Anthony Thorne

16 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

This is something Larry Hancock and I have discussed in the past. It is actually an old concept. 

When it comes to social order, the greatest fear is chaos. It's the greatest fear for both the haves and the have-nots. As a result people prefer to believe that "someone" is in charge--even if that "someone" is evil--than that no one is in charge, and it's just chaos. 

TBH that feels like a convoluted leap from your original statement, which was that it was worse for big gov to be exposed as incompetent and stupid, rather than it being exposed as evil. This is fine but that's just how it comes across to me.

Governments can be incompetent and stupid, and still in charge. Go read the Guardian UK and see how many articles you find by Marina Hyde and John Crace arguing that the government is incompetent and stupid. Now also take a moment to reflect if the UK government in charge of running the country is actually in charge. I think you'll find that the government there is simultaneously incompetent, stupid, and in charge.

Likewise in the US Jon Stewart spent years deriding the Bush administration as being incompetent and stupid. You'd be hard pressed to find an episode of the show that didn't do this. Yet, for all those years, the Bush administration was still in charge. They were even able to start a couple of wars while they were in power, something they would have found hard to do if they weren't in charge. Yet they did it. So it seems fairly certain they were in charge at the time, yet they were also in many ways incompetent and stupid. So again you have a situation where a government is able to be incompetent, stupid, and also in charge. 

Exposing a government as being both incompetent, and stupid, doesn't really explain to me how it would necessarily indicate that they also weren't in charge, as I think it's possible for a government to be both. Even more to the point, it doesn't give me a lot of insight into why a government being exposed as incompetent and stupid would be worse than it being exposed as evil. The Daily Show exposed the Bush administration as incompetent and stupid. Marina Hyde and John Crace's articles for the Guardian UK display that government as being incompetent and stupid. People who watched Stewart's show, or who read those articles, usually just laughed. Again, I'm not sure how either of those things being exposed would be worse for those governments at that time as being exposed as evil.

It's taken a long time for all the Operation Condor documents we have to come out, and we're still waiting on more. Many of them seem to expose government activities of that time as being evil. Meanwhile, Jon Stewart was allowed to broadcast his show for years, and people from the government often went on his show. His show exposed those people as being incompetent and stupid, whereas the Condor documents exposed sections of government as behaving in an evil way. None of the members of government seemed particularly bothered that they were being exposed as incompetent and stupid, but they do seem to take offence at being portrayed as evil. So how is the government being exposed as incompetent and stupid, worse for them than being exposed as evil again? Because they don't seem that bothered about being exposed as incompetent and stupid, and they seem more unhappy about being exposed as evil. You'd think they'd have an idea about which of the two was worse for them, unless you and Larry figured out something in your discussion that they couldn't get their heads around across multiple decades. Maybe you did.

Michael, you sometimes seem to chuck links in at random. The 'footage that kills conspiracy theories' link, showing a fire at the WTC7 building, has appeared in pretty much every Truther documentary, mainly because the people who made those particular documentaries felt it was possible for a building to both be on fire, and also to potentially be brought down at some point by explosives. But if you think it's not possible for a building to have a fire on a few floors, and also for it to be brought down by explosives while it was simultaneously on fire, I'd be happy to hear your explanation as to why. I've never heard a reason, but you might have one.

One of the more useful sites with 9/11 info is Joel Van der Reijden's website here.

https://isgp-studies.com/about

And he actually agrees with Michael and Pat (as do I) that the 9/11 truth movement has been heavily infested with kooks and cranks. If Michael wanted to selectively browse Joel's site and just cherry pick the pages where Joel documents dumb, misleading things many of the 9/11 truthers have said, he'd likely be able to dig up a lot of useful info for use in future threads like this one.

The WTC page on that site is here

https://isgp-studies.com/911-wtc-7-collapse-nist-failure-to-disprove-controlled-demolition-thermate

and he links a number of papers from engineer Tony Szamboti, including a 20 page discussion of 'NIST manipulations' here.

https://isgp-studies.com/miscellaneous/911/more/Tony-Szamboti-white-paper-25-points-2014-NIST-WTC-911-truth.pdf

Playing Devils Advocate a little bit because I'm up early this weekend and bored so the above almost certainly features a less nuanced summary of Pat's more nuanced original point. To Mike's point though, it seems that a sizeable number of JFK researchers are 9/11 truthers, such as Joan Mellen

http://joanmellen.com/wordpress/kennedy-assassination/911-and-1122/

and Peter Dale Scott, with many books and articles, and Jim Marrs. I think there are several others.

4 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

It Is far worse for big gov to be exposed as incompetent and stupid than it it is for it to be exposed as evil.

 

Huh?

As a couple of articles have noted, who could have got hundreds of thousands of people into the street singing anti-war anthems, if not Lennon? This would have been inconvenient for the incoming administration that planned, and got, a lot of new military interventions. 

Yet I've read two conspiracy-related books on Lennon's murder, each of which generally touched on the points above. Fenton Bresler's 'Who Killed John Lennon?', and another by UNCUT journalist Phil Strongman 'John Lennon: Life, Times, Assassination', that read as if Strongman was familiar with this very website, as it heavily referenced past political assassinations, Northwoods, MK Ultra, the CIA and so on. Neither book was completely satisfying as there wasn't a lot of additional evidence that could be brought into the discussion - Strongman's book did have a careful run down of Chapman's travels, and made a decent stab at suggesting some of them were likely so he could be briefed / programmed / trained in an MK Ultra fashion. But you were left with the sense that both authors wish they had more to go on.

Bresler was a reasonably high profile barrister in the UK, and when he passed away, establishment obituaries went and changed the name of his book from 'Who Killed John Lennon?' to "The Murder of John Lennon", so every reader browsing the obit would read the second non-existent title, and not the first, which is the name of the book Bresler actually wrote.

The longest useful page on the JASON's for our purposes is probably Joel van der Reijden's, here - 

https://isgp-studies.com/jason-group-national-security-science

His Garwin summary is

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Co-founder of the NRO. Director of Science and Technology of the CFR. Served on the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) and chaired its panels on Military Aircraft, Anti-submarine and Naval Warfare. Informed Henry Kissinger on certain science topics. Expert in electromagnetic weaponry, but admitted he didn't have access to all the of the compartmented programs that are going on. Member of the National Academy of Sciences' 1982 Committee on Ballistic Acoustics that did its best to dispute the HSCA's conclusions of an over 95% probability of a grassy knoll shooter at the time of the Kennedy assassination.

As he notes, the JASON's have been operating under the wing of a parent company, MITRE, since the late 70's. MITRE came up a lot in the research I did a year and a half ago, as there were so many familiar names sitting on its board, Woolsey, James Schlesinger and others.

Back to the late 60's / early 70's though - all the various science names you'll find in the JASON's and in various academies, science groups, military boards and so on are heavily interlinked, almost as much as the neocons are. They all know each other, work with each other, and shift from various groups, get together on newly assembled commissions, ask each other questions, write to each other during projects for additional support, recommend one another to various government bodies for new jobs, new work, new positions. Garwin in this light is no different than Frederick Seitz, Joshua Lederberg, Sidney Drell and a handful of other names that pop up again and again in the CIA Crest database, and in standard official histories and documentation, as working continuously for various Pentagon and military concerns. Note - eventual CIA head John Deutch, and eventual Sec Def Ashton Carter (who worked together frequently) had background careers as scientists, and were gradually dragged into the Pentagon bureaucracy through their work with the Defense Science Board, of which Garwin was a member.

I didn't have time to get to the bottom of it but there was a new initiative by the CIA to recruit key scientists for various projects just before JFK was killed. Specifically, there are CIA Crest documents with letters, reports, correspondence, memos and even a few pages of a transcribed phone conversation in early November 1963 where the CIA was  wooing various scientific big names for a few projects that were specified, and a few that were unspecified. I ultimately decided the timing was probably coincidental as the CIA Crest site goes deep into many years, many dates, and the CIA are always doing whatever they're doing, but if determined you could ponder if the CIA did a big advisor push at that time because they knew the war effort was about to shift dramatically over the coming months after JFK was killed. There's a funny three or four page conversation (which nearly reads like dialogue from a spy movie with a guy in a phone booth in the rain making a private call) where a CIA figure talks about how great it will be if ******** can join their work, it will be so great to have you working for us. The name was redacted but based on various timelines I'm pretty certain it was Sidney Drell, himself a JASON figure who later worked on a few things with McGeorge Bundy.

Seitz and a few others, amid their work for the Defense Science Board, were pulled into positions in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and ACDA was a major gathering point for numerous neocons and hawk advisors like Wolfowitz, Fred Ikle and others. Seitz notes in his biography that through the late 60's and early 70's ACDA experienced a 'rightward push' with both government and science folk of a rightwing, hawkish nature flocking together to work there, but leaves it at that. If you follow the membership of ACDA, you see numerous names becoming prominent in both neocon circles and the eventual Committee on the Present Danger, so this was the sort of crowd Garwin would have eventually been bumping up against, whether he wanted to or not. Garwin noted in a recent interview that he was a committed Republican voter right until Trump, which he viewed as a step too far. Interesting guy.

Garwin was a regular member of the JASON group and began a second term on the President's Science Advisory Committee the same same year that Nixon took office. Garwin was something of a maverick, between a moderate Republican and a hawk, and he helped advise the Pentagon and CIA on all sorts of technical issues during the Vietnam war. He pops up in Sarah Bridger's SCIENTISTS AT WAR: THE ETHICS OF COLD WAR WEAPONS RESEARCH, and luckily for everyone who doesn't want to pay $100 for the hardcover of that book, Bridger seems to have made a PDF of that volume available for free. The link isn't pasting for me so I've linked the file from online below. Garwin gave advice on the nuclear topic just near the end of the Johnson era, and there was a public fuss made, along with some antagonistic newspaper articles, when he went over to Vietnam to give advice in person on the topic. Bridger's book indicates he largely warned the administration off using them.

The JASON group Garwin frequently worked with typically gave advice to Pentagon and intelligence officials - (I always liked their name, as it reportedly stems from the half year the members often met, through July August September October November). Garwin would later serve as an advisor to a hawkish group at Harvard that featured names like James Woolsey and Judith Miller, and in the late 90's he sat among hawks and right wingers (including Wolfowitz and Woolsey again) on Rumsfeld's Ballistic Missile Commission. Garwin later noted that he'd simply done his best to talk sense to the others, but I wonder. There's a C-Span clip from years earlier at some government setting where the camera cuts away from whomever to Rumsfeld laughing, with Garwin laughing right alongside him. Generally Garwin and the JASON's were around to solve tricky problems, help the government and military out of tight technical spots, and occasionally produce reports that the hawks found useful, when some regular academics and scientists were turning up their nose at working on reports that might help the war. Scientists who said yes to the military contracts were gradually dragged away from their peers, and encouraged in various ways by the military to write more of them - a lucrative racket for some of them, apparently.

Garwin is still around at 95 and still has his IBM email address, and I should possibly email him a hello sometime to see if he has any comments on anything.

Sarah Bridger - Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research.pdf

I'll have to go back and check. Garwin was active as an advisor to government through all of the Vietnam war.

Richard Garwin is quoted in article on CIA Crest as being the scientific expert consulted at the time for a possible nuclear attack on Vietnam. Garwin was the same guy brought in to refute later audio acoustics evidence from the day of the JFK assassination.

Yes, it has, but to me it's more RFK Jr framing it as being part of the chronology of events that led to JFK's death, which he does at the end of the piece. And I guarantee you there are plenty of 20-somethings who have never heard the quote, and who have never considered it in the light that RFK Jr straightforwardly puts it in above.

That excerpt is from this longer interview, recently recorded. The above Northwoods clip is being shared heavily on social media.

A striking moment from a recent interview with RFK.

This book is now out.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Killing-Kennedy-Exposing-Cover-Up-Consequences/dp/1510775439/ref=d_pd_sbs_sccl_1_1/358-2167968-7937828?pd_rd_w=j46DN&content-id=amzn1.sym.d1825639-ef0c-406d-817e-edd44d294c05&pf_rd_p=d1825639-ef0c-406d-817e-edd44d294c05&pf_rd_r=SD437PR08JX9Q1GD62PW&pd_rd_wg=jCbqN&pd_rd_r=0b027183-b296-4dfe-85f8-e210c493e2c2&pd_rd_i=1510775439&psc=1

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"A stunning fresh perspective!"
--Dick Russell, author of The Man Who Knew Too Much

"This book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the coup that took place in Dallas in 1963. Roth's focus on the personal journeys of unsung patriots clarifies our quest for democracy."
--Mal Hyman, author, Burying the Lead: The Media and the JFK Assassination, associate professor of sociology, Coker University 

"Author, Jack Roth, has collectively pieced together an outstanding and significant manuscript on the study and research of individuals regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on November 22, 1963. With a handful of exclusively selected and constructed questions, he has captured the hearts and minds of over twenty top researchers, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists and film makers who have dedicated their lives in order to keep JFK's story alive. He has upgraded their continued research and brought most of it from the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. These individuals have continued to pursue a profound sense of truth and justice in American history. Justice cannot be served until we establish the truth behind John Kennedy's murder. America's heart is in the coffin of President Kennedy!"
--Casey J. Quinlan, American history teacher; author, Beyond the Fence Line, president, Project JFK/CSI Dallas

 

The contents on Amazon Kindle suggest that the book will be worth a read at the very least.

I wish I had the links and citations handy that I dug up a year or more ago. Allen Dulles was deep in some armaments related committee managed by the Rockefeller Foundation a couple of decades before JFK's murder, was on it for years, and the guy above Dulles who ran it was John McCloy. So Dulles essentially worked for McCloy and the Rockefeller interests. Little likely changed when McCloy took over the leadership of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1953, which he ran until 1970.

The armaments panels that Dulles, McCloy and other big names worked on usually had a sprinkling or heavy number of military names sitting alongside them, since the Pentagon figures found the discussions of are-we-buying-these-weapons-or-not to be just as interesting as Dulles and his business and banking associates did. It's a thick web. You can find talks given by Dulles in the late 50's at various economic forums on the Communist threat. then the heads of several companies will write to him and go, We were so inspired by your talk, we've just founded a new group, Business Leaders for National Security (and I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea), could you please attend our next meeting? Dulles writes back to one and says, sorry I'm busy that day but Mr XXXXXXX from the CIA will be able to attend and answer all your questions. There was a major forum in the late 50's where Dulles outlined the Communist threat to the business community, and you could see how it grabbed their attention through the ripple of letters and responses shown in the CIA Crest paperwork.

So Dulles was in steady, regular communication with many figures in the Pentagon, the armaments community, business leaders, various hawkish groups, and in some circles he'd be talking and offering advice and guidance and directions, in others (less frequent) he'd be listening and nodding and agreeing to proposals that he had been told to do, and in some he'd be chatting as an equal, the CIA director chatting to a figure that had equal or greater government experience than him, and who had sat alongside him on numerous panels pushing the Cold War for multiple reasons.

The point being that while Dulles ran the CIA, carried out coups, and did much dirty work, it would often be done in consultation with other groups who would say, yes, we think that proposal is a good one, and this is also important, and make sure that you take care of this issue, and we'll see if we can help out here, and you'll need to fix this issue for us there.

Though 1963 when the hatred of Kennedy had developed into a strong focus among certain groups, Dulles would have been a key figure to put events in play to see JFK killed - ie, gentlemen, if you want us to assist, we'll see what we can do. But the discussions and consultations that Dulles had made a part of his career would have likely carried through to high level discussions among important figures, networks and groups through the latter month of 1963.  I don't see Dulles as a wounded, bitter figure who retired to his homestead to brood and plot, but as someone who would have been kept well informed of the temperature of his associates, and their own hopes for what would happen to Kennedy during that season of campaigning. Donald Gibson in BATTLING WALL STREET has a section on the Rockefeller interests - an enormous enterprise with tentacles stretching into government, the industry and the media - and how they appeared to corral their forces against Kennedy. McCloy, a key figure from that group running the CFR, then appearing on the Warren Commission with a self-satisfied smirk alongside Dulles, seems to be a telling indicator of some of the groups likely involved.

CSIS, mentioned by me as being formed together in a rush during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then gathering a major roster of hawks to appear at a hastily assembled early 1963 conference, appears to be another. Gerald Ford from the Warren Commission had been pulled into the CSIS orbit and appears as an early figure in their official bio. CSIS had a scary number of connections to the Pentagon, including some Joint Chiefs. Side note, try going through all the major acts of terrorism that ever affected the US over the decades that followed, and try to spot how many times a CSIS figure is on the Commission that eventually investigates it. I had trouble finding any where CSIS wasn't represented, and found some where more than one CSIS member turned up on the list of members. This includes the 9/11 Commission. CSIS also sent a group of key figures to Italy in the late 70's, at the height of the Gladio bombings, to hold a conference, meet with right-wing members in Italian politics, and generally hold forth in the country for a time while the Gladio plot unfolded.

At some point, once John Newman's next couple of books are out, I want to go over whatever he's dug up, to see if any of it connects or brushes up any of the above. I think Newman is suggesting that LHO was an asset of intelligence, used as a pawn in the back and forth machinations being played out within the intel community, the molehunt game and the spy program penetrating the USSR. Oswald as an eventual patsy is a useful move to block any later discussion or investigation of Oswald's role in the above, as it becomes a touchy subject for multiple parties. 

6 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

In the end, was such carnage and expense in the interest of the US public and taxpayer? 

Depends if they had stock in a weapons company or not, I suppose.

Very good review.

Talbot's comment - 

Quote

In reality, Allen Dulles recovers very quickly (after being dismissed by Kennedy). He retreats to his home in Georgetown and he begins basically to set up a government in exile there…. So, people like Richard Helms, James Angleton still feel they are part of the Allen Dulles circle. Dulles is not only seeing his old CIA lieutenants, but generals, admirals, the national security network.

How has this been confirmed? Is it documented somewhere, or has that info been gathered from other people's testimony?

Two more segments of Newman's Youtube series are below. People might like to sub to the Youtube channel as I'm sure new pieces will go up in the future.

Newman's next book, ARMAGEDDON, will now be coming out in two volumes, so this long running project will likely take a bit longer, see below.

Quote

I think Denis was speaking specifically about Paul mentioning "handbills" and not pamphlets

What's the difference between a handbill and a pamplet? Not a lot, I'm assuming.

From Newman on Facebook.

Quote

Oswald did stamp a few Corliss Lamont pamphlets with the 544 Camp Street stamp

So he was handing out pamphlets with the 544 Camp Street address. Got it.

Also, from here

https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol10/pdf/HSCA_Vol10_AC_13_544Camp.pdf

The top of the link says that the above incident occurred in Canal Street, New Orleans  Documentation says Oswald did it, Litwin has forgotten how to use Google and thinks that Oswald didn't. Has Litwin gone bananas?

Pipes and Black hyped Litwin's earlier book, not this one, so they know of Litwin's writing, and gave words of praise back then. I mixed up the positive reviews of Litwin's earlier book with the lack of positive reviews for his current one, sorry Fred.

But they're quite the pair to quote for praise. Black and Pipes sit on the advisory board of The National Interest, the neocon publication run by the Center of the National Interest think tank (originally founded by Richard Nixon as the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom). A former Secretary of Defense (Schlesinger) is chairman, a Chief Financial Officer for the Department of Defense (Zakheim) is on the board, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from the Reagan administration (Ikle) sits on the board beside him. Ruth Wedgwood is a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. J. Robinson West (board) was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for international economic affairs during the Ford administration. Helmut Sonnerfeldt (board) was a member of the National Security Council during the Nixon admin. Graham Allison has been a Pentagon advisor for decades, sits on the Defense Policy Board, and came to fame working under Ernest May in the 60's when he helped put together a study on the Cuban Missile Crisis. (May, who joined Allison at the Kennedy School of Govt at Harvard, was an official historian for the Joint Chiefs, and maintained his career as a Pentagon advisor alongside Allison). Zakheim, Schlesinger and others from the list also worked for military contractors on the side (Booz Allen and MITRE). With the above members, The National Interest could pass itself off as a newsletter from the Department of Defense, and the guys working on it who have a background in propaganda, rather than a career resume from the Pentagon, are Black and Pipes.

Pipes wrote articles funded by the United States Institute of Peace, a cleverly titled outfit created in 1984 by the Department of Defense during the Reagan administration, which had the Secretary of Defense on the board. See Pipes citing a grant from the government agency here, and a breakdown of hawks and neocons in the Institute right after.

https://www.danielpipes.org/documents/1064.pdf

https://militarist-monitor.org/united_states_institute_of_peace/

Black was a longtime business partner of Richard Perle, with the two of them running Hollinger International, Black as CEO, Perle sitting with him on the Hollinger board. Black was convicted of criminal fraud in 2007, and spent a few years in prison. Black's main claim to fame and fortune was overseeing the Hollinger newspaper empire. From Wikipedia - 

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Black controlled Hollinger International, once the world's third-largest English-language newspaper empire,^[1] which published The Daily Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times (US), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), National Post (Canada), and hundreds of community newspapers in North America, before controversy erupted over the sale of some of the company's assets.

When Pipes worked as a pro war / anti-muslim essayist for the neocons, he had a regular column in the Jerusalem Post, and had a side specialty of writings attacking conspiracy theories, JFK conspiracies included, see here. 

https://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/01/bibliography-my-writings-on-conspiracy

Pipes is also director of the Middle East Forum, which wrote letters to congress (with Perle as a signatory) demanding action against countries harbouring weapons of mass destruction. Comedy alert, Pipes also authored a book in the late 90's - The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy -  lambasting Middle Eastern authors for asserting that an anti-muslim conspiracy against them might be on the cards. The book was released just a few months after the Project for a New American Century, Richard Perle among them, had written an open letter to Bill Clinton urging the President to act against Saddam Hussein, 

https://noi.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/iraqclintonletter1998-01-26-Copy.pdf

This is the tip of the iceberg for Pipes, who gets a long write up here.

https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/daniel-pipes/

Black and Pipes both have a history of producing conservative propaganda, and making money from hyping neocon wars. With that in mind, and with another Litwin's book featuring praise from a guy who worked for a government funded propaganda outlet (Ronald Radosh, from the United States Information Agency) I confess I find it funny that two cited fans of Litwin's work sit on an advisory board of hawks from the Department of Defense with multiple ties to the Pentagon.

4 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Do you have a shred of actual evidence that these individuals are "supporting Litwin's career" ? I didn't think so.

Black and Pipes wrote blurbs for the back of one of Litwin’s books, to help Litwin sell a book he'd written.  They're also part of a specific group of hawks with ties to the Pentagon and Department of Defense - the Center for the National Interest - which regularly produces pro-war propaganda and which has figures from and advisors to the Pentagon on the board.

I was browsing the list of names of folks who gave Litwin accolades for his book TEENAGE JFK CONSPIRACY FREAK. One of them was from Ronald Radosh, who was cited as

Quote

Professor Emeritus of History at CUNY, opinion columnist for The Daily Beast and co-author of A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel

That's all great, but Radosh's full biography is slightly more illuminating.

Ronald Radosh

Adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute, Research Director for the United States Information Agency (USIA)

From Wikipedia - "Former USIA Director of TV and Film Service Alvin Snyder recalled in his 1995 memoir that "the U.S. government ran a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest U.S. commercial PR firms combined. Its full-time professional staff of more than 10,000, spread out among some 150 countries, burnished America‘s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a 'tower of babble' comprised of more than 70 languages, to the tune of over $2 billion per year". "The biggest branch of this propaganda machine" was the United States Information Agency (USIA)."

Litwin's earlier book has quotes of praise from Conrad Black and Daniel Pipes. Those two guys are already well known, but they both also sit on the board of a particular group with some interesting figures as company. No bombshells, but it might shed a little more light on the folks who are probably supporting Litwin's career. Will post more about it later.

Anyone with an A4 sheet of paper, a few afternoons on their hands, several relevant research volumes and a handful of pertinent leads in the right directions can sketch out what likely happened on 9/11 - which would really be a story about what happened in the months and years prior, because the plot wasn't concocted the morning of the event, it was concocted earlier.

CIA/US, Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can all appear on that A4 sheet of paper depending which leads you prioritise digging in to. Some will appear more than others. But once you've done this, you need to add an additional column of commentary with various notes that distinguish some entries from the others. And that column will be comprised of phrasings you can pick from as you sift through the evidence, largely along the lines of

PLANNED IT

BENEFITED FROM IT

HELPED IT OCCUR

COLLABORATED WITH MOST FIGURES ABOVE TO HELP IT HAPPEN

COLLABORATED WITH SOME FIGURES ABOVE TO HELP IT HAPPEN

KNEW IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, KEPT THEIR BIG MOUTHS SHUT

SUSPECTED IT MIGHT HAPPEN, SAID NOTHING THEREAFTER WHEN IT DID

HAD NO IDEA IT WOULD HAPPEN, DOESN'T WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING MORE THAN THAT FOR MANY REASONS

and a new one which will probably dawn on some researchers if they dig deep enough into the evidence here and there, which is

KNEW SOME OF IT WOULD HAPPEN FOR PURPOSES THEY FOUND PRODUCTIVE, WAS SURPRISED WHEN SOME ADDITIONAL THINGS HAPPENED, NOT HAPPY WITH SOME OF THE ADDITIONAL THINGS THAT OCCURRED, BUT WHO CAN YOU TALK TO WITH CONCERNS ABOUT THAT IF YOU WERE ALREADY KEEPING QUIET ABOUT THE STUFF YOU KNEW ABOUT?

I gather there are some old threads that dug to a degree into the topic, various theories and so on. Possibly a new one at some point might have some fresh things to say.

Here are a few paragraphs from the 10,000 word segment that was curtailed from the COUP IN DALLAS essay. Feel free to look at the RAND essay cited below in footnote 71, where RAND decided to ask the public if a terrorist event might persuade them to support future military interventions, and whether they were likely to believe the government's official narrative about a terrorist event. It's probably pertinent to a few things here.

Some of the names cited below reappear many times throughout the rest of the essay. None of the below was known to me, or the other people who worked on the book, until we decided to follow the history of a few names and groups to see where they led. The 18 months of activity occurring immediately before the below, outlined in full in the essay, is quite the thing.

I agree with Jim that there's not a lot to point JFK researchers towards Israel as a perpetrator of the JFK hit.

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In August 1988, Graham Allison heads Harvard’s annual Program for Senior Executives in National and International Security. Albert Carnesale, Joseph Nye, Jacques Gansler, and Robert Blackwill - a close associate of Philip Zelikow from both Harvard and the National Security Council - run the program with Allison. On the 23rd August, Augustine gives a talk at the Belfer section of the Kennedy School, ’Tunnel at the End of the Light’. Charles Zraket, the MITRE CEO already working with Augustine and Lederberg on the Carnegie Commission, also participates. Zraket is a member of the Hudson Institute Board of Trustees with Frank Carlucci, and had previously worked on a DSB report about military software. In May 1984, the Hudson Institute, a haven for hawks who support investment in the defense industry, had sponsored a terrorism conference with a talk by Michael Ledeen of CSIS. At the time of Augustine’s discussion, the DSB’s major Summer Study on the declining defense industrial base is weeks away from release. Gansler, the DSB member who had previously testified alongside Augustine about the critical nature of the issue, is an organizer of the program. At the time of the gathering, Augustine has spent months working on the DSB’s largest report to date on the subject. Augustine appears before more than a hundred figures from the Army, Air Force, Armed Services Committee, National Guard, Navy, Marine Corps, NATO, the CIA, the Department of Energy, the National Security Agency, and Rockwell International, a major defense contractor. (67.)

In October 1988, Ashton Carter, John Deutch and Brent Scowcroft speak at the AAAS Colloquium on Science, Arms Control and National Security. Deutch again portrays the U.S Defense Technology Base as being in danger, and Scowcroft warns what reductions in nuclear forces would mean for the security of the country. Like Augustine, Scowcroft, too, views the situation as a critical issue. (68.)

The 1988 Summer Study, and the reports and gatherings surrounding it, herald a shift. The DSB report, completed in late 1988, is presented to Sec Defs Carlucci and Cheney. It also gets presented to the National Security Council, which by 1989 includes Zelikow as a staff member. Participants from the DSB, and the authors of reports that coincide with the Summer Study, now take to warning of the threat of muslim terrorism. (Jed Babbin, the future author of books supporting the War on Terror, also worked on the DSB Summer Study. In the report, Babbin is listed as a Director for the Lockheed Corporation). (69.)

Late in 1988, Harvard figures arrange a conference at the American Assembly to discuss the changing global environment. Members of government meet with business, academic and media figures to discuss the issue. Nye and Scowcroft are on the Steering Committee for the event, which gives out papers by the presenters to be used as subjects of discussion during the conference. Nye is the Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School, and Scowcroft is on the joint Harvard / CIA Council on Intelligence and Policy. The event is sponsored by Ford Motor, Xerox, and the Olin Corporation, a leading US manufacturer of ammunition. Allison, Nye, Samuel Huntington and Rita Hauser attend, along with Charles Cooper from RAND. Graham Allison talks about restarting the US economic base, and ponders strategies for the decade ahead. Lawrence Eagleburger, President of Kissinger Associates, also speaks. John Marttila, a researcher for government and industry, notes that the public now considers terrorism to be a greater threat than the Soviet Union. Seycom Brown, an associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, discusses the increasingly unstable world order. In a section of his talk, Brown - a RAND researcher and analyst for decades - talks about the growing likelihood of hijackings and acts of terror. (70.)

During the same month - according to a RAND record available online - the RAND Corporation conducts a national phone survey measuring public opinion about terror events. More than 1000 people are called, with the researchers asking 99 questions on the topic. One question judges how people feel about military interventions overseas. (71.)

“Do you think it will be best for the future of this country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs?”

Another questions asks about defense spending.

“Do you think we should spend less money for defense, more money, or do you think we currently spend about the right amount of money for defense?”

A third question asks how likely the respondents are to believe the official government story about a terrorist attack.

“You can trust the government in Washington to tell the truth about terrorist incidents.”

A later question asks whether restricting civil liberties after a terrorist attack could be justified. In December 1988, one month after the survey, the Lockerbie terrorist bombing gives respondents new information to consider. Accordingly, RAND researchers call 404 people back in May 1989 to check whether their opinions have now changed. The RAND study - THE IMPACT OF TERRORISM ON PUBLIC OPINION, 1988 TO 1989 - offers a useful snapshot of how public opinion might change after a terrorist-linked aviation disaster. In 1994, study co-author Bruce Hoffman moves to St Andrews University to direct Paul Wilkinson’s Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence. Hoffman returns to the US in 1998, and a few years later, writes an article for The Atlantic suggesting that torture is a justifiable method of gathering intelligence during the War on Terror. (72.)

 

(67.) The Harvard program, with Augustine’s speech referenced, is detailed at ADDRESS OF THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT EXECUTIVE PROGRAM IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY, August 23, 1988, CIA-RDP89G00720R000800100003-9 . The DSB report that Zraket participated in is the Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Military Software, September 1987. The Hudson Institute conference with Michael Ledeen is detailed in TERRORISM CONFERENCE ON 17 MAY 1984, April 24, 1984, CIA-RDP87T00434R000100010024-0

(68.) The AAAS Colloquium is detailed at AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE PROGRAM ON SCIENCE , ARMS CONTROL AND NATIONAL SECURITY, CIA-RDP89G00720R000800150015-1

(69.) Babbin is the author of In the Words of Our Enemies, Regnery Publishing, Washington, 2007.  The book purports to collect anti-American rhetoric from muslim extremists overseas.  The DSB report lists Babbin as ‘Mr. Jed L. Babbin, Director of Contract Policy, Lockheed Corporation’, see Defense Science Board 1988 Summer Study on the Defense Industrial and Technology Base. Volume 1, October 1988, Task Force Membership, section D-1

(70.) The presentations at the 1988 American Assembly are collected in America's Global Interests : A New Agenda. Allison’s presentation is ‘National Security Strategy for the 1990s’. Eagleburger’s is ‘The 21st Century: American Foreign Policy Challenges’. Martilla’s is American Public Opinion: Evolving Definitions of National Security’. Brown’s is ‘Inherited Geopolitics and Emergent Global Realities’. The American Assembly presentation three years later, with many of the same participants, will be noticeably more hawkish.

(71.) The RAND monograph is The Impact of Terrorism on Public Opinion, 1988 to 1989, by Theodore Downes-Le Guin and Bruce Hoffman, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20211129124243/https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2006/MR225.pdf

(72.) see A Nasty Business, Bruce Hoffman, The Atlantic, January 2002. The subheading of Hoffman’s article reads ‘Gathering “good intelligence” against terrorists is an inherently brutish enterprise, involving methods a civics class might not condone. Should we care?’

 

Full PDF of the book appears to be here.

https://ia902801.us.archive.org/33/items/TheBastardBulletASearchForLegitimacyForCommissionExhibit399ByRaymondMarcus1966/The Bastard Bullet_ A Search for Legitimacy for Commission Exhibit 399 by Raymond Marcus (1966).pdf

3 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Why talk to Fred?

I was joking. The hair-raising intro to his book suggests he browses the forum here with an aggrieved look of hostile rage on his face, searching through posts and profiles for new things to set him off.

Haha, bloody hell. Here's Fred's book,

https://www.amazon.com.au/Oliver-Stones-Film-Flam-Demagogue-Dealey-ebook/dp/B0BSZV3BK7/ref=sr_1_4?qid=1674847546&refinements=p_27%3AFRED+LITWIN&s=books&sr=1-4&text=FRED+LITWIN

Many will have comments but everyone here should go read the long introduction, and then take the time to say hello to Fred personally, as he's clearly reading the forum and digging into folk's Twitter profiles and so on. Hi Fred.

The introduction to the Kindle version quotes Max Boot with approval, and could have been written by Boot himself. I'm surprised he didn't get Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle to chip in with their thoughts and world-view. Maybe next time.

Side note -  go see Matt Taibbi's recent Tweet, where the list of 'Russian bots spreading disinfo' that the mainstream media touted for many months, was largely comprised of regular American citizens, and included Consortium News editor Joe Lauria.