The Guardian-BBC nexus in defence of the Warren Report

[Paul Rigby]

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Another sure route:

One of British journalism’s finest hours in the field of JFK studies was the responsibility of the late John Diamond. As he was to relate in an April 1994 piece for The Mail on Sunday’s Night and Day supplement, when “Oliver Stone’s movie ‘JFK’ first appeared, I sat in a viewing theatre with the director and talked to him about it.” Diamond’s initial verdict? “I came back convinced that Stone had it right: Kennedy was killed by gangsters hired by the CIA to stop him pulling out of Vietnam. It made perfect sense.” So what happened to Diamond’s favourable review of Stone’s “JFK”? “I wrote a piece for this very paper to that effect – and had it thrown back in my face.” Was Diamond appalled by this censorship? Not a bit of it. British journalists are, after all, nothing if not pragmatic: “I went away and did a little research.”

By happy coincidence, you understand, this research revealed to Diamond that his first response to Stone’s film was nonsense; and resulted in a piece called “Plotgate,” which was, amazingly, published, and from which I take his quotes. Why was “Plotgate” published? Because that alleged “little research” had caused him to conclude that “Yes, Stone’s theory made sense, but so did a hundred other theories. On balance, therefore” – wait for it, wait for it – “the one which must make the most perfect sense is that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nutter with a gun, killed him.” Now there’s a specimen of logic fit for a connoisseur.

The challenge confronting Diamond, an impeccably pleasant and liberal soul by all accounts, was how to transform the base metal of cowardly conformity into the bankable gold of a lucrative Sunday supplement commission. Easy – play the anti-semitic card.

“Plotgate” offered ploddingly jokey summations of the ten conspiracies thought most likely by Diamond to lend themselves to ridicule – and, of course, earn him a commission. At number ten, he offered the following: “The mass media is run by Jewish liberals, which is why you have, until now, never read any of this stuff.” It was under this title that he introduced his apologia for his well-rewarded volte-face on Stone’s film. Cowardice, we were to believe, was really its exact opposite, courage: “I’ll hold my hands up to this one. I am a Jewish liberal waiting for my papers to come through from the World Zionist Conspiracy HQ in Hollywood so that I too can help in the cover-up…Lone nutters, you see, tend to influence history rather more than organised cabals of rich Jewish-Jesuit-Masons.” What heroism, what insight.

A proper journalist, one capable of actual research, might well have looked at the name of the producer of Stone’s JFK, and shared that research with his, or her, readers. Not because Jews do control the media, or anything so crass, never mind untrue, but because Arnon Milchan had long been identified as an arms-dealing propagandist for Israel and South Africa, and his role in the making of Stone’s “JFK” begged important questions. But Diamond wasn’t a proper journalist; and the paper he produced “Plotgate” for was no more a paper of honest journalism than Pravda under Stalin.

"Plotgate," The Mail on Sunday, Night and Day, 17 April 1994, pp.20-21.

[Paul Rigby]

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Another sure route:

One of British journalism’s finest hours in the field of JFK studies was the responsibility of the late John Diamond. As he was to relate in an April 1994 piece for The Mail on Sunday’s Night and Day supplement, when “Oliver Stone’s movie ‘JFK’ first appeared, I sat in a viewing theatre with the director and talked to him about it.” Diamond’s initial verdict? “I came back convinced that Stone had it right: Kennedy was killed by gangsters hired by the CIA to stop him pulling out of Vietnam. It made perfect sense.” So what happened to Diamond’s favourable review of Stone’s “JFK”? “I wrote a piece for this very paper to that effect – and had it thrown back in my face.”

PS: In “Plotgate,” Diamond unquestionably seeks to give the impression that he never did produce a favourable review of Stone’s “JFK.” Odd, them, to find that in an Independent column entitled “Speech Marks: The things they say about…Oliver Stone,” (16 November 1993), we find the following excerpt:

”Stone believes that the CIA is after him because he has just made a rather convincing film suggesting that the CIA was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”

The quote was attributed to one John Diamond, and the Mail on Sunday, 5 January 1992.

[Paul Rigby]

The Guardian-BBC nexus in defence of the Warren Report

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Case 1: Mark Lawson, one-time Guardian columnist, now BBC TV and radio critical arbiter...

Lawson arrived at the Grauniad as a fully paid-up member of the CIA-serving fiction service. In June 1995, Picador published his alternative history satire, Edelweiss, which posited JFK’s survival of the Dallas visit thanks to the death by chicken-bone of would-be assassin Oswald...

By the time Stone’s “Nixon,” his follow-up to “JFK,” was released, Lawson was in full stalker mode. His anguished public “letter” to the director is sublimely absurd, and, in paragraphs two and six, nothing less than barking mad. Enjoy:

Mark Lawson, “Dear Oliver Stone,” Independent on Sunday, 15 March 1995, p.21:

“When it was announced last month that your next movie will be a biography of America’s disgraced 37th president, a joke circulated in Hollywood. It was that the poster for Oliver Stone’s Nixon would have a line across the top reading ‘He was a paranoid genius driven mad by power and ambition…’ Then there would be a gap and the sentence would conclude ‘…and that’s just the director.’

It’s hard not to feel that you and the late President Nixon were in some sense made for each other. Both intelligent and talented – he could have been a great president, you could have been a great film director – you were both handicapped by an indifference to the facts. I understand that there is a substantive difference. Nixon broke the law and ignored the Constitution. You have broken only the laws of historical film-making. Yet both of you are guilty of corrupting the minds of Americans.

You see, I read in the papers leaks from the working script of Nixon. Reportedly, there is a sequence in which Nixon, as Vice-President, sets up a hit squad of Mafiosi, CIA, Cubans and right-wing businessmen to kill Fidel Castro. Apparently they fail, but later in the movie they organise the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas.

When I read this, Mr Stone, I shivered. Because when I was watching your last historical farrago, JFK, I noticed an interesting omission. Although your film argues that President Kennedy was assassinated by a secret conspiracy of about a thousand people including Cubans, Mafiosi, generals, arms manufacturers, Lyndon Johnson and Senator Tom Cobbleigh, I noticed that you had left one possible conspirator out. In one of the oddities of American history, Richard Nixon was in Dallas, on “business”, the day JFK was shot. How, I wondered, could you leave him out of your collusion stew?

Now I understand. Nixon, at the time, was alive to protest or sue. Now he is dead, you have to make a whole other movie just to pin Dallas on him.

Let me make clear that this defence of him against you is precisely the reverse of being personal. I think that Nixon was, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, ‘so crooked he had to hire servants to screw his trousers on’. JFK established you, in terms of visual and narrative power, as one of America’s greatest film-makers. But there’s such a thing as historical responsibility. Your biographical movies steal the narrative manner of factual presentation. There are Americans who may think your nonsense about how the underground thousand killed Jack Kennedy is what really happened.

There is a useful American rebuke to the deluded and terminally earnest: ‘Get a life!’ But I think we have to say to you, with regard to these movie biographies: ‘Get the life!’ Because the way you’re going, you’ll end up like Nixon: a talented man destroyed by a psychological flaw.”

Camp humbug of the most agreeable kind. Perfect for BBC Radio 4.

[Paul Rigby]

The only MP willing to raise these issues in the House of Commons is Norman Baker, the MP for Lewes. When his book on the death of Dr. David Kelly was published he was interviewed by Jeremy Vine on BBC radio. He was accused of being a "conspiracy theorist" and was not treated with the respect he deserved. Yet he is treated very differently when he is talking about the way MPs have been fiddling their expenses. The same goes for the Guardian. They gave his book a very unfair review and concentrated on minor issues without addressing the evidence that appears in his book.

In the long gone days when establishment hack Christopher Hitchens bothered to masquerade as an oppositionist, The Guardian invited him to defend Joe McGinnis’ imaginative fiction, The Last Brother. The result was classic formulaic “left-gatekeeper” stuff on JFK and his family, as Hitchens ran through the check list of CIA bulletin points in his own ludicrously hyperbolic fashion. The lines highlighted must rank as among the most obviously silly ever written even by a left-gatekeeper:

Christopher Hitchens, “Commentary: Thou shalt not mock the legend of Camelot,” The Guardian, 14 August 1993:

“Almost a quarter of a century ago, a political operative named Joe McGinnis decided to go straight and write a book called The Selling of the President. This was the first serious attempt to expose the arcane of political manipulation and media packaging as they affected “the democratic process”. The alliance of pollster, advertiser, make up man and TV coach was exposed to the gaze of the actual consumers. Good, I remember thinking.

Now Mr McGinnis has written another book, called The Last Brother, about Senator Edward Kennedy. And a great tsunami of self-righteous rage has broken over him. Why? Because he has put some imagined words and contrived thinking into the mouth and head of Teddy – something that speechwriters and consultants have been well-paid to do these many years.

I should stress that Mr McGinnis was not caught out doing this, but rather claimed to have done so as a means of completing his narrative. That hasn’t saved him from a press-baiting as intense as any I have ever seen. The reason is obvious: for the lifespan of a generation virtually everything about the Kennedy family that has seen respectable ink has been crudely fictionalised. Every authorised commentator on that failed dynasty, whether on television or in print, has been a former or current (and highly-rewarded) courtier.

The family itself has taken credit for books it did not write, thoughts it did not have and qualities it did not possess. As a new fictionaliser, you challenge a monopoly or oligopoly like this at your own risk.

Theodore White’s account of JFK’s life and campaign was larded with artfully “reconstructed” dialogue and internal chat, and of course it was Mr White, granted the bended-knee first interview with newly-widowed Jackie, who hit upon the pretty conceit of ‘Camelot’. A term never employed during the Kennedy presidency, this moist reminiscence of a banal musical that Jack was said to have liked became the keynote of a vast, phoney retrospective that is still going on.

As a family tactic, it owed much to ‘Jack’s’ habit of conscripting tame historians and ghost-writers for his own book. His first published book, a callow tract entitled Why England Slept, was the work of many hands, most of them in debt one way or another to the boy’s ghastly father. His second, Profiles in Courage, has so much ‘input’ from Theodore Sorenson that it became a joke among other writers, some of whom ceased laughing once Joe Kennedy senior told J. Edgar Hoover to go after the mockers. Like many quasi-fictions, Profiles was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Careers are to be made in the business of chronicling the Kennedys, as Arthur Schlesinger and others can well attest. And those who dare to profane or even question any element of the myth can expect trouble.

Nigel Hamilton was confronted with archival and research difficulties, by a clan that combines private and state power over public papers, when it seemed that this biographer would not be sufficiently uncritical. Judith Exner, the former mistress of the President, was showered with calumny when she tried to prove her connection to him and to the Mafia chief Sam Giancana. (Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post and author of an early Kennedy hagiography, said that one of the worst moments of his life came when he realised that Mrs Exner was telling the truth about having JFK’s private White House and weekend numbers.) And now McGinnis is assailed daily by the same media claque which has for years made a fat celebrity living out of the peddling of a roseate illusion about ‘America’s royal family’.

In that telling phrase, of course, lies the necessary clue. The Kennedys must not be criticised, or their affairs subjected to any vulgar speculation, because otherwise public confidence would droop and the fabric of faith would be shredded. And then where would be? Truth itself, whether lightly fictionalised or grossly manhandled, is not the point. The point is that ‘For one brief, shining moment’ there were gods and goddesses in command, and that this dream (so rightly called) is a necessary dream.

Those who read the supermarket press would be amazed to learn that Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegging crook who took Hitler’s side in the second world war, or that gorgeous Bobby made his career out of being a toady for Senator Joe McCarthy, or that genial Jack hired the Mafia to help assassinate Fidel Castro. They know that Teddy has his fair of troubles, but in this narrative such troubles are written down as a family misfortune which in a mysterious sense, falls upon him independently of his own will. He has, as Gore Vidal puts it, all the charm of 300 pounds of condemned veal.

Like the devotees of the Windsors, then, the defenders of the Kennedys claim the right to be ethereal and metaphysical in defence of the adored objects, and utterly literal and practical in attacking their critics. A nice coincidence occurred in 1940, when the pro-nazi Joseph Kennedy (then US ambassador to London) sent autographed copies of Jack’s confected Why England Slept to King George and Queen Mary. Writing to his son he said: ‘You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come.’

That is the lesson that most Kennedy chroniclers learned before they picked up their pens. If McGinnis had to invent anything, why couldn’t he have learned to play by this rule and save himself tons of trouble?”

[Paul Rigby]

The tone of the Guardian articles is interesting. They do not deal with the evidence. Instead they mock...I used to work for the Guardian and built up a lot of contacts at the newspaper. Whenever any new important evidence emerges I send them the material but it is never published. I thought I arranged for David Talbot’s book to be serialized but my contact changed his mind after discussing it with the editor. The book was not even reviewed by the newspaper.

John Dugdale’s review of David Talbot’s Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Pocket£9.99), The Guardian, Saturday Review, 14 June 2008, p.20:

Bobby Kennedy declined to discuss his brother John's assassination publicly, beyond stating that he accepted the Warren Commission's verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But secretly, Talbot argues, the young US attorney general was "America's first assassination conspiracy theorist", using men he trusted to conduct his own investigation. Brothers brilliantly evokes the Kennedys and their court - a brash yet idealistic fraternity reminiscent of Mad Men and The West Wing - and shows they saw themselves as besieged by internal enemies, who became Bobby's suspects: the mafia, angered by his war on organised crime; the CIA and Cuban exiles, both furious the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion had received only covert US support; Hoover's FBI; and military chiefs who scorned the president as soft on the Soviet threat. Expertly researched through inner-circle interviews, the book suggests a conspiracy was also behind Bobby's murder in 1968, and names two spooks who Talbot believes were part of the JFK Dallas plot.

After the enormous amount of space devoted to reviewing Talbot’s Brothers, it was quite a relief to find the Grauniad returning to form this morning with this lengthy attack on anyone who doubts the wit and wisdom of Earl Warren and Zelikow. Nice to see the paper’s obsession with attacking heretics has abated:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...september11.usa

So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you? You probably also think you're the Emperor of Pluto

By Charlie Booker, The Guardian, G2, Monday July 14, 2008, p.5

I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory - that the more interesting your life is at any given point, the less lurid and spectacular your dreams will be. Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.

If your waking life is mundane, it'll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they're all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you'll spend each night dreaming you're the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas.

All well and good in the world of dreams. But if you continue to believe you're the Emperor of Pluto after you've woken up, and you go into work and start knocking the boxes around with a homemade sceptre while screaming about your birthright, you're in trouble.

I mention this because recently I've found myself bumping into people - intelligent, level-headed people - who are sincerely prepared to entertain the notion that there might be something in some of the less lurid 9/11 conspiracy theories doing the rounds. They mumble about the "controlled demolition" of WTC 7 (oft referred to as "the third tower"), or posit the notion that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming and let it happen anyway. I mean, you never know, right? Right? And did I tell you I'm the Emperor of Pluto?

The glaring problem - and it's glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.

Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you're talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there's one thing we know about humans, it's that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.

It's hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for Christ's sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.

That's just one broad objection to all the bullxxxx theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they'll pull a face and say, "Yeah, but ... " and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that "makes you think" (when it doesn't) or "contradicts the official story" (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of "evidence" and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.

And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you've sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun "findings" before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.

Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there's a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he's wrong, do I?

Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find "proof" that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 - or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It'd certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone's account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the "evidence" was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie - but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.

Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you're part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You've seen through the matrix! At last you're alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!

Except - ahem - you're only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the "system" is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality - that "the man" is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn't give a toss about you anyway - is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that's no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?

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The Guardian: The best "liberal" paper CIA money could buy

[Paul Rigby]

So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you? You probably also think you're the Emperor of Pluto

By Charlie Booker, The Guardian, G2, Monday July 14, 2008, p.5

I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory...

Yes, Charlie, we know you have: It's called the Warren Report.

I offer this by way of further dispelling the unfounded rumour that there is a “party line” at the Grauniad. No, the very thought is unthinkable.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story...2281580,00.html

On film: Don't beat around the Bush

The political Oliver Stone has been on hiatus for a while. It'll be interesting - and infuriating - to have him back, with his Bush biopic

By John Patterson

The Guardian, Film & Music, Friday, 23 May, 2008, p.2

It seems very risky for Oliver Stone to schedule the US release of his new film, the George Bush biopic W, for October 17, just three weeks before the presidential election. Given America's aching desire to see Bush finally swagger offstage, those three weeks constitute the very last window during which this movie might strike a chord with domestic audiences. If it is released before what's shaping up to be an epoch-making, historical-firebreak election, Stone may yet connect with whoever still has energy to loathe the president. If it actually arrives in, say, January, it will feel like some relic of the recent and suddenly ancient past from which we have just, we hope, made a clean and decisive break.

That said, the political Oliver Stone has been on hiatus for a long while, and it'll be interesting - and probably infuriating and exasperating - to have him back, especially given the timing. His last explicitly political outing - and his best, calmest movie - was Nixon in 1995, which came on the heels of the luridly speculative JFK in 1991 ("Counter-myth" my arse - a myth is a myth is a myth). In the meantime, he has failed to bring a long-planned Martin Luther King biopic to fruition, and recently abandoned an ambitious project about the My Lai massacre of 1968, in which US soldiers killed several hundred Vietnamese civilians. And oddly, World Trade Center, which you would have expected to be an orgy of paranoia and fevered speculation, proved about as political as Singin' in the Rain.

Stone has performed his habitual striptease of PR leaks about script and casting. Unfortunately, the first leaked excerpts from the script prompted readers to think it was all an April Fool's Day prank. Uh-oh. They were regaled with Prince Dubya partying with his fratboy pals, drunkenly picking fights with the old man, choking on that pretzel, yelling "I'm the decider!" and so on, all of which is guaranteed to outrage the righties. They were more pleased with the propaganda version of Bush in the ABC-TV special DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a bloated and mendacious hagiography from British-born rightwingers Lionel Chetwynd and Brian Trenchard-Smith, starring Timothy Bottoms, who had also played a radically different Dubya in the short-lived but hysterical Matt Stone/ Trey Parker series Where's My Bush?

Stone's casting is promising. Josh Brolin, with a few adjustments on the Texan he essayed in No Country For Old Men, may prove as eerily convincing playing Dubya as Bruce Greenwood was as JFK in Thirteen Days. Down the marquee, we see the same old business of outsourcing the most satanic roles to British actors (see Nixon/Hopkins, and Gambon/LBJ in The Path to War). Toby Jones plays evil genius Karl Rove, and he certainly has the buttocky countenance for the role, while Thandie Newton gives us the neurotically loyal Condi Rice. Dick Cheney remains uncast as shooting commences, but rumours abound that rightwinger Robert Duvall turned it down. Big surprise: he's a Margaret Thatcher idolator and the son of an admiral, so don't be surprised if his politics resemble McCain's, or maybe even those of Cheney himself. Expect another Brit to take up the slack.

What's most worrying about W is that it might potentially freeze the debate on George Bush, the way JFK froze and then stunted serious consideration of the Kennedy assassination for years (it's scary how many people, post-1991, believe that LBJ did JFK in). I worry that we'll either be left with a mildly sympathetic final image of the worst president ever (Stone plans to emphasise his "goofiness"), or that a truly serious and accurate indictment might too easily be discredited by the right simply because of Stone's involvement. I realise Stone doesn't set the terms of historical debate, and that history will judge Bush most scathingly without any assistance from him, but since nobody's interested in history any more, Stone's portrayal may be the one that sticks with us. If that's the case, he'd better get it right.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

The Guardian: The best “liberal” daily CIA money could buy.

[Paul Rigby]

So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you? You probably also think you're the Emperor of Pluto

By Charlie Booker, The Guardian, G2, Monday July 14, 2008, p.5

I've got a theory - an untested, unprovable theory...

Yes, Charlie, we know you have: It's called the Warren Report.

While lots of sad, deluded souls like you and me imagine a regal reign on Pluto – really, Charlie – grounded folk like Grauniad columnist Simon Hoggart go to important conferences and meet an ex- CIA chief. And come away gushing…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/ap...comment.uknews2

High-class rolling stones in Boulder

By Simon Hoggart

The Guardian, Saturday, 15 April 2006, p.17

I am back in Boulder, Colorado, for the 58th conference on World Affairs, which, as I may have mentioned before, is basically a piss-up with speeches, and none the worse for that. Some quite famous people do come, but most of the participants are just interesting, have something to say, are at a loose end or, in the case of the several Brits here, are good, heavy-duty bullxxxxters.

I arrived two days early to help get over jetlag, and on Saturday was taken up into the mountains. (Denver is known as the mile-high city, and Boulder is even higher than that.) About 20 feet from where I am writing the Rocky Mountains suddenly start their vertical take-off. Up in the hills are the old mining towns, some now gentrified as suburbs for city people, others not much different from the way they looked a hundred years ago. For example, downtown Evergreen still has those raised wooden sidewalks you saw in the old westerns, meant to keep ladies' skirts away from the mud stirred up by the cattle being driven down the centre of the street.

In the minuscule community of Sphinx Park, Colorado, we had lunch at the Buck Snort Saloon. It's quite a long way up a dirt road, lined with old shacks, some new weekend shacks, and cars, including ancient pick-ups with wildlife living in the upholstery. It was a glorious day, with a powerful sun shining from a navy blue sky, so we sat on the wooden deck outside, perched on upended logs, munching burgers and drinking beer, while Elk Creek gurgled below. This is pretty much Brokeback Mountain territory, though that wasn't a point I made to the grizzled men gathered round the pool table.

Our main speaker on the first day was James Woolsey, who for two years was director of central intelligence, or head of the CIA. One vaguely imagines a Dr Strangelove figure, but Woolsey was sharp, funny, humane and very scary. He pointed out that it was countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are at the centre of al-Qaida operations, who are rolling in money due to the incredible US trade deficit. This is now around $800bn (£457bn) a year, of which $250bn is for oil. Much of that makes its way to people who bear the west no goodwill at all. "This," he said, "may be the only war in history in which both sides are funded by the same people."

I like his story about travelling with his wife to San Francisco for a class re-union. His obsessional security people told him they needed to go on different flights, and he had to travel under an alias, protected by armed secret servicemen. So he sat all the way in the back of the plane, flanked by two burly guys with bulging jackets. When they arrived a flight attendant took one of them aside and said something that made him burst out laughing.

He reported that she'd said: "I have been in this job for 20 years and have never seen such a polite and well-behaved prisoner."

...like a twelve year-old.

Ed Reardon

[Paul Rigby]

The Politics of Genocide

Review of Book by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

by Rick Rozoff

During the past two decades, the post-Cold War era, Washington has employed and exploited the word genocide in furtherance of geopolitical objectives in several strategic parts of the world...In one of the more impressive empirical confirmations of a hypothesis readers are likely to find anywhere, the results of Herman and Peterson's database research are both predictable and appalling: In case after case, major English-language newspapers such as the New York Times and The Guardian (as well as countless others) used the word 'genocide' in a manner that would have been approved of by the State Department, linking it consistently to toponyms like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Darfur, but rarely if ever to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq, whether Iraq during the "sanctions of mass destruction" era (1990-2003) or since the U.S. invasion and military occupation (from 2003 onward).

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20879

The Guardian: The CIA's favourite "liberal" British daily:

The new press service, FWF, was set up in offices on Kingsway in London with a holding company called Kern House Enterprises Inc., registered in Delaware as a front for CIA funding…By the late 1960s the FWF was providing a service that was no longer limited to news media in the Third World. In Britain the service was taken by the Guardian and the Sunday Times…

Paul Lashmar & James Oliver. Britain's Secret Propaganda war 1948-1977 (Stroud, Gloucester: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998), p.134

[Bernice Moore]

hi paul as for wheen ''The re-examination of the Kennedy assassination – which included the release of 60,000 documents declared secret in 1963 . another stupid is as stupid does, not even a question mark at the end of his sentence...HALLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! take care...best b...how is the book coming along..??b

[Paul Rigby]

Conspiracy theories are corroding our society

Not all conspiracies are false, but their recent proliferation is a problem that affects us all

By James Bartlett

It has been quite a week for conspiracy theories. First, the case of Dr David Kelly was revisited, accompanied by claims that he has been murdered at the behest of Tony Blair; then an MI6/GCHQ agent was found dead in his flat, which has sparked a new wave of speculation. Not all conspiracies are false of course: last week's investigation into the Claudy bombing revealed that the UK government had covered up a Catholic priest's involvement and new sources suggest the CIA tested the effects of LSD in Pont-Saint-Esprit. Next week, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there are dozens of events dedicated to proving that the attacks were an inside job.

Conspiracy theories are often dismissed as a harmless irritation. The idea that all is not as it seems, that a small cabal of powerful people control world events has always been with us. But in recent years they have become a widespread and influential cultural phenomenon. In some contexts, they may have serious social implications.

In The Power of Unreason, a Demos report released last Sunday, we looked at the role of conspiracy theories in extremist groups, violent ideologies and radical doctrine. We analysed more than 50 extremist groups from across the spectrum (far-right, left, religious, cult, anarchic), and found conspiracy theories to be at the heart of a lot of them. We argued they are a "radicalising multiplier", which, when combined with extremist ideology, can push groups and individuals in a more radical direction. Timothy McVeigh, the Angry Brigade, Combat 18, the Peoples Temple – were all fervent conspiracists. Not only that, these theories clearly harm trust in government, in particular counter-terrorism work, in ways not fully understood.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/03/conspiracy-theories-corroding-society

James Bartlett - a man destined to work for the BBC.

[Paul Rigby]

To see how obsessive the Guardian's columnists are in denigrating conspiratorial interpretations of JFK's murder, consider the following example. The ostensible subject was Crocodile Dundee's tax dispute with the Aussie government. From this unpromising starting-point, Marina Hyde nevertheless contrived to reach the target:

But it was the loss of Steve Irwin that hit them the hardest – after all, Steve was really their JFK, until he was assassinated by that stingray he was papping.

Marina Hyde, "Paul Hogan, they want your fame, not your taxes," The Guardian, 26 August 2010, G2, p.3

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/aug/26/lost-in-showbiz-paul-hogan

Many anti-conspiratorialists evidence the same pattern of obsessive interest in the case. No wonder CTers find these people, not to mention their weird theories, strange and disturbing.

[John Dolva]

An understandable view from the outside. To some extent the tall poppy syndrome is there, but the Oz film industry has undergone massive changes lately (Fox Studio in Sydney) with a plethora of stars in many genres, many having a go in the US market and more coming. There's a history of tax evasion including overseas flight that makes the authorities no doubt cautious. I'm sure it's purely a matter as presented and needs to be looked at.

Irwing was never a JFK in any way whatsoever. Nor was the bush doctor, nor the leyland brothers et.c. .

Gough Whitlam perhaps.

[Paul Rigby]

Irwin was never a JFK in any way whatsoever.

Marina Hyde's compulsive need to drag in both JFK, and conspiratorial interpretations of his death, into the most unrelated contexts, has never been more obvious. She should seek help: It's plain she can no longer control the compulsion.

Is there, I wonder, an elite clinic which specializes in the requisite cure(s)?

Edited September 3, 2010 by Paul Rigby

[Paul Rigby]

Irwin was never a JFK in any way whatsoever.

Marina Hyde's compulsive need to drag in both JFK, and conspiratorial interpretations of his death, into the most unrelated contexts, has never been more obvious. She should seek help: It's plain she can no longer control the compulsion.

Is there, I wonder, an elite clinic which specializes in the requisite cure(s)?

Yes, another day, another conspiracy - and yet another Guardian columnist in the grip of the same compulsive need to denigrate conspiratorial analyses of JFK's murder:

"For members of the grassy-knoll brigade, this little sequence of events had it all: an unpublicised meeting between two of the men who run Britain, a snatched photo of an internal email, and the suggestion that BBC staffers would now have to tone down their Spending Review season that begins this week. Cue arched eyebrows and indignant tweets all round."

Why was the BBC discussing its coverage of spending cuts with No 10? The BBC is helping convince viewers that spending cuts are inevitable. It's a large-scale version of peer pressure

By Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian, Tuesday, 7 September 2010, G2, p.5

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/bbc-spending-cuts-no-10

This bit is interesting:

It's a large-scale version of peer pressure and there's decades of evidence that shows it works. Nor is the evidence just in the academic journals: when the advertising folk proclaimed that "eight out of 10 owners" said their cats preferred one particular catfood, they were using social proof.

Grassy knoll gunman, anyone? Aditya?

[Paul Rigby]

Simon Hoggart's week: time to admit we're living in a kleptocracy?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/may/31/simon-hoggart-time-living-kleptocracy

It appears our wilder press has always been much the same. I've been enjoying The Annals of Unsolved Crime by the (very serious and sensible) journalist Edward Jay Epstein. He analyses the Jack the Ripper case, and it turns out that the letter signed with the famous soubriquet was almost certainly forged by a deputy editor at the Central News Agency, which had been making a fortune reporting the murder of prostitutes in the Victorian East End of London. So Epstein says there was no single ripper, just a murder or two, plus some copycat killings, certainly not committed by a member of the royal family or any famous artist.

Suggested title: Bonkers Angletonian conspiracy theorist praised by ageing British presstitute.