Michael Griffith

So Tucker Carlson is a "septic truck"??? It's a good day because Tucker got fired??? Oh, let me guess: You hate Tucker because he's not a liberal, and in your eyes anyone who's not a liberal must be an evil person. So you guys are so far off the deep end of the political spectrum that you are cheering the removal of the only voice on a major TV network for releasing all the remaining JFKA files. Nice. Just really nice. How "tolerant and inclusive" of you.

Oh, sheesh. #Paranoid Or maybe, just maybe, Lennon was not killed by the Secret Team but by a man who was clearly deranged and who also contemplated Ronald Reagan, Johnny Carson, Paul McCartney, and Liz Taylor. Are there any moderators who actually care about the image of this forum? Are there any moderators who want to prevent this forum from looking like a haven for every nutty, paranoid, absurd delusion peddled by the Far Left?

We need to understand that fascism and communism are merely two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Both believe in total government power. Both believe the government has the right to own or seize any business or property that it desires, that the government should exercise total control over the news media, that the government should exercise total control over churches/religions, that the government should exercise total over control over education, etc. The Koch brothers and the JBS have opposed these authoritarian ideas and have advocated the opposite view of government power and authority. Once again we see a manifestation of the unfortunate fact that this forum is dominated by ultra-liberals who insist on describing anyone who disagrees with them as fascists, extremists, neo-N-azis, etc. I, for one, am very glad to see that RFK Jr. is open to working with people who represent a wide range of political views. The fact that he would speak at Hillsdale College says volumes about his tolerance and inclusion and willingness to work with people with whom he disagrees on a number of issues but with whom he agrees on issues that are important to him. That's true tolerance and inclusion, and open-mindedness.

Yikes, anyone who answers this question is going to look like a self-promoter. At the risk of seeming to be guilty of self-promotion, I would list two contributions I think I've made: One, my extensive interview with DoD photographic lab technician and photographer Brian Mee and my interviews with at least six professional British photographers regarding the backyard rifle photos. I used this material in my online book Hasty Judgment. I included the transcript of my interview with Mr. Mee in the book. I also cited some of Mr. Mee's observations in my article "The HSCA and Fraud in the Backyard Rifle Photos." Two, my detection of the impossibly rapid movement of Malcolm Summers' left foreleg in the Zapruder film. I also think I may have been the first one to write about the impossibly quick movement of Brehm's son in the Zapruder film, but I'm not sure. I'd have to go back and check, but Noel Twyman or Harrison Livingstone may have already called attention to the movement of Brehm's son (the problem is that I no longer have Twyman's book or any of Livingstone's books). Anyway, I wrote about the movements of Summers' left leg in my article "Evidence of Alteration in the Zapruder Film." End of shameless self-promotion.

I think we should revisit and remember Prouty's scurrilous defense of the Scientology fraud and its criminal founder, Ron Hubbard. No sensible, serious person would have done what Prouty did for Scientology and Hubbard. Come to find out that Holocaust denier Tom Marcellus, whom Prouty praised for having the IHR republish one of his books, also belonged to the Scientology cult. Humm, could that be why Prouty so disgracefully defended both the cult and its founder? Keep in mind that Prouty actually attacked principled researchers who were exposing the Scientology cult and its crooked founder. For example, he viciously attacked Russell Miller's excellent book Bare-Faced Messiah, which exposed Scientology's inner workings and revealed Hubbard's miserable military record and his criminal conduct. It is sad and disturbing that some people in this thread have attacked former Scientology member Tony Ortega for writing an expose on Prouty's sleazy attacks on critics of Scientology and on Prouty's bogus defense of Hubbard (see Ortega's article here). Prouty made the embarrassing claim that Hubbard had worked in "deep cover" for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Prouty made this claim based on two silly blunders. Prouty erroneously believed--or said he believed--that the appearance of the number "16" in Hubbard's military records indicated that Hubbard had served in ONI, when in fact the number was merely an indicator of Navy reserve service. Apparently, Prouty didn't notice, or chose to ignore, the fact that the numeric explanation sheet in Hubbard's records identified "16" as the designation for a naval reserve officer (Hubbard was a naval reserve officer). Prouty also mistakenly argued that the WWII-era "intelligence officer" orders contained in Hubbard's military records proved he worked for ONI, when in fact Navy Department records prove that those orders merely applied to officers who were temporarily tasked with censor duty, i.e., to monitor mail. During the war, some junior and mid-grade Navy officers were temporarily tasked to monitor mail and to teach basic classes in friendly and enemy ship recognition. In this role, they were on temporary "intelligence officer" orders. This had nothing to do with working "deep cover" for ONI. Simply put, Prouty had no clue what he was talking about. Finally, let's see what Wikipedia says about Scientology and then see what Prouty said about it: The movement has been the subject of a number of controversies, and the Church of Scientology has been described by government inquiries, international parliamentary bodies, scholars, law lords, and numerous superior court judgements as both a dangerous cult and a manipulative profit-making business. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology) Now here's what Prouty said about the Church of Scientology: I have traveled far and wide throughout my professional life and see the peoples of Earth as incredibly diverse in character as well as needs. Oftentimes our efforts to understand and help them have been too narrow. In the many years I have worked with the Church of Scientology the one thing which has impressed me the most and which will characterize the Church far into future centuries is its ability to deal with humankind as a whole. At the heart of Scientology’s activities is the betterment of all people no matter what creed, what race, what socioeconomic status to develop themselves spiritually and mentally so that each individual can improve his own life. Scientology’s far-reaching goals are designed to tend to each individual uniquely with compassionate concern and commitment. These rare attributes are essential in these times of trouble and uncertainty and most assuredly provide the Church with a platform for growth and strength in the years to come. (https://www.whatisscientology.org/html/Part11/Chp34/pg0609-b.html) How can anyone use Prouty as a source after his troubling conduct in defense of a scam and its criminal founder? I always wondered how or why Prouty even got involved with defending Scientology and Hubbard. When I learned that Prouty's anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying buddy Tom Marcellus was a Scientologist, this provided a plausible explanation for Prouty's embarrassing, baffling defense of Scientology and Hubbard.

This sounds downright nutty. If you'd read some non-paranoid sources on Lennon's killer, Mark Chapman, you'd discover that Chapman also contemplated killing Ronald Reagan, Johnny Carson, Paul McCartney, and Elizabeth Taylor. Really, folks, if your goal is to make this forum look like a loony farm, you're doing a great job.

Uh, did you only read 10% of my reply? I have a lot more than just Prouty's odd conclusion that the Israelis were to blame for high oil prices. Did you miss the part about his prolonged, close associations with anti-Semites, appearing on their radio show numerous times, having a book republished by one of their publishing arms, praising anti-Semites for republishing his book, recommending an anti-Semitic newspaper, and giving a shockingly evasive answer when asked about Holocaust denial? Did you miss all that? I genuinely question the level of education and analytical abilities of anyone who gets on a public forum and not only defends 9/11 Truther nuttiness but acts like it's irrefutable. That is wingnut material. Maybe in your far-left echo chamber world such drivel passes for being credible, but in the real world it comes across as nutty and as indicative of a lack of education and critical thinking skills.

Your ability to robotically make pro-WC assumptions and ignore contrary evidence is truly impressive. First off, Markham said that she was alone with Tippit for "about 20 minutes" after he was shot, and that Tippit tried to talk to her during this time. In her FBI interview on the day of the shooting, she also said the killer had a "red complexion." But, nah, just never you mind the truck-sized holes in her story, right? Just cherry-pick the few things she said that support your mythology and ignore everything else. As for Benavides, before he knew what he was supposed to say, he logically and credibly told Ted Calloway that after the shots rang out, he fell down to the floorboard of his truck because he was scared to death, and "stayed there": When I heard that shooting, I fell down into the floorboard of my truck and I stayed there. It scared me to death. Gee, does this sound like he only "stayed" in the truck for a few seconds? No, of course not. This makes no sense. But common sense goes out the window whenever you guys need it to disappear to avoid admitting the lone-gunman theory is implausible and contrary to the best evidence. When Benavides initially explained how long he "stayed there," he gave the entirely logical and believable answer of "a few minutes." Let's read Benavides' explanation for why he waited a few minutes before getting out of his truck: Mr. BENAVIDES. After that, I set there for just a few minutes to kind of, I thought he went in back of the house or something. At the time, I thought maybe he might have lived in there and I didn’t aant to get out and rush right up. He might start shooting again. That is when I got out of the truck. . . . (6 H 448) This makes total sense. It's what any rational person would do in such a situation. It's completely understandable. If you were only 25-50 feet away from a shooting and feared you could be the next target, how long would you wait until coming out into the open? I guarantee you that you'd wait a lot longer than a few seconds. But, shucks, if we accept Benavides' first account, the one that makes complete sense and that matches what he initially told another witness, this wreaks havoc on the lone-gunman theory's timeline for the Tippit shooting. So, the only alternative, since truth and logic are off the table, is to go with the "few seconds" claim that Benavides made many years later.

I could post numerous scientific links that debunk the 9//11 Truther garbage, but I'm just not going to waste time on this embarrassing nonsense. It's like wasting time posting links that debunk the flat-Earth theory. Why bother refuting something that 99% of the educated population in the U.S. already knows is false and absurd? As for my alleged failure to "mention anything specifically anti-Semitic" regarding Prouty, wow, I suggest you re-read my posts in this thread. I'd say that palling around with Holocaust deniers for years, having a Holocaust-denying publishing company republish one of his books, recommending that people read an anti-Semitic newspaper, blaming high oil prices on the Israelis (sure, makes perfect sense!), appearing on an anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying group's radio program 10 times in four years, publicly praising two prominent anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers for agreeing to republish his book, and saying "I'm no authority in that area" when asked about Holocaust denial--I'd say that such actions certainly justify the charge that Prouty closely associated with anti-Semites for years, and that he expressed anti-Semitic sentiments.

I could take you to the cleaners in a debate about the scientific and forensic 9/11 data. No, you couldn't. Again, 99.9% of the scientists who've examined the "scientific and forensic 9/11 data" reject the 9/11 Truther claims as preposterous, absurd, unscientific, and bogus. 1) This thread on the JFKA board about Col. L. Fletcher Prouty is not the right place for that debate, and 2) I never wanted to take on the role of explaining to the duped American public what really happened on 9/11, as I told Mark Stephens on this forum a year or two ago. We already know what "really happened" on 9/11. Terrorists flew two gigantic airliners loaded with Jet A fuel into the Twin Towers and one airliner into the Pentagon. They openly bragged about it. They were proud of it. They said we had it coming. 99.9% of the scientists, engineers, and other experts who've examined the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 have rejected the ridiculous, paranoid, and silly "controlled demolition" theory and have explained the collapses to the satisfaction of 99% of the educated population. Literally thousands of people in DC saw American Airlines Flight 77 flying unusually low and heading straight toward the Pentagon. People who were on the plane called friends and loved ones just before the plane crashed into the Pentagon to warn them the plane had been hijacked. I had a friend who was a Pentagon policeman on 9/11 and who saw part of the plane's fuselage in the giant hole made by the impact. There was no missile. The missile theory is not just demonstrably false, it is idiotic, paranoid, and obscene. In fact, I feel about taking on the role of explaining 9/11 the same way that Fletcher Prouty felt about telling America that Allen Dulles's favorite black ops expert, Ed Lansdale, was in Dealey Plaza on 11/22/63. I can point out some decisive clues, but I'd prefer that people solve the puzzle themselves. This is crazy talk that even Oliver Stone has backed away from. Again, Lansdale liked and admired JFK and grieved his death. Lansdale opposed the deployment of large numbers of American troops to Vietnam. He even opposed many of the recommendations in the Taylor-McNamara report. In fact, Lansdale even opposed bombing North Vietnam. Lansdale was bipartisan. Lansdale was also not your typical CIA man, either, and many CIA agents disliked him because he disapproved of many of their methods and views. These facts have been noted by a number of historians who have studied Lansdale career. Have you read Cecil B. Curry's seminal work on Lansdale, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)? Prouty's charges against Lansdale are obscene, nutty, and baseless. I would note that when Prouty was interviewed by the ARRB, he did not repeat his claim that Lansdale was the one who had sent him on the South Pole trip. Moreover, Prouty refused to identify the person who had supposedly corroborated that Lansdale appeared in one of the Dealey Plaza "tramp" photos. Prouty had claimed that one of those photos showed Lansdale's backside, and that someone who had known Lansdale had told him that the man in the photo was Lansdale. When the ARRB asked Prouty to name this person, he refused.

So now the Secret Team killed John Lennon too? In 1980? Really? Are we just trying every which way to discredit this forum as a place for serious, educated discussion on the JFK case? Are we just trying our hardest to give people the impression that this forum is a haven for discussing every nutty, crackpot, bizarre conspiracy theory ever conceived?

From my critique of Dale Myers' With Malice: The standard lone-gunman explanation is that Benavides waited in his truck only for a matter of seconds and not for a few minutes. But this flies in the face of common sense, not to mention that it ignores what Benavides himself initially said, which was that he waited in his truck for "a few minutes." If you were only 25-50 feet away from a shooting and feared you could be the next target, how long would you wait until coming out into the open again? Understandably, and by all accounts, Benavides was scared to death by the shooting. He told the WC he waited in his truck "a few minutes" after he heard the shots. According to fellow witness Ted Calloway, Benavides told him the day after the shooting that, When I heard that shooting, I fell down into the floorboard of my truck and I stayed there. It scared me to death. (p. 220, emphasis added) Years later Benavides changed his story and told CBS he only waited a few seconds, not a few minutes. Predictably, Myers chooses to accept Benavides' belated change of story and rejects his original statements (pp. 86-87). If, as seems likely, Benavides did in fact wait in his truck for a minute or two after the shots rang out, then the case against Oswald collapses, unless one is willing to assume some unknown person gave Oswald a ride to the Tippit shooting scene. Myers is willing to speculate that this might have happened, suggesting that a person who gave Oswald a ride would not have come forward to tell about it because he would have been too embarrassed (p. 352). But why would Oswald have wanted to be dropped off at 10th and Patton? The problem of getting Oswald to the Tippit crime scene in time to commit the crime has always vexed the lone-gunman theory. Oswald's rooming house was nearly a mile from the spot on 10th and Patton where Tippit was shot, right around nine-tenths of a mile. Even walking at a very brisk pace, Oswald would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes to reach the Tippit scene, and bear in mind this does not allow time for him to supposedly walk a block and a half past 10th and Patton and then supposedly spin around after seeing the police car approach. Importantly, Mrs. Roberts said that when she looked out the window a short time after Oswald left the boarding house, she saw him standing near the street. This was a few minutes after 1:00, around 1:03 or 1:04. As mentioned, Myers says the shooting occurred at 1:14:30. A very brisk pace would have put Oswald at the Tippit scene at 1:14, if we assume he began his speed walk at 1:04, but that would not have left enough time for him to walk past 10th and Patton, spin around, start walking the other way, get stopped by Tippit, have a "friendly chat" with Tippit, wait while Tippit got out of the car, and then shoot Tippit. And note that this whole scenario assumes Oswald suddenly started sprint-walking toward the Tippit scene right after Mrs. Roberts saw him standing near the road in front of the rooming house. It also assumes that Benavides waited only a few seconds before coming out from hiding and approaching the police car. It just does not work.

The 9/11 Truther "scientific evidence" you keep citing is rejected as spurious, bogus, idiotic, embarrassing, and ridiculous by 99.9% of the scientists and other experts who have examined it. Truth matters. Facts matter. Some theories are obviously, clearly bogus, absurd, and embarrassing, and do not deserve further discussion. The 9/11 Truther nuttiness is one of those theories.

This is your reply? You snipped and ignored most of my arguments and evidence. Nevertheless, I'll address your arguments. 1. If you read my review, Selverstone takes a wack at Mike Forrestal at the end of his book and tries to use that to smear all the other witnesses who said JFK told them he was getting out after the election. Selverstone was so eager to do this though that he missed a crucial point that Peter Scott had pointed out a long time ago. Just as Forrestal said, Kennedy did say that when he got back from Dallas there would be a complete review of Vietnam policy. Scott got this from a separate source that went back to the mid sixties. Therefore, Forrestal was correct and it was Selverstone who was wrong. None of this addresses the points I made about Forrestal. I'll just repeat them, since you ignored them: Selverstone documents that in Forrestal's November 1969 oral history interview for the LBJ Library, he stated that JFK probably did not know what he would do if faced with the imminent collapse of South Vietnam (which is exactly what Bobby Kennedy said in his April 1964 oral history interview). Furthermore, all Forrestal said in 1971 was that JFK told him before he left for Dallas that there would be a review of Indochina policy when he returned. That is miles away from claiming that JFK had decided to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Since Diem had just been assassinated, it makes perfect sense that JFK would have wanted to review Indochina policy, but you read deep between the lines and draw a baseless inference from Forrestal's comment. 2. The whole point of Rakove's book is that Kennedy's foreign policy, especially in the Third World, was contra Foster Dulles, and the Eisenhower administration. . . . You can repeat misleading arguments a hundred times, but this won't make them valid. As I noted in a previous reply, Selverstone only cites Rakove on the very narrow point of neutralism in the context of the Domino Theory. You seemingly admit this in the introductory clause to your attack in your review, but then you go on to portray his use of Rakove as misleading. I think he does this so he can say there really was no difference between JFK and LBJ on foreign policy, thereby making his "Well, you could not tell what Kennedy was going to do in 1964-65" more logical to the unsuspecting reader. Because if you did tell the real story, it would make his withdrawal make perfect sense. More distortion. You are misrepresenting what Selverstone says on this point. Not once does he say in his book that there was really no difference between JFK and LBJ on foreign policy. That is sheer invention on your part. The problem is that you are a far-left ideologue, that you've decided that Selverstone is "the enemy," and that you're wedded to a view that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of scholars who've written on the subject of JFK and/or the Vietnam War. 3. Mike, in his attempt to smear Mansfield, ignores the one valuable part of Selverstone's sorry book. In the very end, Selverstone says that O'Donnell and Powers had to really argue with Mansfield in order to get what he said about Kennedy into their book Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye. Because Mansfield knew how bad that would make Johnson look. Considering the rest of Selverstone's crappy book, that is a contribution. Sort of like what Epstein revealed about Specter. Well, first of all, I made no attempt to "smear" Mansfield. Furthermore, Mansfield contradicted the account in O'Donnell and Powers' 1972 book both before and after it was published. This suggests that the reason O'Donnell and Powers had to argue so much with Mansfield may have been that he knew the account they wanted to use in their book was inaccurate. In two 1970 letters to Life magazine, Mansfield said that he understood that Kennedy was considering withdrawing troops, but never said "all" troops, and in fact made no comment about the extent of the withdrawal being "considered." In the second letter, Mansfield denied that Kennedy “even mentioned the thought” of the 1964 presidential election when he discussed Vietnam with Mansfield. In 1989, Mansfield wrote that Kennedy only planned to withdraw “some troops” after the election. When Mansfield was interviewed by his biographer, Don Oberdorfer, in October 1999, Mansfield said that Kennedy may have planned on making “some minor withdrawals” after the election. But you guys never mention this evidence. You only cite the handful of Mansfield statements that tend to support your position. Moreover, why would Mansfield have cared how anything made LBJ look by 1972? Even among Democrats, LBJ was already very unpopular. Thus, it's hard to imagine why Mansfield would have had any concern about how anything would make LBJ look. This points to a genuine phenomenon that took place in 1963 and early 1964. That was Johnson's systematic and total reversal of Kennedy's policy, all the while lying about what he was doing. It was sweeping and it literally cowed the people left behind. To the point they talked about it in private, how LBJ was lying about Kennedy in order to put the war on his tombstone. Which is, one by one, the reason they left. McNamara ended up being a victim of all this. That idiot Halberstam actually started calling Vietnam, McNamara's War. Which is ridiculous. McNamara was executing JFK's withdrawal program faithfully. At the first meeting he, and everyone else there, knew there was going to be a sea change. And everyone else knew very soon that LBJ was going to brook no dissent and he was going to lie about what Kennedy was going to do. This is why he brought back Walt Rostow as National Security Advisor. He brought him back for the same reason Kennedy shuffled him out: Johnson knew he was an extreme hawk on Vietnam. As John Newman said about McNmara, "Jim, if you were responsible for the killing of 2 million people, you would not want talk about it either." Same thing with Bundy, he only talked after McNamara did his mea culpa. There was a real reluctance to do so for a lot of different political, sociological and psychological reasons. You can repeat such far-left fantasy another thousand times, but that won't make it true. There are so many facts ignored in these two paragraphs, and so many distortions and erroneous claims crammed into them, that it would take two or three pages to unpack and explain them all. Let's just take one example: "McNamara was executing JFK's withdrawal plan faithfully." This argument avoids the point that not only was the withdrawal plan conditional but that under the plan we would continue to aid South Vietnam and would even leave behind support troops. Even James K. Galbraith, perhaps the leading advocate of the claim that JFK was going to withdraw from Vietnam after the election, admits this fact: Training would end. Support for South Vietnam would continue. They had an army of over 200,000. The end of the war was not in sight. After the end of 1965, even under the withdrawal plan, 1,500 US troops were slated to remain, for supply purposes. But the war would then be Vietnamese only, with no possibility of it becoming an American war on Kennedy's watch. (JFK’s Vietnam Withdrawal Plan Is a Fact, Not Speculation (JFK’s Vietnam Withdrawal Plan Is a Fact, Not Speculation (thenation.com) I believe the end of training was going to be conditional as well, but I agree that "support for South Vietnam would continue" and that we would leave a residual force in country for supply purposes. That is a galaxy away from your baseless, irresponsible claim that JFK intended to abandon South Vietnam no matter what after the election. You keep dodging this crucial point. But the thing is, the documents made it clear that what these people were saying was correct. Johnson reversed Kennedy's withdrawal program. And instead, he readied us for an all out war with Hanoi, see NSAM 288. That order, in March of 1964, arranged with help from the JCS, planned that war. So what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ did in three months. There is no getting around that one. This is another claim that you just keep repeating over and over again, while never dealing with contrary evidence and never facing the fact that the overwhelming majority of scholars who have looked at all these same documents disagree with your spin about them, even though many of those scholars are liberal (and some are very liberal). No one can stop you from repeating your spin another thousand times, but readers should understand that your interpretation of the documents under discussion is rejected by the vast majority of scholars, probably 98% of them, who have studied those documents. The Geneva Accords were a dead letter due to violations on both sides. All one has to do is read the Accords. I mean OMG, the USA sent in a whole new military advisorship team replacing the French, and installed a whole new government: clearly those were massive violations. Your polemic here is more proof that you have no clue what you are talking about, that your research has been insufficient and one sided, and that you have no business pretending to be any kind of an authority on the Vietnam War. Even the Wikipedia article on the 1954 Geneva Conference admits who really violated the Geneva Accords: North Vietnam violated the Geneva Accords by failing to withdraw all Viet Minh troops from South Vietnam, stifling the movement of North Vietnamese refugees, and conducting a military buildup that more than doubled the number of armed divisions in the North Vietnamese army while the South Vietnamese army was reduced by 20,000 men. (1954 Geneva Conference - Wikipedia) I mean, this is basic, basic stuff. This is Vietnam War 101 stuff. But you don't even know this material because your research has been so deficient. Even historian Max Hastings, although he is left-of-center, dismantles the far-left/Communist narrative about the Accords in his book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy. Among many other things, he points out that right after the Accords were signed, the Hanoi regime violated them by ordering thousands of Vietminh to remain undercover in South Vietnam: In violation of the Geneva Accords, Hanoi ordered ten thousand Vietminh to remain undercover in the South, insurance against a resumption of the armed struggle. (p. 104) This was many months before Eisenhower began sending small numbers of military advisors to South Vietnam. Finally, I would again note that you snipped and did not answer most of the points and evidence I presented in my previous reply.

I haven't responded because I don't waste my time responding to such stuff. The "professors, engineers, and scientists" you're talking about constitute a tiny, tiny minority of the educated world. Do a survey among any group of engineers and other scientists, and you will find that 99.9% of those folks reject the 9/11 Truther nutcase stuff as nutcase stuff. And we're not just talking about the Twin Towers, by the way, but also about the absurd, obscene theory that a missile hit the Pentagon, not an airliner, never mind the hundreds of people in DC who saw the airliner flying low and straight toward the Pentagon. I know a few such people. I used to work with a guy who worked on the Pentagon police force and who was there on 9/11 and saw part of the airliner's fuselage inside the giant cavity that the plane created. 9/11 Truther conspiracy claims are idiotic, paranoid, unscientific, and embarrassing.

Just imagine what your average educated guests will think when they come here and see some people excusing and/or whitewashing Prouty's close and prolonged ugly extremist associations. How do you think they will view this forum when they see such things? It's bad enough that moderators allow defenses of 9/11 Truther nuttiness in this forum. It's equally unfortunate that we have a thread dedicated to defending Prouty, whose vile associations should have long since caused all JFKA researchers to repudiate him, and whose wild theories have done great damage to the case for conspiracy in JFK's death.

I can't imagine that RFK Jr. will whitewash or minimize Russia's attempted rape of Ukraine. I see John Cotter has posted some evidence that RFK Jr. condemns the invasion: That's good to hear.

Your explanation for why Whaley's FBI statement says nothing about a jacket seems strained to me. I mean, are we to believe that Whaley never once said the word "jacket" or "coat" in his FBI interview? Not once? There's also the fact that, as mentioned, none of Whaley's three police statements mention a jacket. Whaley's claim to the WC that his passenger was wearing two jackets is clearly unbelievable and by itself should raise a large red flag about his WC testimony. You're still assuming that Whaley recorded his pickup times retroactively. He would have had to have had a pretty bad memory to make a 17-minute error. I could believe a five- or maybe even a 10-minute error, but a 17-minute error, especially one that was 17 minutes early, seems a bit hard to believe. When Whaley told the WC that he waited stretches of time before recording his pickup times (which, again, makes no sense to me, since it would have been easier to record them as they happened), he also claimed that he entered his times in 15-minute intervals, a claim refuted by his timesheet. I don't believe either of these claims. I think he was pressured into making them. The pickup location proves nothing. Any number of pickup points would have worked. Furthermore, the Whaley pickup location really does not work. The feds had to rig the reenactment to get Whaley's cab from the pickup point to Oswald's neighborhood in the required amount of time. BTW, it's worth mentioning that Knapp's house was nearly a straight shot down Beckley from the destination spot claimed by Whaley. Huh, now fancy that--what a coincidence. Whaley's first police statement said nothing about a lady being offered the cab. In his first statements, Whaley said his passenger headed south after he exited the cab, but Oswald would have needed to go north to get to his rooming house. I'm just not buying the goods here. There are too many contradictions, too many questionable assumptions, too many doubtful claims. Finally, I again repeat that my overall point about Whaley is that his identification of Oswald is open to serious doubt and is far from what would normally be considered a "positive identification."

Based on your questions, you obviously did not bother to listen to the podcast. But, I'll address your questions anyway. Did any of them bring up the point about Forrestal that I did? This is an example of the fact that you ignore most of Selverstone's evidence in your review. You cite Michael Forrestal's 1971 claim as if it were gospel, yet you ignore the fact that Selverstone documents that in Forrestal's November 1969 oral history interview for the LBJ Library, he stated that JFK probably did not know what he would do if faced with the imminent collapse of South Vietnam (which is exactly what Bobby Kennedy said in his April 1964 oral history interview). You keep ignoring such contrary facts. Furthermore, all Forrestal said in 1971 was that JFK told him before he left for Dallas that there would be a review of Indochina policy when he returned. That is miles away from claiming that JFK had decided to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Since Diem had just been assassinated, it makes perfect sense that JFK would have wanted to review Indochina policy, but you read deep between the lines and draw a baseless inference from Forrestal's comment. Did any of them bring up the distorting of Rakove's book like I did? Selverstone does not distort Rakove's book. You are misrepresenting how Selverstone uses Rakove's book. Did any of them bring up those missing 19 witnesses who JFK revealed his intent to like I did? How many times are you going to peddle these belated accounts and ignore the arguments against them? Let's take a look at your list. Your list includes Forrestal! Never mind that Forrestal did not even hint that JFK had decided on an unconditional withdrawal after the election, right? Incredibly, your list actually includes North Vietnamese war criminal General Vo Nguyen Giap! This is just pitiful and shameful. You include Giap on your list based on triple-hearsay. Your source for this triple-hearsay is a pro-Communist author named Mani Kang, who regarded the murderous thug Giap as, and I quote, "the greatest military figure of the twentieth century." Sickening. Anyway, Kang claimed that he interviewed Giap's youngest son, and that the son told Kang that General Giap told him that he knew that JFK "was withdrawing from Vietnam in late 1963"! This is what you consider to be "evidence"? Your list includes Robert McNamara! Oh, wow, now there's a reliable, believable source! After all we now know about McNamara and his two-faced and three-faced maneuverings, you still put him on your list? Again, why didn't McNamara mention his alleged "secret debrief" in his 1995 memoir? Your list includes Senator Mike Mansfield. Your use of Mansfield is misleadingly selective. You and your few allies never mention that Mansfield made a number of contradictory claims about what JFK supposedly told him about his Vietnam intentions. You only quote the one statement that you like, and you ignore all the others. At one point, Mansfield wrote that JFK never even mentioned the '64 election in relation to Vietnam. In another letter, Mansfield said that JFK only intended to withdraw "some" troops. But you never mention these statements. Your list includes Senator Wayne Morse. Yes, years later, Morse claimed that JFK told him he "wanted out" of Vietnam. One, that is not at all the same thing as an expressing an intention to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. Two, it is odd that Morse never breathed a word about this statement in his two-hour oral history interview in November 1965. Not one syllable about any withdrawal plans, much less an unconditional withdrawal. This is especially odd because eight months earlier, in February 1965, Morse publicly "completely repudiated" LBJ's Vietnam policy and accused Johnson of misleading the people and waging an unconstitutional war. One would think that given this fact, if JFK had indeed told Morse that he "wanted out" of Vietnam, Morse would have emphasized this point in his February attack on LBJ's Vietnam policy, and would have at least mentioned it in his lengthy oral history interview (the transcript of which runs to over 80 pages). I won't bother repeating the statements made by JFK loyalists who rejected the idea that JFK had plans for an unconditional withdrawal, but I will note that these loyalists included Bobby Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Ted Sorenson, and Walt Rostow. Nor will I bother once again quoting all the statements that JFK himself made in which he made it clear that he had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam, that he opposed withdrawal, that he thought withdrawal would be a mistake, and that we had to be prepared to stay the course in Vietnam. You keep ignoring these statements. Did any of them bring up how JFK put back the withdrawal section into the McNamara/Taylor report like I did? This is a meaningless, ancillary point because it doesn't address the conditional nature of the withdrawal. Did any of them bring up the McNamara debrief like I did? You mean the debrief that McNamara inexplicably failed to mention in his memoir? You mean the debrief that McNamara's worshipful, adoring aides knew nothing about? This is not to mention the fact that given what we now know about McNamara, nobody in their right mind should be using him as a source, unless he was speaking against his own interest. Did any of them notice how he left out the November 27th meeting making McNamara the point man on Vietnam like I did? This is another ancillary, meaningless point given the evidence that Selverstone presents from the Kennedy White House tapes, wherein we hear JFK repeatedly reaffirming his determination to keep South Vietnam independent. You keep ignoring this inconvenient fact. See, if you leave all that out, then you can say, "Well its really hard to day what Kennedy would have done." This silly comment shows that you have no business passing judgment on Selverstone's book. You are not qualified to be reviewing it, much less to be talking about the larger issue of the Vietnam War. 99% of JFK and Vietnam War scholars agree that it's very hard to say what JFK would have done in 1965. Mike Swanson will have more to say on Selverstone soon. Oh, boy! So in response to all the scholars who have praised and recommended Selverstone's book, you cite Mike Swanson, whose book on the Vietnam War is loaded with grammatical, spelling, citation, and punctuation errors, not to mention numerous erroneous claims. Swanson doesn't seem to understand such basic things as the need to match verb tenses in a sentence; nor does he seem to understand things that college sophomores are expected to know when they write, such as what a subordinate clause is and how to punctuate it, what an introductory clause is and how to punctuate it, and when to use a semicolon. Here are just a few examples of the poor English and gaffes that one finds in Swanson's book on the Vietnam War (Kindle version): "Vietnam wasn't hardly even on the radar" (2532) "and in the 1950's most government officials" (2582) "What this meant is that importers were able to" (2636) "A US government report" (2640--he repeats this error throughout the book; the correct punctuation is U.S., not the all-caps version of the pronoun "us") "with their oppressive monopoly taxes" (272) "Only that way could they grow morally and learn personalism." (1915) "to position people he held in great trust into key positions inside of the bureaucracy that could act as his eyes and ears that had similar policy objectives" (2496) "the more drinks he drank the more mean he got" (3299) "Johnson responded by asking him why 150,000 men could not deal with only 10,000 Viet Cong?" (3337) "Secretary of State Robert McNamara had second doubts" (4096--shoot, all this time I thought McNamara was Secretary of Defense! And what exactly are "second doubts"? I've heard of "second thoughts," but not "second doubts.") "One reason why Robert McNamara . . . did not ask such questions is that there was no great incentive to do so." (4287-4291--a double whammy) "Secretary of State Robert McNamara's job was to" (4291--again, I could have sworn that McNamara was Secretary of Defense) I repeat that this is only a small sampling of the amateurish errors in Swanson's book. Yet, you're waiting anxiously to see what Swanson has to say about Selverstone's book! I'll be terribly blunt: Swanson's poor command of English suggests that his education was deficient, and that, needless to say, he is not qualified to be passing judgment on Selverstone's book.

I recommend that you read Dr. Marc Selverstone's historic new book The Kennedy Withdrawal. Using Kennedy White House tapes and numerous internal documents and other sources, Selverstone makes a strong case that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from South Vietnam until the Saigon government was stable and strong enough to resist Communist aggression on its own, and that even after withdrawal, military aid was going to continue.

Uh, Trump did not order a single lockdown. Each state's governor decided whether or not to order a lockdown in his/her state and what the provisions of the lockdown would be. After many blue states ordered draconian lockdowns, Trump quickly began urging that the lockdowns be lifted. Keep in mind that the CDC has no power to order a state to do a lockdown. That power is reserved exclusively to the governor of the state. Some red states imposed only mild lockdowns or practically no lockdowns, yet their numbers were not appreciably worse than states with harsh lockdowns. The provisions of the lockdowns varied considerably among the 50 states. Thankfully, we here in Virginia had a centrist Democratic governor in 2020-2021, and his lockdown provisions were less drastic than those in many other blue states, such as Michigan and California.

Moyar cites a boatload of primary sources in his endnotes. However, we need to understand that the President's signature will rarely be on a deployment order, if ever. The order will be discussed by the President and his NSC, etc., then he will give his approval, and then actual orders will be signed by someone else. Who signs the order will depend on the size of the deployment. In many cases, a deputy undersecretary or even his designee, such as a senior military officer, will sign the orders. The President will sign things like major policy statements, such as NSAMs, but he will rarely sign deployment orders.

JFK authorized all of those troop increases. Dr. Mark Moyar covers this in some detail in chapters 5 and 6 in his book Triumph Forsaken (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

I think it's worth repeating that even most liberal historians do not buy the claim that JFK was determined to abandon South Vietnam after the election no matter what. They've read the accounts of former JFK aides and associates that make this claim, but they don't buy the accounts, and they don't buy the claim. For example, Stanley Karnow, author of one of the most widely read books on the Vietnam War ever published, Vietnam: A History, and producer of the famous 1983 documentary series Vietnam: A Television History--even Karnow, despite his very liberal bent, did not buy the claim. In his 1995 book Past Imperfect, Karnow said the following about the Oliver Stone-Fletcher Prouty withdrawal claim: Nothing in Kennedy's public utterances, however, suggested that he even remotely envisioned scuttling Vietnam. During an interview with Walter Cronkite in early September 1963, he affirmed his faith in the domino theory, adding, "I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw." He echoed that line in a talk with Chet Huntley: "We are not there to see a war lost." Had he delivered the address he was slated to give in Dallas, he would have declared that the involvement in Southeast Asia might be "painful, risky, and costly . . . but we dare not weary of the task." Robert Kennedy repeated the same thesis in an oral history interview, saying that the president "felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam, and that we should win the war . . . . " When asked if his brother ever contemplated "pulling out," Bobby replied, "No". . . . President Kennedy had made it plain that the repatriation of the U.S. advisers depended on the performance of the South Vietnamese troops; unless they were trained to take over, the Americans would stay. Johnson carried out the U.S. withdrawal, though it was essentially an accounting exercise. As one thousand men returned home, another thousand arrived; by December 1963, the force was the same as it had been. (pp. 272-273) Or, take Dr. Edward Moise, who is arguably even more liberal than Karnow was. Even he does not buy the claim, as I documented earlier in this thread. To give you some idea of how liberal Moise his, he's even praised Robert Buzzanco's Vietnam War research. As I pointed out in a previous reply, Moise notes that the unconditional-withdrawal accounts of former JFK loyalists are not believable because they so markedly contradict JFK's own statements on the matter. (I might add that other 1961-1963 sources who knew JFK said he had no plans for an unconditional withdrawal.) Yet another very liberal scholar, Dr. Fredrik Logevall of Harvard University, likewise does not buy the idea that JFK would have abandoned South Vietnam no matter what after the election. Logevall contends that American intervention in Vietnam was arguably a "crime," which places him firmly in the left-wing anti-war camp, but he still strongly rejects the Stone-Prouty withdrawal claim. See, for example, his chapter “Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been,” in Mark J. White, editor, Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited (New York: New York University Press, 1998). The point here is that the Stone-Prouty withdrawal claim is a fringe viewpoint that is shared by very few historians and/or Vietnam War scholars. We would do well to keep this mind when we talk about the top five books on JFK and Vietnam.

A few follow-up points: Whaley said nothing about his passenger wearing a jacket in any of his three police statements, nor did he mention a jacket when he described the passenger to the FBI. Yet, at one point in his WC testimony, Whaley said his passenger was wearing two jackets, one over the other. Clearly, something is very wrong with Whaley's WC testimony. If Oswald did in fact take a cab, this does not automatically mean that he took Whaley's cab. There were plenty of other cabs available. We're talking about the downtown area of a major city. An error of 17 minutes on a timesheet strikes me as a bit much, as a bit hard to believe, even making the questionable assumption that Whaley waited several fares before recording his pickup times. Again, his timesheet shows no indication that he used 15-minute increments. I suspect he said this because he was advised to say it or because he was trying to say what he thought the WC wanted to hear. Oswald probably resembled 10-15% of the male population of Dallas. His height and weight were in the average range. Nothing about the appearance of his hair stood out. It's entirely possible that Whaley's passenger bore some resemblance to Oswald, and that this general resemblance may have caused Whaley to think that he recognized his passenger when he saw a photo of Oswald in the newspaper.