Possibly because they were bored, Public Policy Polling asked the public about a variety of conspiracy theories. Interestingly, of all the ones they mentioned, the majority of the public only truly subscribes to one. They don’t think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In fact, only one in four Americans polled thinks that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. To me, that should withdraw it from the category of conspiracy theory. This is especially true because Congress concluded the same thing. Congress concluded that there was more than one shooter and therefore a conspiracy. They simply refused to endorse any particular theory of who was part of the conspiracy beside Oswald. Nothing else that PPP polled falls into this category. The government has never said that aliens crashed in Roswell or that bin-Laden is still alive or that chemtrails are real or that the moon landing was faked or that the CIA created the crack epidemic on purpose or that global warming is a hoax. Maybe people believe that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK because the government said that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. It seems awfully strange to marginalize an opinion that has been endorsed by Congress as some kind of tin-foil hat delusion.
And, yet, one is made to feel defensive about endorsing the government’s own findings. How strange is that?
Who feels defensive? We had an idle chat about this at the timeclock a few days ago. NOBODY believed the Warren Commission. We differed on the details, as you say. I’d say a majority favor the Mafia, either on their own or as hirelings. Many divergent opinions on who did the hiring. One even believed it was Jackie! Man, he must have a real bad divorce!
BTW, the gun nuts can reel off all sorts of technical details on how it couldn’t have been a Mannlicher-Carcano that did the job and stuff about angles of bullets and timing.
The CIA has worked with members of organized crime since its formation, to include the time around the JFK assassination. However, the Mafia did not staff the Warren Commission.
No. No. The Mafia doing the job, not staffing the Warren Commission. WC was staffed by pols interested in whitewash.
I don’t think the mafia did it.
Just reporting the timeclock consensus. Who do you think (or guess) did it?
Angleton, Helms, David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, and unknown anti-Castro accomplices.
E. Howard Hunt, Allen Dulles, too.
Maybe, although I see a lot less evidence for that. Dulles was a civilian at the time and although Hunt was a partner of Phillips on a lot of things, I can’t place him at the heart of the conspiracy.
It’s Phillips that essentially confessed to his brother. It’s Phillips who was in position at the Mexico City embassy. It’s Phillips who wrote a novel in which his “fictional” character ran Oswald and built the assassination team that killed JFK (although he claimed it was originally built to take out Castro). In fact, E. Howard Hunt fingered Phillips on his death-bed.
Morales essentially confessed, too, to his lawyer.
Here’s an account of the Phillips confession:
I’m ok with David Phillips as prime suspect and Allen Dulles as at least in the person of interest category who should have been questioned by honest thorough authorities, which were in short supply back then.
He was fired by JFK, effectively, following the BoP, and apparently Kennedy told his brother, While we’re at it, lets fire any other Dulles who’s working in this govt. Apparently they found a sister working at State and she was let go.
So for personal and policy reasons, Dulles would have had adequate motive to want Kennedy removed. But someone with his extensive intel background, he would have been careful to cover all his tracks had he been involved in the plot.
I just don’t think Phillips would have acted unless he was confident he was protected from above. Would Angleton have been enough? Dulles, even out of office, with his contacts and rep within the agency would still have been a mighty useful force, both pre and post assassination.
Angleton was definitely enough.
Helms initially put someone else on the case to investigate the agency’s relationship to Oswald. But that officer soon discovered that the FBI had more information about the CIA’s role than he did. When he complained, Helms took him off the investigation and let Angleton take over. The problem was that Angleton ran counterintelligence and was in charge of the program to send false-defectors to Russia, and obviously to track any repatriated defectors from Russia. Have you ever read What Jane Roman said?
Ms. Roman was on Angleton’s staff and she had a run-in with Jefferson Morley that effectively ended his career at the Washington Post and led Morley to dedicate himself to JFK research. The most important part of it is on page three. I’ll excerpt enough to give you a taste. This is about the interview Morley and John Newman had with Jane Roman in November 1994.
Dulles certainly had the animus. Remember, E. Howard Hunt helped him write his book. Dulles was also an accessory after the fact, although I suspect he was deep into the planning. A couple weeks before the assassination Dulles visited LBJ at his ranch in Texas. Photo ops and all. That would put LBJ in a very blackmailable position if he didn’t go along with the coverup.
Also, and this is the important part, when you kill the leader of a country you have to have plans for afterwards, otherwise you will get arrested and carted off by someone with clean hands. I’m guessing it was all hands on deck at Langley.
One curious story told to me by an old army vet who’d been in a Rangers group. The army would load them on planes, send them to places in Latin America, and told to shoot anyone on the street with a black face. Essentially, providing coverage for coups.
He said one day his group went up in a plane and flew around for 24 hours, being refueled in the air. When they landed they found out that JFK had been assassinated. That is, they were up in the air in case something went wrong and there were riots about JFK’s murder. But everyone was quiet as a lamb.
I’d forgotten Dulles visiting LBJ just before the assassination. Interesting and troubling as to both figures.
Yes, I’ve long suspected foreknowledge by Johnson. Nothing big happens by accident in politics and usually when Lyndon was on the politically favorable receiving end, it involved Lyndon playing an important role in the planning. Certainly he had a major hand in the coverup, as with naming the guy Kennedy had fired to the WC.
That’s short of proof of course. Just expressing a sense of my suspicions. And yes, I think LBJ was capable morally of being involved in murder.
I actually don’t suspect that Johnson was in on the planning. Rather, I think Dulles deliberately showed up at the ranch in order to create a blackmail situation for LBJ. That is, if Johnson were to play this straight and go after the CIA he’d turn up looking very dirty himself.
Johnson certainly was a major part of the coverup, as was J. Edgar Hoover within hours after the assassination. The FBI investigation was pretty awful, changing testimony, inventing evidence and losing real evidence.
No, this was a coup, and the people who did it didn’t just go home afterwards. The CIA still has an institutional interest in keeping this on the down low, and quite honestly if the general public understood that there was a coup the entire legitimacy of much of the last fifty years of American government would be put into question.
Which is exactly why the public needs to know.
I agree.
I think the point is, why would the WC have been interested in a whitewash if the real culprits were just the Mafia?
Allen Dulles had been the head of the CIA. He was on the Warren Commission. If the real assassins were CIA, then Dulles would have a strong interest in the whitewash.
Earl Warren’s interests may have been somewhat different. He may have believed that the Cubans were behind the assassination, and thought that having a scapegoat (and one who was already dead) was greatly preferable to sparking WWIII.
Have any of you read the recent book “Nixon’s Darkest Secrets” by Don Fulsom? Does it have credibility and respectability? Aside from all the disturbing things about Nixon I didn’t know (and I was a young adult at the time), there’s a bit about the CIA’s presence in Dallas on the day of the assassination and the subsequent role that the agent had in the Nixon Administration.
http://www.amazon.com/Nixons-Darkest-Secrets-Americas-President/dp/0312662963/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&
;ie=UTF8&qid=1364996568&sr=1-1&keywords=Recent+books+on+Nixon
Sorry about the too wordy link. Maybe I need to spend some time with the “allowed HTML”.
…The government has never said that aliens crashed in Roswell…
In 90s the Feds indicated a coverup but not of aliens. It was Project Mogul.
Roswell as alleged is a more reasonable explanation of what happened, in all it’s essential points, than the rather thin and suspect Project Mogul or other laughable USAF explanations.
Hope by saying that I don’t lose too many cred points here, but hey it’s a huge galaxy and universe out there and logically there’s no good reason why our diverse planet wouldn’t be visited by more advanced civilizations capable of interstellar flight.
I’m with Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell on Roswell. And fair chance those bodies allegedly/probably recovered were mere android entities, not the real ETs, their creators back in the mother ship.
I think my pov is also more in tune with the trend line on this issue being a little less laugh-worthy in recent years. This doesn’t mean I believe in the other 95% of ET allegations and stories out there. And therefore I tend to agree author Jim Marrs is too unskeptical about some of these things.
I use the speed of light as a baseline, and wonder who wants to use all that energy and time traveling across space to discreetly watch humans. We aren’t that interesting. Neither are cows.
Cows are interesting too — to bovinologists (?) and other types of inquiring scientific minds. And I still say we’re smarter and more interesting to observe!
Light speed etc: It was in the 1980s I believe that theoretical physicists began publishing possibilities about collapsing space-time. Worm holes was one theory. Point being there are prob civilizations out there, a few visiting us, who thousands of years ago would have unlocked/received secrets relating to nullifying vast galactic distances.
Others less advanced would still have to use intermediary resupply space stations, basically living their entire lives as space travelers.
We went from the Wright Bros to landing a man on the Moon in only 66 years. Imagine where we’d be in space technology in 100 and 600 years with the kind of consistent and firm goals set that Kennedy laid down for NASA in 1961. Just takes a strong vision, a willingness to go forth boldly, and of course the funding and maybe in 600 years we will be traveling to Alpha Centauri. I find none of that farfetched.
Where have we gone since the Moon? My point is that it’s too expensive energy-wise, space travel isn’t healthy for humans. I’m not saying space travel is impossible, just unlikely, and if someone came here you’d think they’d say hello. About fifty years ago I saw UFOs over the Jersey Shore, so it’s not that I doubt unexplained things flying around. I just think there’s a terrestial explanation.
For 95% of sightings there probably is a terrestrial explanation.
Re the dangers of space travel our scientists are just beginning to learn about them, particularly effects on the brain from long term space station stays. But just bec something looks impossible now shouldn’t mean we give up. Heavier than air flying machines once seemed impossible.
Re the Visitors not bothering to say hello to us: I’m sure you’ve seen The Day the Earth Stood Still and what happened to ET Michael Rennie when he stepped off his ship. Not much of a different attitude today. Also there would probably be a vast intellectual and spiritual gap between them and us, making us more fit for non-interfering anthropological study from a distance.
There might even be some universal laws or restrictions in place as to general non interference by higher civilizations with insufficiently evolved human life forms such as us Earthlings.
The fact that it’s only three in four believing JFK was killed by a conspiracy is because the majority of people alive have no memory of the events. In the early nineties, when Oliver Stone’s movie came out, it was more like nine of ten.
The JFK murder is the most profound political event in America since WWII. Despite how it is the mainstream media repeatedly wants you to believe that you are either foolish or possibly insane for believing there was a conspiracy in JFK’s death, fifty years after the fact a vast majority still see it, and that’s without much of the new information.
I recommend THE ASSASSINATIONS, by DiEugenio and Pease. It is a collection of essays dealing with different aspects of the JFK assassination as well as those of RFK. MLK, and Malcolm X, much based on documents released by the Assassinations Records Review Board. DiEugenio has rewritten his DESTINY BETRAYED. There’s another book by John Armstrong, HARVEY AND LEE, but it’s hard to find (200 bucks on Amazon). Armstrong’s got an essay in THE ASSASSINATIONS.
All you need to know is to follow the logic of the fake Oswald in Mexico City. At the end of September beginning of October 1963 the CIA photographed a guy who was impersonating Oswald. It’s easy to google a picture of him. The question you should ask yourself is why would anybody pretend to be Oswald, going into the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City, two months BEFORE the assassination.
Once you understand that there was a coup in 1963 you will begin to figure out the last fifty years of American history.
You write:
Yup.
Thank you.
That about sums it up.
Thank you.
All the rest is bullshit. Smoke and mirrors bullshit.
Thank you.
AG
The thing about the JFK assassination is that there were so many levels of conspiracy theory and they tended to get in the way of one another, kind of like smoke screens.
To me the biggest smoke screen was whether there was a second shooter. People tended to focus a lot of time on this … perhaps most of the discussion about the assassination focused on this point. And yes there was a ton of evidence to sift through that may or may not support the second shooter theory.
BUT, ignore that for a minute. My question is this: why did Oswald perform an assassination at all? To me it is a virtual certainty that he was hired by someone. First, there was no reason for him to do this on his own. Second, his background , emotional mindset, financial situation, and skillset made him an ideal choice as a hired killer in this situation (assuming the plan was to kill him off immediately thereafter).
Yes, there are “lone nut gunmen” who try such assassinations – Squeaky Fromme comes to mine – but Oswald didn’t fit that mold at all.
And when looking for motives for killing JFK – knowing that it would elevate LBJ to the top – there is a decent-sized list of people/organizations who not only were extremely pleased with having LBJ take over but also were fully capable of arranging an assassination.
No, in this case the lone nut gunman theory just doesn’t hold water.
Now, if you want to have REAL fun with conspiracy theories google the names John Hinkley and George Bush together. You’ll find that the man who shot Reagan was part of a family that had very close ties to the Bush family. You know, Bush, Reagan’s VP.
As for 9/11, there is even more of a smoke screen problem. Weird theories abound about stuff like planted explosives in the towers and about the pentagon flight being diverted off radar and the pentagon hit with a missile not a plane. But there are legitimate questions to ask about whether some people in power were made aware of the planned attack and effectively allowed it to happen. Certainly the benefits of such an incident in terms of galvanizing a nation to support a war effort are well understood. Google Operation Northwoods if you have any doubts that senior military people could support such a plan. Then there is the infamous PNAC document from 1998 that discussed how their proposed policy of military invasion of the middle east would not be supported by the public without a Pearl Harbor type of event.
And don’t forget that in the first week after 9/11 there were many reports that the stock of the two airlines, United and American, had been shorted in far greater numbers than normal in the days before 9/11. These reports spoke of an investigation being launched. Nothing but silence since.
We’ll most likely never know. But personally I believe that if certain leaders in the Bush administration had known this was in the works they would have actively blocked any counter action because they knew that it would benefit their plans. And given all the evidence they did have in advance (the PDB that was revealed by the 9/11 commission has recently been shown to have been only one of many such warnings) it is fair to ask the question.
Why would you assume Oswald was doing any shooting that day? Far more credible evidence points away from him than at him. Easily within reasonable doubt parameters.
I think he was downstairs in the lunchroom, as he told police later, not on the sixth floor shooting. And the best evidence has two men involved near the Tippitt shooting neither of whom fits the description of LHO.
I’m generally pretty contemptuous of conspiracy theories, especially the more elaborate ones – they usually require belief in levels of competence and secrecy not generally attainable by actual human beings. A lot of people use them like a religion, because there has to be an unseen power of some sort orchestrating events – it’s too traumatizing or something to acknowledge that life is complicated and messy and sometimes random stuff happens.
That said, there needed to be a thorough examination of how 9-11 came to pass, and there never was. And while it was before my time, an awful lot of people treat the Warren Commission the same way, as nothing more than an exercise in ass-covering. The other one that could change history books is that it seems extremely doubtful that James Earl Ray (MLK) acted alone, as the trial transcript Boo recently linked to (among many other things) makes clear.
Those kinds of theories are plausible – they’re about people in power acting in perceived self-interest and doing bad, but ordinary, things. That’s qualitatively different from people who think that thousands of people conspired to fake the moon landing or global warming science, or that there’s alien remains in Area 51 or Elvis is still alive or WTC’s Building 7 was somehow brought down by explosives it would have taken a week to install. That’s Fox Mulder “I Want To Believe” territory. And as with religious zealots or large chunks of the Tea Party, it’s the believing that’s important, not whether whatever’s being believed has any connection to reality.
You write:
How strange?
Lewis Carroll knew.
We are already on the other side of the looking glass.
Down the old rabbit hole.
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Attributed to Hassan-I-Sabbah, the founder of the Assassin sect by William Burroughs.
WTFU.
AG
Small sample size, but I find it curious that those who describe themselves as very liberal are the most likely to believe that Oswald acted alone.
Many leftists are burdened by structural analysis, which is kind of a bloodless logic that puts class struggle above facts. I believe it was Chomsky who said that there was no reason for the elite to eliminate JFK because he was just like them. First, he wasn’t just like them and second, there have been plenty of coups by elite against other elite. In fact, people without power and wealth rarely are in a position to overthrow anything.
Also, no one wants to be called crazy by the Serious People.
Most people believe in God, too. That doesn’t make it true, or even plausible.
If your belief in God allows for Jesus to rise up to heaven, or Allah to ride a winged white horse up to heaven, then you should have no problem with the magic bullet.
Belief in God is a matter of faith. A legal investigation should not depend depend on faith but fact.
Of course the WC was a controlled whitewash.
Spark was the loss of Cuba after the failed CIA supported Bay of Pigs invasion or Operation Zapato. George H.W. Bush involvement with the CIA poses questions. The assassination was a coup d’etat under leadership of US Navy admirals, CIA and FBI. Support was given by Texan oil barons with execution by at least two teams: international mob (France) from front and CIA assassin from behind (DalTex building). Dallas Police must have been cooperating with federal agents to secure Dealey Plaza, route taken, speed of limousine and deal with the aftermath. Dallas mob took care of Oswald in garage of police station. See this article – The Guns Of Dallas.
This assassination strategy was also used by CIA/Mossad for the Hariri assassination in 2005. Full control of the area beforehand, during and after the hit.
I believe in the French hired killer also. The story from his lawyer is that the contact came from the US Mafia through the French Mafia. The original order may well have come from the CIA via their Mafia contacts.
You have an excellent analysis.
Lets not forget Secret Service complicity — co-conspirators or amazingly criminally negligent at the very moment of greatest need.
(Or Maybe you meant them with “federal agents”)
SS cooperation was crucial. Mafia less so.
I suspect part of the problem — why irregularities around the Kennedy Assassination are dismissed as “conspiracy theories” — is guilt by association. The poll may indicate widespread skepticism about the findings of the Warren Commission, but it seems like too often the most vocal skeptics are also partial to some of the other items polled.
For a vivid example, look at Jim Marrs, author of “Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy”, one of the books Oliver Stone used for his film. His other books on Amazon discuss “Man-made diseases”, “the Trilateral Commission” and even “Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us”.
There are more careful authors who have written about the subject. I found a lot to appreciate in David Talbot’s “Brothers” — especially in light of the interview that RFK’s son gave earlier this year. But I find that it is hard to discuss the topic, even among friends, without ending up on the receiving end of a certain look. Many people have come to expect that those who have taken an interest in this question are obsessive and find conspiracy everywhere.
When this post first went up yesterday I googled “conspiracy theory”. Amazing how much space is used to explain how crazy you might be to believe in conspiracies. Maybe someone should look into the conspiracy of why our government has RICO or charge anyone with conspiracy.
If there is anything to be learned from JFK’s assassination, and the fake election and misrule of Dubya, it is:
NEVER ALLOW A TEXAN IN HIGH OFFICE
the risk is too great, independent of party affiliation.
They missed Osama bin Laden as a CIA plant with 9/11 a CIA operation and the City of Memphis business elite conspiring to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King.
The reason there are conspiracy theories is that there really are conspiracies in the world and there are all sorts of collaborative cynical manipulation of events, news media, and narrative going on. And most conspiracies use secrecy as a strategic weapon. The government has a huge shroud of secrecy about it that is growing ever larger.
In the absence of real information people create their own counter-narratives. It is those counter-narratives that receive the broad brush labeling of “conspiracy theories”. So of them might be true after all—if only the information ever comes out. A lot of them are pure fantasy that can be proved as such with the release of validating information. And some will attain the certainty of religious beliefs regardless of the facts.
The JFK assassination has had two separate government inquiries that came to contradictory conclusions. The first was the Warren Commission report that came into question shortly after it appeared and spawned the JFK assassination conspiracy theory cottage industry. And that was fueled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s foray into the issue which added complete confusion.
So it’s a matter of which government findings you choose to believe. Isn’t it.
Actually, you unnecessarily narrow the possibilities by restricting the choices to two government reports.
I wish that John Armstrong’s book HARVEY AND LEE would come out as an ebook. It’s a thousand pages hardback and it covers most of the details. In lieu of that DiEugenio’s DESTINY BETRAYED is a very good book, and like I said above, the collection of essays THE ASSASSINATIONS covers a lot of information release via the ARRB in the 90s.
Actually four official govt reports: the initial DPD/FBI report of a lone nut, the 1964 Warren Whitewash, the 1968 AG Ramsey Clark panel report re X-rays and autopsy photos (lone nut conclusions), and the 1979 HSCA report concluding in favor of a conspiracy.
And people didn’t wait until the WC issued its report: there were strong doubts about the LN theory, some by researchers in print, within days or weeks of the assassination. After that the 1966 book by Mark Lane– Rush to Judgment — was a huge bestseller and highly influential before Garrison’s inquiry was revealed the following year. And Garrison was only “confusing” to those naive enough to believe that governmental entities like the CIA couldn’t possibly be involved in the plotting to assassinate, as nearly all in the MSM believed then and eleven today.
And most observers today would agree that Garrison was right to investigate CIA involvement — a rather radical and bold thing to assert in 1967.
The biggest conspiracy theory is that our broken instutitions are actually broken, riven by “partisanship”. The fact is that these institutions (and the bigger they are, the more this is true) are not broken at all. They’re working just fine for the people in the boardroom and conferencing in Aspen. Oh yes free market capitalism has never been finer. Unregulated speculation at these lofty height always pays off for the executives. Look at Mitt: he would buy a company and profit whether or not the company failed and destroyed jobs. Plus the de facto legal immunity from any criminal business action is pretty nice.
Any number of institutions can be viewed in this way. Prison systems. The prison system isn’t broken. It’s working just fine for the private incarceration concerns. And it’s working just fine for those who would like to profit from a de facto apartheid. Plus it’s a great finishing school for advanced gang organization (big automatic weapons market those guys). Public schools. Public schools aren’t failing. They’re doing just fine as the puppet of for-profit education. Medical insurance. Real estate. Energy. It’s all working great and corporate profits have never been higher. We just have to make sure we don’t let the debt get out of hand and threaten our offshored profits. Plus free market solutions and free trade agreements which evacuate regulatory protections. And you have to allow that if you spread money to the lower classes you just create dependency and fornication. They plainly need to tighten their belts and manfully expect poverty in their decrepitude.
Dassit, tb.
Dassit in a nutshell.
Now…what to do about it!!!???
UH oh!!!
The very first thing to do is to attack the stranglehold that the media have on the minds of the American people. Break that lock and all else follows. Don’t break it and it’s business as usual.
But…how to do that?
Damned if I know. The only way to inform the people of the essentially traitorous role of the corporate media is through said media.
UH oh!!!
Over and out, followed by ever-further down the ol’ media rabbithole.
Sorry, but there it is.
Every once in a while in normal social discourse with fairly left-leaning people I try to point out that their own left-leaningness has been just as thoroughly programmed by a lying media as has the right-leaningness of their so-called opponents.
Result?
Blank stare.
Brief silence.
Disconnect.
And then…
The death prattle.
Bet on it.
Over and out.
Until the denoument, of course.
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now.
Watch.
Later…
AG