interpret our world for us. When ordinary people take on the task of doing this themselves, it must mean that they don’t believe what the authorities say we should.

Maybe the professionals feel threatened when amateurs think about political events for themselves.

Perhaps we are in the middle of a new Reformation. The high priests are again losing their monopoly, and they see us sliding into cults and chaos. Something similar happened in 1517, when Martin Luther challenged the Church and translated the Bible into German so that ordinary people could think about theology for themselves. When put on trial, Luther said, “I cannot submit my faith either to the Pope or to the Councils, because it is clear as day they have frequently erred and contradicted each other.” That is exactly what a JFK conspiracy theorist would say about the Warren Commission.

People take on the task of explaining things for themselves when the orthodox experts insist on saying nonsense—for example, that Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone killed JFK. A Reformation is a rebellion against arrogance. If historians and journalists want to understand why they are being displaced by conspiracy theory, it would be most reasonable to examine their own failings first.

The correct big-word label for conspiracy theory would be “naive deconstructive history.” It is “history” because it explains events, but only after they have happened. Past-tense. Conspiracy theory, as a political act, is an after-the-fact complaint. To see conspiracies while they are happening would require the resources and powers of police forces and espionage agencies.

Conspiracy theory is “deconstructive history” because it is in rebellion against official explanations and against orthodox journalism and orthodox history. Conspiracy theory is radically empirical: tangible facts are the focus, especially facts that the standard stories try to overlook. There is a ruthless reduction down to what is without doubt real, namely, persons. Conspiracy theory presumes that human events are caused by people acting as people do, including cooperating, planning, cheating, deceiving, and pursuing power. Thus, conspiracy theories do not focus on impersonal forces like geo-politics, market economics, globalization, social evolution and other such abstract explanations of human events.

To call conspiracy theory “naive” does not mean that it is uncritical or stupidly innocent. In fact, that is what conspiracy theorists might say about orthodox explanations of events promoted by government sources, by mainstream journalism, or by schoolbook history. For example, it is naive to believe that the September 11, 1973, coup d’etat against Allende was not orchestrated by the United States. Rather, to here call deconstructive history “naive” means that conspiracy theorists are unaware that they are doing deconstructive history, and they are amateurs, untrained in deconstructive history.

Conspiracy theories arise when dramatic events happen, and the orthodox explanations try to diminish the events and gloss them over. In other words, conspiracy theories begin when someone notices that the explanations do not fit the facts.

Take the case of explaining the past two decades of US “free-trade” schemes among countries in the Americas: FTA, NAFTA, and soon FTAA. These schemes began with two nations, then three, and soon four and more. The first was the 1989 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) which set the subservient conditions of member nations to US economic dominance. The essence of the FTA is that US corporations get unrestricted commercial rights and resource ownership in Canada, and in exchange, Canada gets to obey US trade laws.

Why would Canadians have agreed to this? Well, we didn’t, but historians would explain it by saying something like, “Globalization made Canadians choose free-trade.” Conspiracy theorists would say, “Don’t be naive. Look at the facts.” In a decade of political opinion polls, and in three consecutive national elections (1984, 1988, 1993), a majority of Canadians had consistently said that they do not want American “free-trade” schemes. How has it happened that such a clear, strong democratic decision by so many millions of Canadians could be overthrown?

In the 1984 and 1993 federal elections in Canada, the successful parties had explicitly campaigned against free-trade, but when elected they reversed themselves. The 1988 vote was also not straight: of the two anti-free-trade parties, the minor one in mid-campaign began to attack the leader of the major one. It is reasonable to see such facts and to surmise that orthodox explanations are not the real explanations.

Let’s look in the library to see what can be found. From 1976 to 1979, more than a decade before the FTA, US Ambassador Thomas Enders was crisscrossing Canada promoting free-trade. Who was Thomas Enders? He was hired by the US government in 1958 as an “intelligence research specialist.” In 1969 he was in Yugoslavia, in 1971 Cambodia. His jobs there were to rig Lon Nol’s election and to use a local intelligence network to pick villages to be bombed by B52s in President Nixon’s secret war. From 1976 to 1979, he was in Canada weaving a web of political and business connections to promote the American version of “free-trade.” In 1981 Enders became President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, working on the invasion of Grenada and the illegal proxy wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador. One of his jobs was to coordinate operations with Oliver North and Duane Claridge, head of the CIA’s covert operations in Latin America.

Considering these facts, which is more likely—that Enders was in Canada promoting free-trade as some kind of personal hobby, or that he was under orders, promoting free-trade as one more operation in a career of covert operations? At the time, Quebec’s populist premier, Réne Lévesque, said of Enders, “He’s the bum who launched the bombs in Vietnam. He’s a damned spy. He must be working for the CIA” (quoted in Lisée, 1990, p. 207).

The idea of NAFTA first appeared in public in 1979, to everyone’s surprise, as Ronald Reagan’s core policy when he announced his candidacy for President. But, curiously, it was then never again mentioned in his campaign. In 1979, Reagan’s campaign was run by Michael Deaver and Paul Hannaford, who reportedly also ran a public relations firm that represented the right-wing Guatemalan group Amigos del Pais and its leader Roberto Alejos, who had provided the ranch used for CIA training of Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion forces in 1961. In early 1980 William Casey became Reagan’s campaign director. Casey began his career directing OSS espionage operations in Germany and China in the 1940s, and he ended his career as director of the CIA. It is not common for US presidential candidates to be so managed by those so linked to covert operations.

The information in the proceeding two paragraphs comes from library sources. “Free-trade” comes from the dark lower bowels of Washington sometime in the early 1970s. It seems to have been conceived and promoted, in part, by conspiracy rather than by forthright democratic processes.

This exemplifies how conspiracy theory arises: 1) significant political or economic events change power relationships in our society; 2) contradictions are noticed by ordinary citizens in the explanations of these events; 3) concern and curiosity are aroused; 4) further information is sought under the presumption that power is being abused and deception is being deployed. Most of the evidence discovered is circumstantial, as it must be when investigating conspiracies.

“Free-trade” was definitely not the democratic choice of Canadians, and maybe not of Americans or Mexicans either. There is a history waiting to be written about these “free-trade” schemes. Orthodox, school-book historians will probably not write that history, and mainstream journalists will not dig it out. Conspiracy theorists might. (Did anyone notice that the NAFTA treaty was not legally passed by Congress as a treaty?)

Conspiracy theory has a special focus on contradictions, discrepancies, and missing facts. The natural sciences similarly seek to find faulty explanations by focusing on facts that don’t fit the orthodox explanations. If we want more truthful explanations of events, whether of scientific events or of political and historical events, then we must compare competing explanations.

One explanation usually fits the available observations better than the other. By the principle of fit, the explanation that encompasses more of the observations should be preferred. This principle can favor conspiracy theories. For example, one gunman cannot shoot a bolt-action rifle as fast as the shots were fired at JFK. The vast majority of eye-witnesses heard shots coming from different directions.

We can discover mis-explanations and find better ones by focusing on the facts that don’t fit. For example, Galileo concluded that moons around Jupiter are discrepancies to the then-orthodox geocentric theory. Galileo was called a heretic for writing that. Mark Lane’s book, Rush to Judgment, includes hundreds of facts that did not fit the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a lone gunman killed Kennedy. Lane was called a conspiracy theorist for writing that.

The pejorative force of the “conspiracy theory” label comes from its ad hominem attack on the author’s personality. It is true that conspiracy theory authors doubt the orthodox explanations and suspect that there are other explanations for events. Such doubt and suspicion, which is the same kind of doubt and suspicion as motivates many scientific discoveries, gets labeled paranoia.

Think for a moment. Most of the US population believes that a conspiracy, not a lone gunman, killed JFK. A society could not function if that many people were “paranoid.” That word is pure pejorative. Real paranoia includes: 1) fear, 2) of a prominent person, 3) whom you think threatens you personally, 4) using invisible means, like the evil-eye, x-rays, or laser beams. Conspiracy theory entails doubt and suspicion, but that is far from clinical paranoia. For example, I believe the Iran-Contra conspiracy theory, but I have no emotion of fear, certainly no fear that Oliver North is out to get me, using invisible rays of some kind.

However, we should remember that conspiracy theorists are ordinary people and will show ordinary failings of rationality, for example, what is referred to as “confirmation bias.” This means that we are all biased to look for evidence that our ideas are right rather than for evidence that our ideas are wrong. This bias has been demonstrated and replicated in many different contexts and countries. Confirmation bias is a common mistake made by conspiracy theorists, as well as by historians, journalists, and everyone else. David Fischer has catalogued and exemplified over 100 different kinds of faulty reasoning in the research of competent, published historians. These would all apply to conspiracy theorists as well.

Conspiracy theory is more thoughtful than fearful. The motivations behind conspiracy theory research are cognitive and social. It is very much like doing family genealogy. You begin with a few facts. Then you puzzle out the story, make inferences and hypotheses, and seek further facts. With help from other people, with good luck, you discover information that is sometimes difficult to find. A story emerges, suggesting new facts that should be sought. The satisfaction comes from finding the facts, constructing the story, and sharing the process and discoveries with other people.

Conspiracy theorists think they are serving the public good. Often their motivations are patriotic, and with good reason. Democracy is built on distrust of the king and all the king’s men. Democratic safeguards like habeas corpus, jury trial, independent courts, and secret ballots all presume that we should not trust people in positions of power. Because of distrust, opposition parties and an independent press are expected to question and criticize the government, and the government is expected to answer. The free press is called the Fourth Estate, in opposition to the First Estate (the Church), the Second Estate (the aristocracy), and the Third Estate (those who live off capital). Since orthodox journalism has become an instrument of power, investigative journalism is now sometimes called the Fifth Estate. Conspiracy theory is part of the Fifth Estate in this balance of powers. The independent, oppositional thinking that underlies conspiracy theory is not paranoia; it is the very foundation of freedom and democracy.

There probably appear to be more “conspiracy theories” about for three reasons: 1) More people have the skills and resources to look for conspiracies and to make their thinking public; 2) Probably there are more conspiracies to find as political and economic power become ever more concentrated and our democracy declines; 3) Mainstream journalism and schoolbook history now serve the state and corporate interests more than in the past, so now we hear more nonsense.

Conspiracy theory will certainly be a growth industry for the foreseeable future. Conspiracy theory will decrease when conspiracies decrease and when journalists and historians increase their efforts to explain events rather than explain them away.

References:

Barkun, M. (2003). A culture of conspiracy: Apocalyptic visions in contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Barlow, M. & Clarke, T. (1998). MAI: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the threat to American freedom. New York: Stoddart.

Brandt, D. (1993). NAMEBASE. San Antonio: Public Information Research.

Camp, G. S. (1997). Selling fear: Conspiracy theories and end-times paranoia. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.

Chodos, R. (1978). “From Enders to Chretien to Horner to you: Continentalism rears its head.” Last Post, 6(6).

Clark, G. K. (1967). The critical historian. London: Heinemann.

Clarke, T. & Barlow, M. 1997). MAI: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the threat to Canadian sovereignty. Toronto: Stoddart.

Clarkson, F. (1986). “Behind the supply lines.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, (25), 56, 50-53.

Coughlin, P. T. (1999). Secrets, plots and hidden agendas: What you don’t know about conspiracy theories. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Fenster, M. (1999). Conspiracy theories: Secrecy and power in American culture. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Fischer, D. H. (1970). Historians’ fallacies. New York: Harper & Row.

Hidell, A., & D’Arc, J. (1999). The conspiracy reader: From the deaths of JFK and John Lennon to government-sponsored alien cover-ups. Secaucus, NJ: Carol.

Hofstadter, R. (1965). The paranoid style in American politics. New York: Knopf.

Hurtig, M. (1991). The betrayal of Canada. Toronto: Stoddart.

Jackson, D. (2000). Conspiranoia!: The mother of all conspiracies. New York: Plume.

Johnson, G. (1983). Architects of fear: Conspiracy theories and paranoia in American politics. Los Angeles: Tarcher.

Klepper, S. (1981). “The United States in El Salvador.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, (12), 5-13.
Knight, P. (2000). Conspiracy culture: From the Kennedy assassination to the X-Files. London: Routledge.

Knight, P. (Ed.) (2002). Conspiracy nation: The politics of paranoia in postwar America. London: New York University Press.

Lane, M. (1966). Rush to judgement. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Lisée, J. F. (1990). In the eye of the eagle. Toronto: HarperCollins.

Manktelow, K. & Over, D. (Eds.) (1993). Rationality: Psychological and philosophical perspectives. London: Routledge.

Marcus, G. E. K(Ed.) (1999). Paranoia within reason. A casebook on conspiracy as an explanation. London: University of Chicago Press.

Munslow, A. (1997). Deconstructing history. London: Routledge.

Orchard. D. (1993) The fight for Canada. Toronto: Stoddart.

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Persico J. E. (1991). Casey: From the OSS to the CIA. New York: Penquin.

Pipes, D. (1997). Conspiracy: How the paranoid style flourishes and where it comes from. New York: Free Press.

Preston, W. & Ray, E. (1983). “Disinformation and mass deception: Democracy as a cover story.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, (19), 3-12.

Ross, R. (Producer) (1992, April 7). “Investigating the October Surprise.” PBS documentary.

Shawcross, W. (1979). Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the destruction of Cambodia. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Sibley, R. (1998, Feb. 8). “Conspiracy theories.” Ottawa Citizen.

Sklar, H. (1988). Washington’s war on Nicaragua. Boston: South End Press.

US State Department (1974). Biographic register. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

White, T. H. (1982). America in search of itself: The making of the President 1956 -1980. New York: Harper and Row.

Woodward, B. (1987). Veil: The secret wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. New York: Pocket Books

Disheveled, Moi? I Challenge Errol Morris and the Smithsonian!

The establishment media’s efforts to support the Warren Commision continue, once again using the services of documentary filmmaker and corporate commercial director Errol Morris. There’s an interview with Morris in the new Smithsonian magazine and its online variant, in which the author learns from Morris What The Zapruder Film Really Tells Us — namely that it is a pristine, unchallengeable evidentiary document, from a “more innocent time”, and engages in an ad hominem attack on me.

Among my sins, apparently, I am “disheveled”, “like an aging pedant”, and “shuffling around a cluttered office.” My real crime, however, seems to have been a little home-made video in which I disagreed with Errol Morris’ piece of work for the New York Times, The Umbrella Man.

Guys, I am really sorry. I didn’t realize there was a dress code to be a filmmaker, or to have an opinion about the Kennedy assassination! My little film was made in a hut in Oregon. We dress like that in Oregon, and there is no hairdresser or makeup artist in our rural valley, or the forests which surround it. I’m also Volunteer Firefighter Cox, expected to don my boots and turnouts and race to the station when there’s a call. So I don’t usually wear a suit and tie around the property. Aging? I am aging. Isn’t the author? A pedant? No need to be rude. Shuffling? Yassuh! Yassuh! Cluttered? My hut is 196 square feet and contains books, videotapes, computers, desks, a drawing board two chairs and a wood stove. Yes, it is full of stuff. So what?

Surely the intention could not be to contrast Morris – who is presumably an urbane urbanite, with a spacious, tidy office, who walks with a decisive, John Galtian stride, who will never grow old, and who believes what the New York Times/Warren Commission tell him – with shuffling, cluttered, disheveled, aging moi? Never in a million years! Because then The Simthsonian is deliberately introducing a red herring – setting up a straw man or a patsy – to distract the reader from what the article should really be about — the authenticity or otherwise of the Zapruder film.

I’ve made a video about this, too, and find it strange that Errol and his interlocutor ignore it, since – unlike the Umbrella Man piece – it’s about the subject of the article. I’ll turn to that next, but I just want to remind the reader/viewer that in my film I took no position about what the so-called Umbrella Man was doing (most likely he was signalling to the multiple gunmen, but who knows?); I just pointed out that CIA director William Colby told House Committee investigators that a bizarre dart-firing gun-within-an-umbrella did exist, having been developed at US taxpayers’ expense, by CIA.

Now let’s recap three actual facts about the Zapruder film. First, it could never have been used as evidence in Oswald’s trial since its chain of possession was so clearly broken. Only Oswald’s murder, in police custody, allowed the film to be treated as “evidence”, by the establishment media. It would have been thrown out of court if the accused had been allowed a trial and had the services of a decent lawyer, such as Mark Lane.

Second, in the possession of Life magazine, and possibly the Secret Service, the Zapruder film was damaged and frames were lost. There has been no explanation for its shabby treatment by these authorities. Third, much of the fusillade is obscured by the Stemmons Freeway sign. John Costella and other photographic experts have insisted that the film contains obvious faked elements, and that the Stemmons sign is one of these – since it lacks the “pincushion distortion” which the rest of Zapruder’s film displays.

Morris, the NYT and The Simithsonian all neatly sidestep the fact that Morris’ original interview subject, Josiah Thompson, is also a fully-fledged conspiracy theorist, who believes that President Kennedy was killed by a crossfire of riflemen in Dealey Plaza. By interviewing Thompson only about the Umbrella Man, Morris gets him to call another researcher, Robert Cutler, “some wingnut”, and makes both men look bad in the process.

There’s an easy way to address the misrepresentation of Thompson and Cutler, and insults to rural Oregonian attire. It’s a little harder to address the matter of the extrajudicial killings of President Kennedy, Officer Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald one weekend almost 50 years ago. But to solve the problem of the Zapruder film, why doesn’t Errol Morris commission an independent group of photographic experts to analyze this allegedly “authentic” document? The group should investigate Costella’s claim that the Stemmons sign is fake, and all other instances of alleged fakery. The copyright to the original film has been given to a private company in Dallas — after the taxpayers paid Zapruder’s family 16 million dollars to acquire it! It’s possible that said company will try to prevent such an analysis — and that Errol’s board of experts will have to study 8mm dupes or stabilized video copies instead. Probably it’s a good idea to study multiple copies – as many as possible – since the provenance and authenticity of the original is so uncertain.

Such a group, operating completely in the open, cannot begin to address the question of American “innocence” or otherwise. It may confirm Errol Morris’ belief that the film is authentic. Or it may not.

Come on Errol! You’ve made a gazzillion commercials – for Citibank, AIG, Cisco, Miller, NIKE, Southern Comfort – fine, ethical companies who do such good in the world – that you can surely afford to shell out forty or fifty grand and settle this matter! Bob Cutler, who your documentary brands a “wingnut”, spent $400,000 of his own cash to found a museum in Dallas. Or, if you’re short of dosh, let’s both go to the Smithsonian or the New York Times and ask them to pay for it. I’ll get a suit and a haircut, special for the meeting!

Obama and “Conspiracy Theories”

Since a conspiracy is merely an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime, the concept of a “conspiracy theory” shouldn’t be the least bit bizarre or suspect. Nevertheless “conspiracy theory” seems to be particularly worrying to the Obama administration, if one of the President’s recent appointments is anything to go by.

The individual in question is Cass Sunstein — one of the panel of “outside experts” appointed to review the NSA’s massive breaches of domestic and international law. The panel contains such “outsiders” as Richard Clarke, a White House insider who worked at the NSC for Clinton and Bushes 1 and 2, and Michael Morrell, who spent 33 years at CIA, and stepped down as CIA director just five months ago. It would be a joke if it wasn’t so sad and bad, I know, but in some ways the appointment of Sunstein is even more troubling.

Russia Today reports that Sunstein (another White House insider and Harvard Law Professor) coauthored a paper in 2010 titled “Conspiracy Theories” which warned of the great dangers posed by people who believe in such things, and called on Obama’s government to engage in “cognitive infiltration” where “government agents might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories.”

Wow. Did you read what I just read? Did I get it right? Unfortunately yes. An internet search leads to an abstract of his 2008 paper “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures” here.

In theory, it’s possible to download his paper as a .pdf. In practice, it isn’t. The links on the abstract page don’t work, and the links on the RT article and Glen Greenwald’s piece in Salon are either broken or lead to the broken abstract page.

Why would this be? Isn’t Professor Sunstein keen to share his controversial ideas with us? Or would he prefer not to share them because they’ve been operational for quite some time? The Guardian reported in 2011 that the Pentagon has developed software enabling a handful of loyal Bradleys and Chelseas to create multiple fake online personae, “to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions”. The article speculated that the Pentagon’s “sock puppet” HQ was based at McGill AFB near Tampa, FL, home of the US Special Operations Command.

What does this mean to those who have investigated the Kennedy assassination, or the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, or the 9-11 atrocities, or other conspiratorial wickedness? Possibly that the number of crazed posts your website receives are not the work of individual nutters, but rather of US military contractors and employees, paid by our tax dollars, to muddy the waters, upset sane people, and drive the discourse into the ditch.

US government agencies have been doing this since long before the invention of the Internet. COINTELPRO, an FBI operation which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, produced bogus information against leftist groups, created false left-wing organizations (the Fair Play for Cuba Committee?) and paid government agents to pretend to be left-wing or right-wing activists (Lee Harvey Oswald?).

It’s easier to spot the provocateur when you can see him or her (though the British police have also done an amazing job of infiltrating Green groups with agents provocateurs, and getting their members pregnant!). When it’s just a name on a website it’s much harder to know whether the person posting is a harmless nut, a dangerous nut, or something else.

And Sunstein’s project seems to be working. In June of this year, John Simkin, a British academic who ran one of the best Kennedy-related websites, announced he was closing his forum due to abusive and demented posters — and this was a site where posters, in theory, used their real names. (Fortunately he reconsidered and the JFK Assassination Debate Forum is live again). But you only have to read the mad garbage which swiftly shows up in Guardian reader comments to see that Sunstein’s sock puppets are alive and well.

Question: what is so frightening about conspiracy theories that they must be suppressed in this manner, at taxpayers’ expense?

 

The Zapruder Mystery

I’ve posted another Case Not Closed short on the interwebs – this one about the Zapruder film. There’s a fair bit of information about the mysterious adventures of Mr. Zapruder’s home movie: two 8mm films on one 16mm roll, supposedly split and copied onto standard 8mm at the Jamieson Film Lab in Dallas. When I wrote THE PRESIDENT AND THE PROVOCATEUR the history of the film was twisted enough: how many copies were made? why was there a gap in the numerical sequence? was it true that the right wing oiligarch H.L. Hunt had his own personal copy on the evening of the assassination?

Since then the chain of possession has become still murkier. Not one but two CIA photographic experts have come forward, to reveal that the Zapruder film was screened at CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington DC the weekend after the assassination. Incredibly, the two men – Homer McMahon (then Head of the NPIC Color Lab) and Dino Brugioni (Chief Information Officer at NPIC) saw different films.  One film was on an 8mm reel. The other was on an un-split 16mm reel. According to McMahon and Brugioni, the content of the films was different. Each man, unaware at the time of the other’s work, prepared briefing boards for CIA and Secret Service study.

This strange tale – which indicates multiple “Zapruder” films and multiple 16mm reels very early on – is told by Douglas P. Horne, Senior Analyst on the ARRB’s Military Records Team, here.

Horne’s story is the tip of the iceberg. The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, edited by Jim Fetzer, goes into much detail, pointing out anomalies in the existing version of the film. John Costella‘s analysis of possible alterations and special visual effects – including the possible insertion of a fake Stemmons Freeway sign – is here.

Monte Evans’ long piece about Dan Rather, who was given exclusive access to the Zapruder film and misrepresented it (at least based on the film we’ve seen) was published in Issue 6, Vol 6, of The Third Decade (Nov 1990) – available at the Mary Ferrell site.

In this article – http://www.imaginginsider.com/?p=70019 – Jim Fetzer claims that both the Zapruder and the Nix films are fakes. Now, Fetzer is a multiple conspiracy theorist: he also believes the Americans never landed on the Moon, suspects Stanley Kubrick faked the footage, and considers the WTC7 collapse and Pentagon attack on 2001/9/11 deeply suspicious. But there is no harm in reading what he writes. He is quite literate.

But this is about the Zapruder film. So let’s end with a little meditation on how and why, when we the taxpayers purchased the “original” film from the Zapruder estate as a national archival treasure, the copyright passed not to us, but to a private corporation, based in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. How much did we spend to acquire this asset, only to give it immediately away? A cool sixteen million dollars.

FOLLOW UP:

An article in the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, Spring 2008, deals with the issue of video evidence versus witness testimony. Prof. Jessica Sibley reports on a Supreme Court decision – Scott v. Harris – where the trial judge and the Supremes discounted witness testimony in favour of the “substantive evidence” of a police car video camera. The Supremes are certainly disconnected from daily reality (witness Alioto’s recent insane comment, in a different case, that non-US citizens can’t make Freedom of Information requests anymore because “they don’t pay taxes”) and they departed from precedent in choosing a video clip over what the witnesses swore under oath.

What this means is that, in a court of law today, the Zapruder film might overcome multiple contradictory witness testimony if a witness (presumably the photographer) testified that it was the unaltered film he or she shot (Zapruder didn’t do this, and the Warren Commission wasn’t a court of law), and if the evidence chain was shown to be untainted (impossible in this case). The law in 1963/64 was different. A film at that time was viewed by the courts merely as one piece of demonstrative evidence. Even if the evidence chain had been clean, rather than filthy-dirty, a court would have found multiple witness testimony to the contrary far more compelling – in other words, the film is fake and Greer stopped the car.

(It’s worth remembering, again, that the Warren Commission wasn’t a court of law but a extra-judicial tribunal composed largely of the murdered President’s enemies; that Lee Harvey Oswald had no legal representation; and was murdered in police custody without the benefit of a trial.)

More Silliness From the New York Times

Unlike previous anniversaries of the Kennedy murder, where the New York Times has attempted to mount a serious defence of the discredited Warren Commission, the Grey Old Lady has apparently decided that strategy no longer works — and that, instead, it’s going to treat the 50th anniversary of the assassination as something to laugh about.

This started with the Errol Morris interview with Josiah Thompson – restyled “Tink” for the occasion and cackling over the Dealey Plaza atrocity – but it was apparently just the Times’ first foray. Now the paper has followed up with a yet more trivial piece: a two-page article dedicated to a self-styled “performance artist” who has apparently bought himself the cemetery plot next to Lee Harvey Oswald’s, in Fort Worth.

You can read the story, if you’ve time on your hands, here. But why is this news?

Let’s be charitable and assume that he really is a “performance artist” and not just another paid timewaster like the individual who showed up wearing a pope outfit and carrying a “CIA killed Kennedy” sign at the LA premiere of JFK. I interviewed that fellow on video for the BBC and he cracked rather rapidly under my devastating barrage of questions, admitting that he’d been paid to show up in the silly outfit and “hadn’t been doing this for very long.” Doing what? Spreading disinfo and eating up media time? On whose behalf?

Whether or not the dude with the cemetery plot is on the level, this isn’t news. It certainly isn’t worth two pages in any newspaper. Fifty years ago the President of the United States was murdered in cold blood on the streets of Dallas, Texas, and a Texan became the country’s unelected leader. The assassins and the intellectual authors of the killing have yet to be identified. A committee composed mainly of the murdered President’s enemies declared the crime (and the subsequent murder of a policeman) solved, blaming the whole thing on a lone individual who had been denied a lawyer and murdered in police custody. This is news: interesting, serious stuff – worthy of a serious newspaper article, almost!

Stand by for more silly-season pieces from the NYT, and an exclusive interview with Tom Hanks about his next big Hollywood movie, KEEP MOVING! THERE’S NOTHING TO SEE HERE!

St Cecilia’s Day

This site is dedicated to three unsolved murders – those of President Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer Jefferson Davis Tippet, and Hon. Lee Harvey Oswald, two of whom were illegally killed on St. Cecilia’s Day, half a century ago this year, and the third two days thereafter.

And also to link to the short films I’m making in the run-up to the anniversary of President Kennedy’s and Officer Tippet’s murders: 11/22/1963.

Why bother?

Because this year – 2013 – marks the fiftieth anniversary of the original crime of the century — the assassination, still unsolved, of President John F. Kennedy.

One may dispute this. One may say (as all the major media sources and the forthcoming Tom Hanks movie claim) that the Warren Commission was right,  Oswald did it all on his own, and that settles it! Or one might insist the Mafia ordered the murder. Or the Cubans. Or the CIA. Or, more vaguely, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex. One may also respond that these three murders weren’t the crime of the century — that the Holocaust , or the wars in Vietnam and Korea, or the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, or the atrocities of 9/11, or the devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan were vastly more terrible crimes.

I don’t mean to set up a contest of outrages. My concern is that WE KNOW who was behind the Holocaust, and most of these other crimes. And so we can blame the culprits, and hope to convict them in a court of law, and enjoy what is popularly called closure.

In the case of the Kennedy/Tippet/Oswald murders, we are denied closure because WE KNOW NOTHING AT ALL. The Warren Report would have us believe that Lee Oswald murdered Kennedy and Tippet without a motive, that Jack Ruby didn’t know Oswald, and that he killed him on a whim. Without getting into the volumes of evidence, the faked photographs, the contradictory testimony, the “single bullet theory”, the Warren Commission’s conclusions have collapsed, which is presumably why much of the evidence – including, and is this not the hight of irony? Lee Harvey Oswald’s IRS returns – remains sealed.

John F. Kennedy was the elected president of the United States. He was the elected choice of the majority of American voters. And he was murdered in cold blood, in an open car, on the streets of an American city.

Next to him was a fellow Democrat, John Connally – also seriously wounded in the fusillade. Two women – Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connally – were riding in the car with their husbands, and witnessed this horrible killing, as the Secret Service driver put his foot on the brake. The marksmen were certainly skillful. They didn’t kill or even wound the women. But they were guilty of a dastardly, unforgivable act. And whoever ordered the fusillade was worse.

A bloody unsolved murder and the theft of the franchise are not funny.

One of the things that encouraged me to make this site, and this series of short films (you can see the first one here) was watching Errol Morris’ short documentary for the New York Times, in which Morris and his cackling interview subject treat these murders as a joke. (You can see Morris’ documentary, The Umbrella Man, here. But Jack Kennedy, John Connally, J.D. Tippett and Lee Oswald were real people, and the horror inflicted upon them continues to impact us all – in a much larger sense, since it showed all future Presidents just how powerful they really were.

So…

As the anniversary of these terrible events approaches – Friday, 22 November: Saint Cecila’s Day – isn’t it incumbent on us to reflect on them?and to treat this period as a serious time of study, discovery, a course of action?

Laughing at these events is even worse than than misrepresenting them, as the Warren Commission did. Very few people (except salaried media folk and politicians) believe the old lie that Lee Oswald (who never had a trial, was denied a lawyer, and murdered in police custody) shot the president he admired. And most people living today were born long after these events. They have other things to think about, are peddled the Warren Commission lie, and never told that the House Committee on Assassinations, having studied the same evidence, concluded that President Kenndedy was murdered by multiple gunmen, and thus a conspiracy. This was back in 1979.

But as the anniversary date approaches, and the one percenters gear up their Warren Commission support campaign (in the form of TV, news articles, and a big-budget Hollywood propaganda movie, Parkland), I’m hoping that these posts and little films will shed some light, and speak for the 99% whose voice, as usual, is absent.

A Truth Commission, please!