Props For Researcher Pat Speer

Why?  Because Pat Speer has the patience and fortitude to examine and review just about everything said about the Kennedy assassination leading up to, and during, the 50th Anniversary of the event in 2013.  This includes it all: print, web, and TV.  I really didn’t have the wherewithal to sit thru it thinking I would be so angry I would not be able to sleep at night.  I’m so glad somebody did this work as it needed to be done.  

His review, entitled, The Onslaught: the Media's Response to the 50th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination, is a master clinic in media machinations involving presenting the case to the American, where most television commentators on the major networks, or journalists, have little or no understanding of the event.  After reading two very long pages of Speer’s analysis, it’s really quite amazing to see such a divergent group of people, from the web, print media, PBS, and cable news news networks, people of different backgrounds from seasoned print journalists to new media writers, can all come to the same conclusion:  The Warren Commission got it right.

The conclusion being that there is no conspiracy, that conspiracy is just a bunch of made-up stories, that Lee Oswald is guilty of not only killing President Kennedy, but Officer Tippet, and attempted to assassinate General Walker as well.  It’s amazing to see them all walk in unison together like this.  It’s a hive-mind in operation.  Just one big collective of dead thinkers from all over the place. 

The stumbling block for all of these people is the single bullet theory.  SBT as we call it.  Two ballistic experts, Luke and Michael Haag (father and son), are tasked with replicating it.  They will make the rounds to a host of documentaries on various networks.  Their tests are all supposed to be scientific and feature stunts that have been done before.  As Speer shows, much is flawed in their demonstrations--wrong distances, angles, still targets, not shooting at bone, and so on.  How ironic to have experts trying to prove a theory that comes from non-ballistic experts, i.e., lawyers.  How convoluted is that?  Very!  The staff attorney’s created the SBT for purely political reasons once the FBI came up with an errant bullet striking the curb on Commerce wounding James Tague.  In the end, the Haag’s come off as a pair of fakers to those of us who have studied the case.  At no point in these demonstrations, is it ever revealed that the Warren Commission in 1964 tasked ballistic experts doctors Dolce and Light to conduct tests on cadavers using Oswald’s rifle at the U. S. Army Edgewood Arsenal.  As Dr. Dolce stated in an interview in 1986, each of the ten test fired bullets were in his words, “markably deformed.”  Dr. Dolce was not called to give testimony to Warren Commission and his findings were buried in a report, published in March of 1965, that was classified “confidential” for 8 years before being placed in the NARA.  You’ll never see this mentioned in any of these programs.

And this thread of fakery runs through just about every show and article on JFK’s assassination.  I think what it shows more than anything is how co-opted the American media is when it comes to the controversy surrounding the case.  It should be a time honored American tradition to question and test what the government tells us.  

I don’t know what the are more bothered with...conspiracy or controversy.  

Here is the quote, by Pulitzer prize-winner David Horsey, in the LA Times that most aggravates me:

“In the real world, though, conspiracies tend to unravel. Somebody squeals, somebody leaks, somebody betrays. We always find out – and usually because a conspiring collective of humans is bound to screw up.”

Does this learned man understand anything about history at all?  It’s rife with conspiracy.  To suggest that conspiracies unravel due to human frailty is ludicrous.  Plots can unravel but they mainly unravel after the deed is carried out.  And some, such as the JFK conspiracy can last seemingly forever by having jack legs such as Horsey who would rather pontificate on a national medium rather than conduct a proper investigation.  In many ways people like this are unwittingly government shills, if not on the payroll.  And we know what former CIA director William Colby said about that in front of Congress; that all major media figures are under their control.

Conspiracies are real.  Conspiracy is not a theory, it's a crime.  The one involving JFK’s death is ongoing for 50 years.  It does happen.  About a dozen people were involved with the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.  Who talked there? Nobody.  Dozens of men were involved in the plot to a assassinate Adolf Hitler.  Who talked there? Nobody.  The nineteen hijackers on 9/11.  Did any of them talk?  Of course not.

I think Pat Speer sums it up when commenting on the early journalists that looked into the assassination.  As he put it, “..they basically accept whatever evidence is put on the plate before them.”  

To be fair, that was a time when most people believed their government.  However, a host of revelations were to follow over the next decade to dispel that.  A whole lot of lying was uncovered from Vietnam, Watergate, and the CIA/FBI revelations. The disappointing thing is that people in the media today still believe what is presented to them with minimal examination. 

Speer finishes up with the following:  “I mean, have any of the old newsmen dragged out to tell their stories --MacNeil, Lehrer, Schieffer, Rather, Brokaw, Aynesworth, Allman, and Payne--expressed the slightest doubt about the most doubtful aspect of the Warren Commission's conclusions: the single-bullet theory? I don't believe so.” 

So the most common prevailers of the lone nut theory in all of these 50th Anniversary media presentations (print-web-TV) either have no working knowledge of the case, are government shills, money and fame seekers, habitual liars, or just a bunch of opinionated blowhards.  I imagine the next generation of stooges will be in place for the 100th Anniversary.  I’m glad I won’t be here to see it.

Sources

http://www.patspeer.com/the-onslaught

Pat Speer debunks the debunkers!

Pat Speer on his excellent research site debunks the debunkers of conspiracy in the national media, print-web-TV, regarding the reporting on the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's killing.  This is why I didn't watch a lot of it.  I knew it would be so anti-conspiracy and fraudulent that it would not be worth wasting time on.  As Pat documents, indeed it was. It shows what lengths these media gate keepers do to keep the government myth of a lone assassin alive.  The amount of selective evidence sourcing to make sure Lee Oswald forever guilty boggles the mind.   

It's worth reading both pages:
http://www.patspeer.com/the-onslaught

And 

http://www.patspeer.com/the-onslaught-part2

Highly recommended.

The Sum Of All Things

"The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy."

HSCA, Final Report, 1979

From the very beginning, the Powers that Be have treated the Warren Report as if it is the word of God, come down from on high, etched in stone. In the picture above, that big book almost looks like a stone tablet. Why, it might as well be Moses himself placing it in Lyndon Johnson’s awaiting hands. Later, he would tell Walter Cronkite that he never believed in the lone gunman theory. After second thoughts he asked CBS to delete the comment, under the grounds of National Security. A moment of candor we are not supposed to know about.

In a 1999 doctoral dissertation by Ross Frank Ralston, he relates an important concept in the study of JFK. It is the principle of "hegemony" in the media. In other words, the ability of certain players in the media to dominate others. According to Ralston, those main players are CBS and Time-Life in the way they presented the government’s case in the assassination. And early on, they set the standard as to how the assassination would be relayed to the public after the Warren Report was published in late 1964. The Warren Report, as Ralston summarizes is, "a man in a building shot a man in a car..."

However, there is more than one theory of what happened because there was another, and final, investigation launched in 1977 to become known as the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In this case they explored both the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Despite political infighting and government agencies lacking in openness and outright lying to the Committee (i.e., CIA) their final report published in 1979 concluded there was a possibility of a conspiracy in the deaths of Kennedy and King but they didn't have the means to continue any further investigation. 

So we are left with two official government investigations both with different outcomes. The first, a lone gunman with no confederates; and the last, more than one gunman with a conspiracy in play.

What Ralston concentrates on in his dissertation is how the media focuses on the former, ignoring the latter, and extending into every possible area of the media from print to TV. In effect, the Warren Report becomes the sum of all things.

The Watch Dog Became The Lap Dog
The way the "Fourth Estate" functions with the Kennedy assassination has long been the fly in the ointment. It is a frustrating issue to examine. Where they should question, they accept without comment. Isn't one of the aims of journalism to research what the facts are? Research what you are told? After all, we are not living in Nazi state, right? In many ways the American press operates like a propaganda arm of the government. Joseph Goebbels never had it so good! One can view this behavior in the way they cover the official government investigations from JFK, to Watergate, to 9-11.

And therein lies the disconnect. The public will question what they are told; the mainstream press, largely, will not. The Watch Dog became the Lap Dog. No one in the American Press ever did a critical analysis of the Warren Report, the 26 volumes of collected evidence and hearings, from then till now. It is as if they wanted to prove the Government's story of what happened. And why? Probably because press independence is a thing of the past. Plus, there are many connections between the government and press at this point. As Carl Bernstein reported in a piece for Rolling Stone magazine in 1976, he found at least 400 CIA operatives in the press, either as volunteers or paid agents.

The internet itself has been a great boon to critical thought on JFK’s assassination. No other media outlet comes close. True, there is a lot of junk out there, misinformation out there from both sides of the issue. One ultimately needs to do their own research to filter out the nonsense. And as I have found in my own research, a careful examination of the evidence paints a totally different picture of the assassination and the surrounding events. Well, back in the day when there were only three networks reporting the news it was easy to play cover for the Ruling Class. Or for that matter, cover up anything that the status quo wanted. Of course they have their own shills in operation on the Internet now as well, but they are all just voices–their impact is diminished as there are so many more voices in opposition

Various Machinations
Ross Frank Ralston does a good job at accounting the various machinations of CBS, Time and Life. It’s the standard mishmash of cherry picked evidence, straw man arguments, and slight of hand, misdirection ploys. These guys are good! And run this same game now. Just watch any History Channel or Discovery Channel documentary on the assassination of Kennedy and you’ll see the Warren Commission’s conclusion verified every time. If you take note of any of these documentaries, their aim is to support the government’s theories and claims on everything from assassinations to terror attacks. While there are too many to document in this post, you can download the PDF below,  about 7.9 megs in size.

I would however, like to point out a few discrepancies that Ralston chronicles regarding the 1967 CBS Kennedy assassination documentary since so much malfeasance occurred masquerading as a legitimate journalistic investigation.

Such as, when they tell us that Oswald’s rifle, utilized by an expert could recycle the weapon in 5 seconds. (The Warren Report settled on 4.8 to 5.6 seconds.) Sounds reasonable, of course. The trouble is, they never alert the viewers that Oswald was never an expert rifleman and barely qualified on his last of three marksmen tests. Nor do they mention the three metal shims used to properly align the telescopic site, or a host of other problems with the lone gunman scenario. (And I might add, you can read about this and a lot more here on this blog.) And since then, a FOIA request has uncovered a CIA document that their own photographic analysis department concluded a time span of just 1.6 seconds, obviously far too fast for anybody to work the bolt manually.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see how they manipulate the facts so the man in the building is forever shooting at the man in the car. The Lone Gunman is an ever present character in documentaries like this since he’s the fall-guy to quash conspiracy. In CBS ballistics tests done with a Mannlicher-Carcano, which by the way, is a model they acquired, not Oswald’s original weapon, they used it to shoot up masonite and gelatin dummies to simulate bone and flesh. Their conclusion? Yep, one bullet could do all that damage on two men. The trouble is, they never showed what the spent bullets looked like. Did they resemble CE399, the so-called pristine bullet? We’ll never know for sure but my hunch is that it did not. It certainly didn’t at the Edgewood Arsenal test where experts fired at the radial bones in 10 different cadavers and all ten bullets were, as Dr. Joseph Dolce said in his report, “markedly deformed.” He was never called to testify for the Commission and his report was concealed.

One thing Ralston left out, which I think is particularly egregious of CBS, is the way they treated Orville Nix in this show. He, of the Nix film and a witness to shots coming from the grassy knoll was interviewed in such a way so they could edit the tape later so he was heard saying the shots came from the school book depository building. This bit of tomfoolery is what the Nazis used to make propaganda films showing Jews in the ghetto, living happily. Years later, another TV producer would pull the same stunt on Jim Garrison making him look like a nut saying there were 33 gunmen in Dealey Plaza. When actually, he was referring to the number of people involved in a conspiracy. Garrison thought only six gunmen were involved in the slaying, which were cut out of the final broadcast in order to make him look like a fool. This is an example of the nasty games these people play under the guise of “journalism.” Yes, journalism for their Masters.

And this is why the Internet is so great. They can’t do this now. It would be posted somewhere on the web. One can see why the Ruling Class despises this new medium so much and are constantly floating ways of controlling it. As we used to say, “The free press is free for whomever owns one.” Now we all do..

Epilogue
Look at the lengths the government goes to quash a conspiracy in the death of John F. Kennedy? If this case is so strong and so true, why go to all the trouble to manipulate witness testimony as the CBS did with Orville Nix, or Life Magazine’s notorious shuffling of the Zapruder film frames in order to fool the public into thinking all the shots came from the rear? What do they have to fear? Why do they want us to believe this myth they created so strongly?

Probably because there is official history and there is what actually happened. They fear the truth and the public’s lack of confidence in them and their seat of power. Finally, they failed. The Majority do not believe the official fiction of what happened. They fail every time they have to resort to Nazi-style propaganda techniques in order to present their case, and by doing so, show us how weak their case really is.

1999 doctoral dissertation by Ross Frank Ralston.  PDF on https://georgebailey.substack.com/p/the-sum-of-all-things?sd=pf

Sources:
Fonzi, Gaeton; The Last Investigation; Law, William In The Eye of History; HSCA Report, 1979; Warren Report, 1964