Bugliosi Takes To The Airwaves

Vincent Bugliosi is out hawking a new book, Divinity of Doubt: The God Question
and appeared recently on the Alex Jones show. The former LA prosector gained fame in the late 1960s for putting away Charlie Manson and his gang for the Tate-Labianca murders. Years later Bugliosi gained the ire of JFK conspiracy researchers with his 2007 book, Reclaiming History. Ever boastful, Bugliosi called this 1600+ book (plus over 900 pages on CD-ROM) his “Magnus Opus” on the JKF assassination and did so once again on Jones’ radio program. The book itself is rightly referred to as a door stop and it belly flopped in the marketplace. It is no longer in print.

There is something basically smarmy about Bugliosi with his high-pitched slick talking lawyer swag. His arguing style, and to a certain extent, his writing style about the assassination bare similarity to that of a stage magician with slight of hand tricks and a pretty leggy model on side. Throw in some straw men to shoot down, plus an added dose of vitriol towards naysayers (i.e., conspiracy theorists) and the naivety of an audience that might not be familiar the particulars in the case, and he comes off looking sharp and on-game. I’ve called him the “King of the cherry pickers” as he often picks the evidence that supports the Warren Commissions’s lone gunman conclusion and largely ignores (when not discrediting) any contrary evidence.

Alex Jones tried to get Bugliosi to talk some about other issues, particularly the Kennedy assassination, but it quickly became apparent that Bugliosi didn’t want to entertain the notion, stating the lack of time to properly get into the issue. Jones did get him to talk about the shots from the grassy knoll, getting the standard reply, “There is no evidence of anybody seeing a shooter on the grassy knoll.” More on that in a few paragraphs.

But take notice of Bugliosi’s modus operandi–he says there is nobody seeing a shooter on the knoll. But what about the witnesses that heard shots coming from the knoll? He ignores them using the classic Bugliosi pass. The fact is, there are over fifty people that heard shots from knoll; everybody from Abraham Zapruder making his famous film, to Phil Willis whose photographs appeared in Look magazine to Bill and Gayle Newman lying on the curb protecting their children from shots they say they heard coming from the knoll. As it happens, too many to mention here.

This very similar to how Bugliosi dismisses the whole idea of there being a shooter on the knoll at all. He does this by stating the shooter has the wrong angle and that the kill shot would have passed through Kennedy’s head from ear to ear, rather than laterally from the front to back. Seems reasonable upon first assessment and I have to admit I was taken in by this when I first read it. But there is a catch–Bugliosi places the shooter in the wrong position behind the picket fence to being with! He does not believe any witness testimony so invents this scheme. My grandmother used to call this, “Having your cake and eating it too.” Indeed. Beware of this man’s arguments as they appear well upon first glance, but fade when more light is focused upon them.

Going back to the witnesses that saw activity on the grassy knoll, Tip O’Neill, on page 178 in his book, “Man of the House” cites both Kennedy aides Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell as saying they saw smoke rising from behind the picket fence on the knoll. And most importantly, they both heard shots coming from behind the fence as well.

However, the Master Cherry Picker not need ponder such difficulties. The song and dance must go on.

Sources
YouTube links:

Bugliosi on Alex Jones, May 11.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LD46_HQtzM

Jim Marrs rebuttal, May 12.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ9clQ-QA4k

High Noon In Badville

“Madmen in power always need a fictitious ‘evil’ enemy to keep the game of war going, and keep the money flowing. Government is only able to grow and become more powerful by scaring the people about an outside enemy that is almost always manufactured and hyped by the government itself.”

Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator

I’ll give the the group that bumped JFK off one thing–at least they stuck to their story, flawed though it is, down through the decades. With the Mob hit on Osama bin Laden the official story had changed so many times one can’t help but think of the great bulk of malfeasance at work. On the face of it, much worse than the Kennedy assassination cover-up and the lies the public were told about that. An ill fated attempt at closure was remedied, but eventually ground to a halt. That seems to be the attempt here but it is so bizarrely imposed to make one wonder what precisely they are thinking. Are the adults still in charge?

By now, all are familiar with the yarn. First there was a big shoot out at the OK Corral. Nope, there was only one guy shooting who was easily dispatched. Then the Boogie Man was using women as human shields and they were killed. No, he wasn’t; only one women was allegedly wounded in the foot. We were told he was shot in resistance. No, he was shot in the head execution style instead. The glorious mansion turned out to be a rundown, nondescript cinder block building.

Over on the winner’s side, the picture of President Obama huddled with cabinet watching the event live on TV was contrived as well.

Obviously, there are problems with the narrative here. But no one in the mainstream press dares compare it to a series of lies. They are just a bunch of Court Scribes at this point taking it all with ease. Never mind the inconsistency. In many ways, this is no different than the way they handled the Kennedy assassination from 1963 or any other major news event till now. The only difference is the real independent press and commentators are on the Internet now. The news will out as long as the Net remains free. For how long is anybody’s guess.

Sleep with the Fishes
I thought it unsatisfactory they dumped the body in the sea. The body is the Prima facie evidence of what occurred–in other words, an irrefutable exhibit of fact. Down through history when the mighty foe is slain, the body is always put on display. Here, no such thing happens. Even the death photos are not to be revealed.

Even more puzzling is that no autopsy was completed. Of course, if bin Laden, was really killed in the manner they say, we know what he died of. However, a documented and photographed autopsy forms a trail of evidence. Evidence the government could use to prove their case. Evidently, the criminal enterprise that our government has become has grown so great in its hubris, that it no longer considers it necessary to prove anything. Their word will suffice. Or so they think. But the people that really think about things are not fooled.

The sheer incompetence shown with this basic course of action boggles the mind. Even the Bolivian authorities did an autopsy of Che Guevara’s remains which included fingerprints and photographs. They made sure the world knew they got the right guy. The body was put on exhibition, complete with CIA operatives standing by. Notwithstanding, for a major world superpower (i.e., Empire) to transgress like this addresses the political nature of the undertaking and how much they need to conceal. And what would that be? Did the Boogie Man really die years ago as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Dr. Steve Pieczenik said in an amazing series of disclosures recently on the Alex Jones show? Or did the Seals rush in and kill a doppelganger? What we know of evidence in this affair is fuzzy to the point of being ludicrous and strains our notion of common sense. Which of course, only encourages endless speculation. I guess they learned their lesson with the 26 volumes of collected hearings and evidence the Warren Commission published. Never again. In those books are stored facts that contradict the Warren Report.

Ultimately, there is not, nor will the ever be, any independent verification of what happened. That should disturb everybody interested in the truth.

Timmy, We Hardly Knew Ye...
Every player needs an alias and Tim Osman was Osama bin Laden’s in the glory days of fighting Russians in Afghanistan. And he got this alias from the intelligence agencies he worked with (CIA, MI6, others) that also founded Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that allegedly materialized 9-11. There is so much mythology, high strangeness and haze surrounding bin Laden I cannot cover it all here. If you want to learn more, Saman Mohammadi at his excellent blog, The Excavator, will fill you in. (Forget Wikipedia as it only serves as a government propaganda tool.) Nonetheless, virtually nothing you’ll read in the mainstream is true on the man just as not much is true about Lee Harvey Oswald, and others like him. Suffice to say, the government basically took down one of its former employees.

This reminds me a lot of what L. Fletcher Proudy said in his book, JFK, in regards to the CIA’s chosen puppets. Men like the Diem brothers or Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The Agency supports them as allies, builds them up, falls out of favor with them and finally, guns them down. If one wants a long life, it’s best not to work with the Agency. Bin Laden found that out–Lee Oswald did too.

An Egyptian newspaper published Osama bin Laden’s obituary in December of 2001. Whatever happen to him, he was by all accounts suffering from stage five kidney disease, meaning kidney failure, requiring dialysis by July of 2001. One can live a long time having kidney dialysis done three times a week but it needs to be administered by heath care professionals and needs constant attention. It’s not something a person ever recovers from. The “official” story ignores this important detail. So far, no reports of dialysis equipment being recovered.

High Noon In Badville
Not only were the 9-11 attacks one of the most tragic events in American history it was also one of the weirdest. There is so much going on with it, after a while the mind dulls to the relentless onslaught of particulars, each fact building on another to a huge pyramid of anomalies and seemingly unthinkable incidents. Everything from cell phones working at over 30,000 feet (impossible) to half a million tons of concrete and steel crashing to the ground with little notice on seismographic markers, to the put options being placed on airline stock of the exact hijacked airliners where a reported $100 million dollars were made, the evidence of the transaction located on the hard drives of the computers located in the Twin Towers. This rolling wreck never stops tumbling.

I’ve always been fascinated with how quickly they pinned this ghastly crime on bin Laden and Al-Qaeda within a few hours of the attacks before any investigation started. And nothing ever changed from that day forward, no matter how much investigating they did. The end result was–he’s guilty–that’s our story and we’re sticking to it. This is similar to Lee Oswald being apprehended within an hour of the assassination with the crime accredited to him which never changed either. In fact, a signed Dallas Police affidavit lists Oswald as President Kennedy and officer Tippit’s killer, dated at 1:40 PM that day. How is that for innocent till proven guilty?

Be that as it may, Osama bin Laden looks more and more like a patsy. The story of the former Company man gone rogue wears thin in places just as Lee Oswald, the Commie Marine, does. Oswald always had a cover and so did bin Laden. It’s called Legend building in the grand game; the old misdirection ploy stage magicians know so well. The cover is exposed a bit when bin Laden is in the Sudan using his wealth to rebuild some of the infrastructure there. Bad guys aren’t supposed to do that just as loners are not supposed to have a wife and kids and friends.

I guess only in a town as unlucky as Badville, where nothing is as it seems, can the outlaw die and return to be killed all over again. The truth is a mirage.


Sources:
Prouty, Fletcher L., JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy; Marrs, Jim, The Terror Conspiracy

Link:
http://disquietreservations.blogspot.com/

Book Review: Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer

“Mailer, after all, was the sort of author who could both dazzle and infuriate, often within the space of a single paragraph. He was a major talent who could not keep himself from reminding you that he was a major talent, an astute observer of his moment, who tended to operate as if that moment were entirely his.”

David L. Ulin, LA Times Staff Writer

The trouble with reading books by Norman Mailer is there is too much of Norman in them. Such a dominating character in American literary art, to read him is to sense he is trying to dominate the reader as well. To “dazzle and infuriate” as David Ulin says above. His foray into the mysterious nature and ways of Lee Oswald in his Oswald’s Tale is a prime example of that. There are some new tidbits scattered about and his foray into Russia seeking new information regarding Oswald’s time there which is informative, but Mailer is sticking to the script. The Lone Gunman is staying alone. Much of the book features Warren Commission interview transcripts and abundant sections of written work by other authors (largely, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, interviewer of Oswald in Moscow in 1959 and Marina Oswald’s biographer and also, a known CIA dabbler which is never admitted to in this book.) Occasionally, Mailer throws in tasty little morsels of his own to consider.

Mailer back in the day, was a conspiracy believer and then at some point decided the evidence did not merit that view and joined up with the Lone Nut purists where he stayed during his final days. That influence can be seen throughout the book. Mailer takes a conventional view of the life of Lee Oswald, though he seems fascinated with forays into his personal habits, idiosyncrasies and sex life. Ironic that Mailer explores Oswald’s sexual habits in detail while ignoring more celebrated topics, such as, was he an intelligence agent as his mother claimed? There are so many controversies here that Mailer never addresses as if he doesn’t want to dirty his hands with the thing.

How Mailer Deals With Controversy
Mailer resorts to the same parsing of selective evidence as Posner, Bugliosi, and a host of other Warren Report defenders do. That of course, comes as no surprise.

A case in point is how he handles Oswald’s street scuffle with DRE member Carlos Bringuier while handing out pamphlets for the pro-Castro FPCC which has Oswald arrested, provides him local media time and establishes his persona as a communist in the public’s eye.

But along the way something odd happens that lets us know there is more here than meets the eye. Because Oswald mails a letter to the FPCC headquarters in New York vaguely describing the altercation. The trouble is, it was postmarked before the scuffle took place. This one little thing casts doubt on this street tussle being a spontaneous affair and implies it was a preplanned event. In CIA parlance, Oswald was being built a Legend. A common procedure of spy-craft.

And how does our great American literary figure handle this? Mailer recruits cabalist traditions and Classical Hebrew, with notions of calling things into being so as to create one’s future. In Mailer’s words, “To say, therefore, that you have done something that you have not yet done becomes the first and essential step in shaping the future.”

Sure, sure. Mailer resorts to metaphysics while missing the obvious–that Oswald mailed the letter too early for what was apparently a contrived event. Earlier, Oswald had approached the DRE to offer his Marine experience to Carlos Bringuier to train them. He offered them a donation as well and was rebuffed on both counts. It should be pointed out here, that the all Cuban DRE was being trained and financed by the CIA. A fact that Mailer never points out to his readers. Evidently, Oswald was on a fishing expedition, doing the labor of a “dangle” for somebody or some agency.

Frankly, I am perplexed as to why he would resort to this. It’s Mailer the novelist speaking here, not Mailer the seeker of the truth. I find it hard to believe that he even has confidence in these words. It is an odd way to brush off the controversy and it just doesn’t work on many levels. For a man so brilliant to revert to this weirdness is absurd but Mailer does so with no shame at all.
I guess when the mind is made up that there can’t be a conspiracy; that Lee Oswald is only lurching from one delusion and flight of fancy to the next, with no greater cause in effect.

KGB Transcripts
While investigating Lee Oswald’s Russian period, Mailer gets access to KGB transcripts taken from bugs that were placed in Oswald and Marina’s apartment. Ample sections of these are reproduced in the book. Basically, I found them not to add much light on Oswald’s character and it all amounts to a lot of bickering between a newly married couple. It’s essentially boring.

However, one item stands out, and it’s another thing Mailer omits–and that is what language are they speaking in? While it is known that Oswald was an excellent Russian speaker, it is also known that during his time in Russia he didn’t show off that skill that much. He apparently did upon meeting Marina, who thought at first he was a local as he spoke with a Baltic accent. But when socializing with the Ziger family, they report he never spoke Russian in front of them, only in English to their father who understood English. Fearing being arrested for being a spy, which he most likely was, Oswald never wanted this skill to be known to those who were listening in on him. It would denote a swift arrest for espionage.

Conversely, his wife Marina was apparently a very good English speaker but spoke little of it when she migrated over to the United States. John Armstrong in his book, Harvey and Lee, states that he saw Marina’s handwritten notebooks in the National Archives and they were all in English. Lee wrote Marina letters in English to her while living in Russia and those are in evidence. Even mother Marguerite reveals in her Commission testimony detailed conversations she had with her daughter in law–conversations in English, without anyone to render in Russian. Yet Marina needs a translator to give her sworn testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964. What is going on here? Evidently, she was under similar pressures in America as Lee was in Russia. Which of course, would fashion her an operative as well. At any rate, both were in a Cold War contest to not reveal too much of who they are and what they know to the Big Players.

And all of this interesting stuff Mailer ignores to create his vision of Lee Oswald as Walter Mitty, with his visions of greatness, constantly encountering dead ends, seeing his destiny smothered before his eyes. The other Oswald, the one that was a shadow warrior for the Home Team, which would explain a lot of his mysterious undertakings, has no place in the narrative, Mailer’s narrative.

The Pay Off
So when the smoke clears we’ve got our lone gunman solely responsible for the act and it’s time to move along. It’s all a sad dream anyway. As I was reading this work, I kept getting the feeling that Mailer would rather have jotted this all down as a novel. After all, he considered the novel to be the apex of literary art, and art he had a gift for. He at times uses the same devices one does in fiction writing and those devices seem out of place, like when invents the metaphysical reason for Oswald’s forecast of a scuffle in a letter before the event happens to work his way out of that mess. This is what a fiction writer does–gives his character some luck out of nowhere to extract himself from a crisis. When Mailer doesn’t wish to deal with something troublesome, he ignores it. At times he seems set on exposing a deep truth and then veers off of it as if the whole scene got too hot. Towards the end he refers to Lee Oswald as a ghost; the First Ghost he says. As if there are not hundreds of other ghosts haunting the American historical landscape. Once again, a metaphor better suited in fiction.

Oswald’s Tale takes off like it’s going to be an interesting, groundbreaking book, but that never happens as it fades into the same old thing for those of us familiar with the Oswald story. There are lots of fields left to follow, as Mailer never wants to deal with any of the major controversies in the case. After all, that might muddy up the nice, clean story being presented. Even at this late stage in JFK assassination research, by hundreds of researchers, Mailer still thinks the men selected to be a part of the commission were honorable and above reproach. You can still think that so long as you ignore their histories as Mailer does. Like many of his ilk, the Warren Report stands as the final authority on what happened and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the last official government investigation conducted in the late 1970s, which concluded in its report there was a probable conspiracy, is given no consideration at all.

Oswald’s Tale is really the same account of Lee Oswald’s life the Warren Report told us, just with better prose.

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

And Then Harvey Rode Into The Trailer Park

“Harvey enters the duller reaches of the world, as if to add color to it by bringing forth sinister premonitions of future doom.”


William Henry Timmer has a childhood experience that while not too unusual at the time, though it would later become that. One summer day 1953 in an oil boom town of Stanley, North Dakota, a new kid showed up in his neighborhood. Scruffy, riding a beat-up bike with no chain guard, he hailed from New York and regaled Timmer and the other boys with stories of street gangs and razor fights. They were all impressed with this older, big city kid who went by the name of Harvey. Harvey Oswald.

But Timmer noticed there wasn't something quite right with this kid. He was older than the other boys in the neighborhood. Timmer saw that he carried with him Marxist literature. One odd thing was Harvey didn’t want to be seen by adults. When Timmer told Harvey and the other kids about some rabbits they had in a hutch and invited them all over to view them in his grandmother’s yard, Harvey came along till he saw Timmer’s mother appear out of their trailer. He then wheeled his bicycle around and rode off without saying a word or staying to see the rabbits.

Later, William Timmer reports, Harvey told him he was going to kill the president of the United States one day. When Timmer related this to his mother she told him not to ever associate with the boy again. He did not. Nor did he know where this boy lived, only that he came to their trailer park from somewhere south. He never saw Harvey after that summer or in the following years before they moved to Arizona in 1957.

Shortly after the assassination, Timmer’s mother, Mrs. Leslie Cole, sent him some newspaper clippings of Lee Oswald following his arrest for the murders asking him if this is the boy he met in Stanley ten years earlier. Timmer identified the man in the pictures as Harvey and his mother preceded to write President Lyndon Johnson a letter describing how her son met Oswald ten years earlier. This letter was forwarded to the Secret Service and from there to the FBI.

Both William Timmer and his mother were interviewed about this incident by the FBI. As with many controversial witnesses, they were never called to testify to the Warren Commission about this encounter with Harvey (Lee?) Oswald. Why? Conflicting records and timelines.

(FBI Special Agent, James Hosty, in his book Assignment: Oswald, tells of meeting Marguerite Oswald and asking her if she and Lee ever lived in South Dakota. She laughed it off, denying ever having lived there. Odd that Hosty got the wrong state in questioning her. It also shows how fast the ND story flashed around as Hosty’s question was posed just five days after the assassination.)

New York City, 1953
Marguerite Oswald moved herself and Lee New York for the purpose of being closer to her son form her first marriage, John Pic. All existing records indicate that Marguerite Oswald was employed for most of 1953 a various department and hosiery stores in New York. Meanwhile, Lee Oswald’s school records have him enrolled in PS #117 and later, PS #44. It was #117 that he was largely truant from, and court proceedings were launched to place Lee Oswald in The Youth House, a home for delinquent boys. Subsequent events had Oswald evaluated for the first and only time by a psychiatrist and interviewed by a probation officer.

The year of 1953 was filled with discrepancies in records and witness testimony. John Armstrong in his book, Harvey and Lee, documents in exhaustive detail the conflicting witness testimony and the disappearance of records pertaining to this and many other phases of Lee Oswald’s life. Take for example, Louise Robertson, who states she was employed by Marguerite Oswald as a housekeeper for six weeks to take care of their one bedroom apartment. Never mind the strangeness of hiring a maid for small apartment when Marguerite is supposed to impoverished, but Mrs. Robertson claims her employment ended as a result of Marguerite and Lee moving out of New York in the summer of 1953. However, the FBI obtain employment records from the Lady Orva Hosiery store which has Marguerite Oswald employed there from May to December of 1953. So she and Lee can’t be living in ND during this time, contradicting not only William Timmer and his mother, but Louise Robertson’s account of the Oswald’s leaving in the summer of that year.

This mess expands even larger than what I can describe here as there all kinds of strange happenings with all of this. John Armstrong documents how all of the family court records regarding Oswald in New York were placed in the FBI’s custody in December of 1963 by Judge Florence Kelley, for the sole purpose of being relayed to the Warren Commission. The FBI claims they were but only copies of the originals were sent. Subsequent attempts by later investigations, such as the ARRB (Assassination Records and Review Board) in the 1990’s, were unable to determine where the originals. No detailed list of the files has been found to make sure everything in Judge Kelley’s order was sent. And apparently something is missing because there are no report cards or school pictures from Oswald’s school days in New York.

So, all of Oswald’s school records are copies of the files and not originals. This is a common occurrence in the case. In fact, Armstrong goes on to state that all the records that the FBI turned over to the Warren Commission, regarding everything with Lee Oswald’s life were copies–never originals. Safe to say, find a copy of John Armstrong’s book to read the seemingly endless details on this and a lot more, as this pattern extends throughout Lee Oswald’s life.

Back To North Dakota
I found William Timmer and his mother’s account of what happened in ND in 1953 to have a ring of truth to it, despite the contradictions. After all, they are describing an Oswald we already know, complete with Marxist reading material. They are not publicity hounds seeking fame, nor did they ever try to make any money off their experiences. Besides that, there are quite a number of people that knew Oswald that report he hated being called Lee and preferred being called Harvey instead. All events like this, from assassinations to huge disasters like 9-11 reveal weird incidents with murky undercurrents. Spooky Harvey showing up in a way-out place like a trailer park in North Dakota carries with it a creepy, dislocated feeling. At least to me. This older kid hanging out with younger boys, playing the role of the tough guy, mouthing off about disquieting threats, builds to a collective whole. Harvey enters the duller reaches of the world, as if to add color to it by bringing forth sinister premonitions of future doom.

All of this has the hint of the doppelganger playing with us again. Either by a tease or just some higher-up agency manufacturing phony files to lead future investigators astray. Though this Harvey interlude has a tinge of the supernatural to it. Or maybe not that. Just sort of a borderline mysterious event with dubious meaning. Such as a few years ago when clowns were spotted around the country in vans offering children candy, bidding them to enter. Apparently, they never got any takers and then vanished from the American landscape. Just like Harvey did on his junky bike.

As former CIA director Richard Helms once said, “No one will ever know who or what Lee Harvey Oswald represented.” Maybe not, but somebody, somewhere, knows. Maybe that is why Marguerite cackled at Agent Hosty’s inquiry about living in South Dakota. Hey, you boys are so out of the loop you can’t even get the state right.


Sources
Armstrong, John, Harvey and Lee; Hosty, James, Assignment: Oswald

Book Review: JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty

The hidden history of the Vietnam War

“We do not have precise answers as to why we gave U.S arms to Ho Chi Minh in 1945 and then a few years later provided Ho’s enemy, the French, with $3 billion of our arms. The situation is not supposed to be clear.”

L. Fletcher Prouty

The tile to L. Fletcher Prouty’s second and last book is a bit misleading. While Prouty does cover the JFK assassination and provides a good rationale for his murder by a gang of plotters, he spends a great deal of time in an area he knows very intimately–Vietnam. During his stellar career in the Air Force he was involved with clandestine operations there, going back to the early 1950’s when the French were still there and involved in a ground war with Ho Chi Minh’s army. Prouty provides the proper historical context the launched the war and why the Untied States got involved in the first place. And in Prouty’s view it started with the CIA’s involvement there. John Kennedy early on saw what the CIA was capable of doing behind his back with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He saw the ramping up for war in Indochina and his attempts to thwart it by his signing of National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #263 which would have gotten our forces out of Vietnam by 1965.

But Kennedy died, his successor Lyndon Johnson signed a NSAM of his own countermanding the order, and the rest is sad and tragic history.

The CIA and Vietnam
The final role towards the end of Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty’s military career was as liaison officer between the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and the CIA. He covers this in great detail in his book, The Secret Team, an excellent look into how the military-industrial-intelligence establishment works within the confines of the National Security State. In that book, Prouty shows the barrier between intelligence and the military becomes so blurred it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. While The Secret Team may appear to be a dull read for some, but if you can pay attention long enough, the reader will be awarded with some amazing anecdotes and a glimpse of the behind the scenes maneuvering of intelligence operations.

The CIA under Allen Dulles went from being a “quiet arm of intelligence” for the president and expands instead into a covert action agency capable of overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing puppets that will be more friendly towards United States interests, mainly business. The Cold War against communism is the stated outward goal but there is a lot more going on out of sight which amounts to a high stake, deadly poker game.

One thing I found surprising was to learn is that the CIA was in control of all United State’s military operations in Vietnam from 1954 to 1965, when the Marines officially took over. You will not read that in most history books. You will not see that on any documentaries about the Vietnam War on TV. It’s part of the hidden history that every so often gets out. And our meddling there actually goes as far back to 1945 when the Japanese withdrew and the French, who had long been there using it as a colony moved back in to a people that thought their time for independence had come. Not exactly a view shared by the French and their business interests. From then to 1975, Indochina existed in a state of war in one form or another.

Of course, this all raises other questions. For example, when and how did the CIA get the authority, obviously not Constitutional, to conduct military operations using military personnel around the world as they saw fit? Col. Proudy tells us. The other secretive agency, the National Security Council didn’t want the military to have the responsibility of doing covert operations. So it was handed to the CIA in the NCS 10/2 Directive. However, they didn't have the men for combat operations so that gave birth to Special Forces, such as the Green Berets and the other outfits that followed.

Prouty tells us that Eisenhower was leery of this arrangement and he wrote the following note on the 10/2 Directive:

“At no time will the CIA be provided with more equipment, etc., than is absolutely necessary for the support of the operation directed and such support will always be limited to the requirements of that single operation.”

Well, that sounds reasonable even though Eisenhower might as well jotted down his desires to Santa Claus. Things went to hell by the time the Bay of Pigs invasion crashed and burned. And it’s gotten no better over time. It’s mirrored in the early combat operations conducted after the 9-11 attacks in Afghanistan which were operated by the CIA. The ongoing drone missile attacks are a further extension of that. It is now known they are running their own prisons in foreign countries. What is the legal and Constitutional basis for this? Because they can? Yes, of course–because they can. And Lord knows who are in this prisons and what treatment they are getting, or how many have died there, or what their faces look like.

Going back to Vietnam, Prouty views it as two-sided civil war. One side is the communists waging war against the non-communists. The second side is the forced relocation (from a Geneva peace accord) of the northern people, the Tonkinese Vietnamese, 1.1 million strong to south Vietnam. A different people with a different culture and religion (Catholic as opposed to the southerns that were Buddhist), they over whelmed the infrastructure of the south. Prouty sees this as one of the major causes for the war in Vietnam. From this, the Viet Kong guerrilla army emerges. And not because they start out being communists, but because they fear being pushed out by the Northerners and took up arms against them in order to survive. Into this cauldron is sent the young blood of this nation to be shredded. First with special forces and later the Marines.

L. Fletcher Prouty wants us to know it’s a war the CIA got us into. And John
Kennedy saw it coming by issuing NSAM #263 which Proudy says he helped coauthor.

The End Result
Despite being such a good chronicler of the entanglement of the Vietnam war
and John Kennedy’s behind the scenes struggles with power brokers, L. Fletcher Prouty stumbles a bit here and there. For example, he lists one of the ships involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion listed as the Zapata, but none where. Look at the declassified CIA memo HERE to see the ships involved. In another section I found odd was the account of Richard Nixon and where he was on the day of the assassination. It’s quite well documented that he was in Dallas the night before, for a Pepsi bottler’s convention, Nixon being the lead council, and flew out the day of, at 9:00 A.M. Yet Prouty insists that Nixon was in Dallas at the moment of the assassination which would put him there at past noon. It simply can’t be from everything that has been published on the case. True, Nixon does change his story many times in regarding to his actions on that day. So I was mystified as to why Prouty would get this wrong since he is generally spot-on with the other issues he deals with. Basically, I get the feeling he is more versed with the issues he dealt with personally in his military career, both as a participant and an observer. Never the less, it is odd he makes these sort of mistakes in his accounting as he seems spot on with everything else.

Though the book has “JFK” in the title and his picture on the cover, there is not much here in regards to his death or a conspiracy. You’ll read more about that in Oliver Stone’s forward (the director of JFK would model the Mr. X character after Prouty).

L. Fletcher Proudy comes off as the honest insider. Everything he says that he has experience with and first hand knowledge of, has a ring of truth to it. And you can be sure it’ll be something you never read anywhere else or thought of before.


Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (November 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1602397317
ISBN-13: 978-1602397316
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches

Errata
The latest version of JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy has a new and additional forward by Jesse Ventura.

The Secret Team
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1602392293/ref=rdr_ext_sb_ti_sims_1

The Blabber Mouth Theory

“Probably no one seriously involved in investigating UFO reports has escaped the hydra-headed debunking machine and its many busy attendants.”

Bud Hopkins

“In Washington they say, if two people know, it can’t be a secret.”

John B. Alexander

Though I only have a casual interest in the UFO phenomena I was intrigued with a recent broadcast (2/20/11) on Coast to Coast AM, hosted by George Knapp with retired Colonel John B. Alexander and his new book, UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. A lot of his comments reminded me of the Warren Commission’s defenders and their arguments against conspiracy. Col. Alexander, a career military officer, was involved with intelligence and many esoteric endeavors such as the “men staring at goats” experiment and other government program weirdness. Along the way, he got an interest in UFOs and was allowed to launch a study group. Yes, the Army version of the X-Files! He interviewed everybody within the National Security index and those in the military-industrial side as well. Alexander comes across as affable, very knowledgable and sincere, open minded with an air of authority on which he speaks.

However, his conclusions are forgone; while Alexander admits there are solid cases such as the Phoenix Lights and Rendlesham Forest incident he says there is no formal government policy to cover-up the UFOs. (I wonder if he would assume the same about conspiracy with JFK’s death?) When it comes to the realities, the main stories of the lore are the myths. There is no perceived threat to National Security so no need to get involved. In other words, I’ve looked into it and there is nothing to it–trust me–don’t worry your little head over it.

A closer examination of his statements reveals him to be another servant of the National Security State with the same old flat arguments. In many ways he maneuvers like any Kennedy conspiracy debunker, though a more gentlemanly version of one. He doesn’t resort to Bugliosi-style sarcasm and verbal abuse. Gosh, it would be nice to see a JFK anti-conspiracy debunker with this much class and seemingly fair mindedness. He portrays the man of the Open Mind though all the while, we know he’s not going to go along with any major assertions. The Phoenix Lights event he’ll acknowledge is a real phenomena but ultimately a mystery requiring more investigation. The major cannons of UFOlogy, such as the MJ-12 docs and the Roswell crash, are dismissed as hoaxes. Come what may, virtually no Warren Commission supporter will walk this fine a line. It’s all or nothing with that gang.

Everything In Washington Leaks
“Everything in Washington leaks,” says Alexander. Here is ground that has been plowed too many times. The good Colonel resembles a Warren Commission acolyte. How many times has this slogan been trotted out? Okay, how does the CIA, NSA, DIA, ONI and many other agencies stay in business? They should be gone by now if they had this many leakers. This old, tired, “nobody can keep a secret” nonsense is the classic argument against these controversies and has long been used against the JFK conspiracy researchers. Ironic that it comes from Colonel Alexander, himself being an intelligence officer with access to classified information. Has he blabbed anything? How insulting a question! That is wrong in so many different ways I could write a whole blog posting on that issue alone.

In the National Security State secrecy is the foundation of the security. In Colonel L. Flecher Prouty’s books, The Secret Team and JFK, compartmentalization is the key to containing and maintaining secret operations. Prouty would be in the loop since he was the liaison officer between the CIA and the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. He’s one of the insiders that let us know how the National Security State functions. One can see quite a difference between the two Colonels and how they view this issue. Prouty on one hand illustrates the need for concealment of information and operations and the processes and procedures that make it work; Alexander acts like there are no methods or procedures in place at all or if there are, they are useless. Because of this, I sense a great deal more truthfulness with Prouty. Alexander acts like these things are boring and ho-hum, striped of mystery and intrigue. He knows better.

The Blabber Mouth Theory
Another issue Col. Alexander breaches is that there isn’t any secrets that are “Above Top Secret” that the President as Commander in Chief isn’t privy to. There is if you simply don’t tell him! Kennedy ordered the CIA to stand down on assassination attempts on Castro but they didn’t–nor did they tell Kennedy anything about their ongoing operations against Cuba or for that matter what they were doing in running all military operations in Vietnam until the Marines took over in 1965. And most telling is when Jimmy Carter asked for the CIA’s UFO information and the director, at the time George Bush, told him to go to Congress. In brief, he was dead-ended. So was Bill Clinton’s early AG, Webster Hubble which Mr. Clinton asked him to look into the Kennedy assassination. He ran into the wall too. Alexander makes no mention of Carter’s run-in with the Secret Team as he wants everything to be normal to the point of dullness. Of course it’s not.

I once worked with a guy once that worked in the inner halls of government. He knew everybody from Ronald Reagan to Linda Tripp. And he admitted there were levels of classification so high the President wasn’t privy to them. He thought it was a good thing. I of course, did not. To witness Alexander deny this is quite telling and lends plausibility to his critics that he is a disinformation agent.

Col. Alexander was so adamant about people not keeping secrets George Knapp asked him, “So you’re of the belief that nobody can keep a secret...even by the military?” That’s when Alexander responds with the quote above about two people knowing something then it’s no longer a secret, which is ridiculous. One of the main jobs of intelligence operatives, both military and civilian, is the collecting and keeping of secrets. He knows it and backpedals a bit by saying that a secret can be kept for a “short period of time.” Perhaps he thought better of impugning the integrity of those people working in intelligence that work hard at keeping information under wraps and in some cases put their lives on the line to do so.

Besides, there is a certain prestige associated with keep information concealed. I’ve signed three nondisclosure agreements in the course of my professional life. I’ve never spilled the beans on any of them, even now with two of those projects no longer operational. In the military there is little prestige as violating a signed oath is rewarded with prison time, as the Navy enlisted men found out after the John Kennedy’s autopsy. They all had to sign nondisclosure agreements and were all read the riot act if they ever breathed a word of what they saw and experienced that night. (Fortunately, those former Navy personnel that were interviewed for the ARRB in the late 1990s were given a waiver. That’s how we know about the ordering of the signed secrecy agreements.)

Be that as it may, the Blabber Mouth Theory holds no value and is a weak argument that is constantly used against conspiracy advocates. People do conspire, that is why it’s criminalized.

The Debunking Way
UFO investigator Bud Hopkins in his article, Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response, made the following point:


“It’s long been understood that debunking and skepticism are two very different things, the former, an artifact of rigid ideology and the latter an objective, scientifically-inclined position.”

That is what it appears. Though over time it seems that both debunking and skepticism has involved into the same thing. A rigid mindset whose purpose is to scoff, downplay and discredit controversial claims and beliefs. In this case, controversial since it doesn’t go along with the flow. Such as when people don’t believe what government investigators tell them about a plane crash (flight 800), an assassination (JFK, RFK, MLK, MX), a bombing (Murrah Building) and a terrorist attack (9-11). The Ruling Class does not like us exposing their deceit. So on the offensive they go, either from volunteers or paid shills. People like skeptic Michael Shermer publish a magazine to support the status quo and make a career out of it. Whatever the government says is the gospel for these people. Only the critics get scanned for their claims or errors. And of course to the Shermer crowd, the critics are always wrong.

So debunking and skepticism is really a means to an end. The way the Ruling Class defends its turf. Just say the words, you don’t have to mean them. They will sound good. In the mix, real history and what actually happened gets lost in a maze of trails. It’s lensed through the words of the winners and the losers have to fight for shelf space. With the rise of the Internet everybody has the ability to self-publish and self-broadcast. Now both sides can square off and do battle for what represents the truth. One good thing is they will no longer be able to edit the tape so Orville Nix is heard saying that he heard shots coming from the building and not the grassy knoll–and it was the knoll he heard shots from–and he is left with no platform to refute the deception.

It’s so nice to be truly free. While it lasts.


Sources
Prouty, L, Fletcher, The Secret Team and JFK; Marvin, Daniel, Expendable Elite

Coast To Coast AM Radio Show
http://www.coasttocoastam.com

Bud Hopkins, Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response
http://www.intrudersfoundation.org/Deconstruct.html