Sunday, June 29, 2008

Conspiracy Versus Cover-Up

The mainstream press in this country is so anti-conspiratorial, that I would not be surprised if one of their own came forward and published a book alleging that John Wilkes Booth was in actuality, a lone gunman, and his co-conspirators were all framed because of their Confederate sympathies. In truth, what conspiracy that resulted in someone’s death does the press recognize other than the Lincoln assassination and the attacks on 9-11? Yes, conspiracy theories and their authors have developed a bad reputation for general kookiness and paranoid thinking. It all starts out reasonably enough but soon the agitators and amateur experts come along and muck it all up. Similar to what happened to the 9-11 Truth movement. Some reasonable and qualified people starting doing credible research and then some idiot comes along claiming the planes that hit the buildings were cruise missiles cloaked as holograms. Ridiculous.

Nevertheless, conspiracies do happen. Did not John D. Rockefeller conspire to control all oil production in America? Did not Andrew Carnegie scheme to control all steel production in this country? Most certainly they did. Conspiracy is so real people are indicted and convicted of it all the time. It is after all, a Federal offense.

My problem with most conspiracies is they are rooted in circumstantial evidence. They have to be; there are, as Mr. Rumsfield would say, “unknown, knowns.” You can place 50 shooters on the grassy knoll but when the smoke clears all you will ever have is skinny little Lee and his junky nineteenth century rifle. It’s in the little things that we have hints of conspiracy, the weird things, the feeling that something is not quite right about an event that transpires, or the appearance of a cover up. The Kennedy Assassination and its aftermath is a debris field of such events. But even here, you have to be careful. It is easy to go off on the wrong tangent when it was just an innocent mistake somebody made, or an anomaly, or just a fluke.

While evidence for a conspiracy may be circumstantial, evidence for a cover-up streams all through this and is quite blatant. There are many and they branch out all over the place. An easy one to examine is the CIA. They are cover-up central for everything that happens. It’s quite apparent that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission regarding Oswald’s movement in Mexico City in the fall of 1963. There were four different surveillance programs ongoing and Oswald crossed paths with all of them. They had to lie to protect their successful surveillance operations ongoing against the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico and have maintained the deception to this day. Various document dumps and witness testimony, including station chief Winston Scott’s memoirs, testify to it. If they are lying about this, then what else have they concealed? Numerous files on Oswald are classified to this day. The Mexico Station chief, Win Scott, had most of his memoir classified. That includes his completely redacted chapter on Oswald. Why?

It’s my opinion a lot of the apparent cover-ups in the death of John Kennedy are direct result of various elements in our military-industrial-government complex simply concealing their business, rather than some secret cabal plotting a coup. However, there is enough circumstantial evidence to make things appear that way. I am not opposed to the idea of clandestine plotters, as Helms, Arlington, Hoover, Johnson and many others, were not the friends of open government, the U.S. Constitution, or liberty. It’s just proving it.

It all comes back to Oswald. He’s the ghost haunting all of this. Oswald was most likely a government operative as his mother said he was before the Warren Commission. And she didn’t have the evidence we have to look at today, murky as that evidence may be. Hunter Leake, second in command at the CIA New Orleans station, stated in an interview in the early 1980s that he hired Oswald out for low-level currier work. After the assassination he was ordered to personally bring all of Oswald’s files back to Langley, where they disappeared in the belly of the beast. Part of assassination lore is Antonio Veciana, head of the anti Castro outfit, Alpha 66, stating in sworn testimony before the HSCA that he saw Oswald chatting with his CIA handler in Dallas, in August of 1963. One of Robert Kennedy’s Cuban sources told him that Oswald was known to be an FBI informant. The guy is all over the place! With a “need to know” basis running through all clandestine services, Oswald could have hooked up with a lot of groups. He may have been a lot smarter than his handler’s realized. He may have double-crossed them all.

Once Oswald gets entangled in this mess, a whole lot of underwear got dirtied. A real investigation has to be stifled at this point because if it is not, then it may expose various government operations or even the government’s involvement with Oswald. And this cannot be. Within 24 hours of the president’s death, Hoover and Johnson swung into action. They established Oswald as the lone gunman and Hoover made sure his agents did no investigating that would lead them to any other finding. Johnston’s top aides called every law enforcement man involved, and pressured them to establish Oswald as the long gunman and surrender any thoughts of conspiracy. Then Oswald is killed by another lone nut, Jack Ruby. He never gets a fair trial. The rest as they say, is history.

One last thing. Writer/blogger Jeff Wells over at Rigorous Intuition coined the word “Coincidenceodentalist.” I like it a lot. It’s a good noun for the conspiracy scoffers. Which would you rather be—a conspiratorialist or a coincidenceodentalist? Life cannot be ruled by mere chance, just as it cannot be governed by those who conspire. Or is it somewhere in-between? Quite possibility so.