John Pilger in the Daily Mirror on fifth anniversary of Dallas

[Greg Parker]

1) Your attempt to argue that Heroes was an inappropriate place to mention the minor fact that Pilger thought there was a second gunman in the pantry is bizarre,

Paul,

I said I hadn't read the book. I just thought your criticism was a tad unfair unless you could demonstrate his latest utterances are at odds with what he originally said, and has said regularly since. In other words, was his omission in Heroes the norm in his writings on RFK up until now?

As for whether talking about a second gunmen at the Ambassador was appropriate for Heroes, from what I've now read, I think the case could still be made. In the wider world, innumerable mentions of the assassinations have been made by writers and critics over the years without diverging into conspiracy land - despite believing in conspiracies in those cases and writing about them in other works.

Is everyone who believes in a conspiracy re the Kennedys duty bound to declare it every time they talk about one of them? Preposterous.

particularly since the book contains both a long, utterly standard New Left attack on RFK,

Was it an attack to say he flew to Philadelphia to "laud the notorious James Tate as one of the greatest mayors in the United States"?

To me, it sounds like a politician doing what politicians do. In this case, Tate was throwing his support behind Humphrey. Kennedy needed to do some schmoozing. You see it every electoral cycle. Enlighten me. Is the truth an attack?

Another quote from the book: "He promised tax incentives to big business so that jobs could be created in the ghettos, but seldom talked about leveling the ghettos." Is that a fact or isn't it? If it is a fact, why are you offended that it was stated?

and stuff on a very big CIA conspiracy with regard to Vietnam. If the former was indeed the cynical establishment figure of that NL caricature, what need for an elaborate plot to kill him? In suppressing the information about the presence of a second gunman, Pilger was very obviously protecting the NL party line. Now why would a truly independent - and thoroughly fearless, we are led to believe - investigative journalist do that? Have we run into yet another "left gatekeeper"?

Possibly. Until this, I'd read only one of is books, and that was a long time ago. The NL, if it was not directly a child of the CIA, was certainly heavily infiltrated by it very early on. That does not mean every NL writer signs a CIA contract...

2) Writing that it's hard to argue with the proposition that Sirhan was "one of the shooters" is an opinion, and is very obviously an erroneous one: Had Sirhan fired real bullets, the real assassin, standing right behind the target, might well have had his head blown off. One sees immediately the downside, for the plotters at least, of such an occurrence.

Oh for gawd's sake, Paul. There was something being fired from Sirhan's gun. I never said it was live ammo. I have no opinion on it.

3) Asking questions about the veracity and timing of Pilger's journalism on RFK and his murder is no more a "witchhunt" - good to see that understatement and perspective are alive and well "Down Under"

If I've told you once, I've told you a million times - don't exaggerate!

- than any other piece of research. Perhaps I've stepped on a raw Aussie nerve or two?

I couldn't give a toss if he was from Bondi or Barcelona. What offends me is lack of a fair suck of the sav. Prove your case by finding what he said contemporaneously (and since) before you skewer him. To do so on the basis of what at the moment is a single omission, is indeed, a witch-hunt.

Presumably confirmation that Pilger did suppress all mention of a second gunman in his contemporaneous reportage would transform what you ludicrously style "a witchhunt" into routine research?

Yep.

4) Why not join in the research on Pilger? Aren't you even a tad curious? I know I am.

I gave it my best shot already and told you all I could find. You really should have found it before you started this. I deeply suspect Chomsky is a gate-keeper. But then, I had cause (via JFK research) to do some actual digging on him. Haven't had any reason in the past to do the same with Pilger.

I don't believe all dogs will bite me, either... just because one once did.

Paul

[Greg Parker]

Curiously, no mention whatever of the RFK assassination conspiracy. What had happened to Pilger’s insistence – to the FBI, in 1968, at least – that there was second gunman in the pantry? On the back-burner in public again? Apparently so. Why?

Paul,

sorry. I did not see this before. It prompted me to check exactly what he did say to the FBI (and LAPD).

Firstly, here is the relevant part of the transcript from the GOODMAN INTERVIEW:

JOHN PILGER: [.....] And we had been told to follow the candidate through the kitchen, because they were going out the back way. And as we waited for Kennedy to appear on stage in the ballroom at the Ambassador,

one of the Kennedy workers came up to us and said, “There’s a funny-looking guy in the kitchen. He’s giving me the creeps.” Well, that was Sirhan Sirhan. And I have to say that none of us journalists where we were went off and inquired who this funny-looking guy was.

Kennedy arrived, stood on the stage, made a very short speech, which ended famously with now “on to Chicago,” where the Democratic nomination would have happened, the convention there. And then, he and Ethel, his wife, and his two protectors—Bill Barry, former FBI agent, and Rosey Grier, NFL player—followed by a half a dozen journalists, including myself, started to walk towards the kitchen.

Kennedy entered the kitchen. Sirhan leapt up on a serving area, pointed a gun at him and fired. He was wrestled. Kennedy fell. He was wrestled to the ground, and then there were other shots.

There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins.

And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, what about Robert Kennedy’s views of Vietnam? Also, of course, your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins.

JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear the second part. His views of Vietnam and…?

AMY GOODMAN: Your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins there. But—

JOHN PILGER:

Well, I told—the FBI interviewed quite a few of us, and I told the FBI at length just what had happened, the numbers of shots that were fired that I heard—I thought I heard. And I’m pretty sure I did hear them, which Sirhan Sirhan—

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

JOHN PILGER:

—couldn’t have fired. There were two people seen running from the Ambassador Hotel, including one famous woman in a polka dot dress. A number of us thought we saw those. We can’t be absolutely sure about that.

There is a new documentary out, which I haven’t seen, which I understand goes into this in depth. But—

FBI REPORT:

"...did not witness the shooting or the immediate aftermath. He had no recollection of seeing Sirhan Sirhan at any time..."

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...sPageId=1081867

LAPD REPORT

"...when the Sen. left the stage and was proceeding towards the kitchen area Mr Pilger proceeded towards the main door of the Embassy Ballroom. He had gotten to a point approx 30 to 40 feet from the stage when he heard women crying etc. Several minutes later heard that the Sen. had been shot. He was unable to get into the kitchen area because of the large crowd that had gathered at that point. He stated that he did NOT [emphasis in original] here any of the shots that were fired and that he could not recall any girl in particular that had been wearing a polka dot dress."

Mr Pilger has seen the photos of Sirhan and has no recollection of seeing anyone resembling him at any time prior to the shooting."

Let's not get ahead of this, though. As Larry Hancock shows in his recent series of essays, the LAPD manufactured interviews and selectively quoted in reports.

The LAPD interview was taped. Would this tape still exist?

Other reporters at the Ambassador that night told the authorities that the rushed off to file stories. One has to assume Pilger did exactly the same. If he did, that story needs to be run down. If it is closer to the Goodman interview version than the FBI/LAPD version, we have proof of further malfeasance by the investigators. If on the other hand, it confirms what the LAPD/FBI reports state, Pilger needs to be confronted and publicly exposed.

Edited July 3, 2008 by Greg Parker

[Paul Rigby]

Let's not get ahead of this, though. As Larry Hancock shows in his recent series of essays, the LAPD manufactured interviews and selectively quoted in reports.

The LAPD interview was taped. Would this tape still exist?

Other reporters at the Ambassador that night told the authorities that the rushed off to file stories. One has to assume Pilger did exactly the same. If he did, that story needs to be run down. If it is closer to the Goodman interview version than the FBI/LAPD version, we have proof of further malfeasance by the investigators. If on the other hand, it confirms what the LAPD/FBI reports state, Pilger needs to be confronted and publicly exposed.

Agreed. Clarification is needed on both scores. If anyone reading this in the London area is contemplating a visit to the British newspaper library at Colindale, please let me know. An email to the FBI would also seem in order. But while the fruits of further research are awaited, I think a little thinking aloud would do no harm.

Let’s assume for one moment that Pilger’s recent account to Goodman did indeed debut in the Daily Mirror in the immediate aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s murder. I think this extremely unlikely, but let’s permit the possibility anyway. The question then arises - why has Pilger only now resurrected two key, pro-conspiratorial recollections after, as far one can see, effectively suppressing them in his books and journalism for the better part of 40 years? Is there an event or development that might have provoked such a change of heart?

The major development is easy: The renewed interest in the case generated by the likes of Shane O’Sullivan, Robert Joling and Philip Van Pragg; and the reaction to that recrudescence of interest.

Now, if Pilger is a genuine truth-teller, we may hypothesise that Pilger has been emboldened to revisit his original pro-conspiracy observations. This offers us a less than flattering portrait of Pilger the temporiser who short-changed his readers for all those years - but is, theoretically at least, a possibility.

I have two problems taking this view with any seriousness. First, Pilger introduced both pro-conspiratorial observations within the familiar New Left context – to wit, that RFK was a vacuous Cold Warrior whose premature demise was thus of no great significance. So Pilger isn’t rupturing with his previous interpretative framework, but instead reinforcing it.

Secondly, the tone of Pilger's contribution. I found it eerily reminsicent of what TV execs call the “So what”? response to pitchers. It runs something like this: You’re idea is great, but I’m not touching it with a barge pole because it would harm my career; I can’t admit I’m a careerist coward, so I have to pretend to be blasé on objective grounds. The latter can be any or all of the following: the idea is unfashionable; there is no anniversary peg upon which to hang such a programme; your idea isn’t as impressive as we both know it to be. And so on.

One further consideration. If the cynical interpretation of Pilger’s recent contribution to Goodman’s programme is vindicated, then we have both a precedent and a pattern. In response to Stone’s JFK, the CIA cashed its Chomsky chip in the form of the book Rethinking Camelot, one of the crudest pieces of Agency revisionism yet committed to paper. Has the Pilger chip now been cashed to quash renewed interest, again on the left, in the RFK case?

Paul

[Paul Rigby]

Curiously, no mention whatever of the RFK assassination conspiracy. What had happened to Pilger’s insistence – to the FBI, in 1968, at least – that there was second gunman in the pantry? On the back-burner in public again? Apparently so. Why?

Paul,

sorry. I did not see this before. It prompted me to check exactly what he did say to the FBI (and LAPD).

Firstly, here is the relevant part of the transcript from the GOODMAN INTERVIEW:

JOHN PILGER: [.....] And we had been told to follow the candidate through the kitchen, because they were going out the back way. And as we waited for Kennedy to appear on stage in the ballroom at the Ambassador,

one of the Kennedy workers came up to us and said, “There’s a funny-looking guy in the kitchen. He’s giving me the creeps.” Well, that was Sirhan Sirhan. And I have to say that none of us journalists where we were went off and inquired who this funny-looking guy was.

Kennedy arrived, stood on the stage, made a very short speech, which ended famously with now “on to Chicago,” where the Democratic nomination would have happened, the convention there. And then, he and Ethel, his wife, and his two protectors—Bill Barry, former FBI agent, and Rosey Grier, NFL player—followed by a half a dozen journalists, including myself, started to walk towards the kitchen.

Kennedy entered the kitchen. Sirhan leapt up on a serving area, pointed a gun at him and fired. He was wrestled. Kennedy fell. He was wrestled to the ground, and then there were other shots.

There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins.

And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, what about Robert Kennedy’s views of Vietnam? Also, of course, your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins.

JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear the second part. His views of Vietnam and…?

AMY GOODMAN: Your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins there. But—

JOHN PILGER:

Well, I told—the FBI interviewed quite a few of us, and I told the FBI at length just what had happened, the numbers of shots that were fired that I heard—I thought I heard. And I’m pretty sure I did hear them, which Sirhan Sirhan—

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

JOHN PILGER:

—couldn’t have fired. There were two people seen running from the Ambassador Hotel, including one famous woman in a polka dot dress. A number of us thought we saw those. We can’t be absolutely sure about that.

There is a new documentary out, which I haven’t seen, which I understand goes into this in depth. But—

FBI REPORT:

"...did not witness the shooting or the immediate aftermath. He had no recollection of seeing Sirhan Sirhan at any time..."

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...sPageId=1081867

LAPD REPORT

"...when the Sen. left the stage and was proceeding towards the kitchen area Mr Pilger proceeded towards the main door of the Embassy Ballroom. He had gotten to a point approx 30 to 40 feet from the stage when he heard women crying etc. Several minutes later heard that the Sen. had been shot. He was unable to get into the kitchen area because of the large crowd that had gathered at that point. He stated that he did NOT [emphasis in original] here any of the shots that were fired and that he could not recall any girl in particular that had been wearing a polka dot dress."

Mr Pilger has seen the photos of Sirhan and has no recollection of seeing anyone resembling him at any time prior to the shooting."

Let's not get ahead of this, though. As Larry Hancock shows in his recent series of essays, the LAPD manufactured interviews and selectively quoted in reports.

The LAPD interview was taped. Would this tape still exist?

Other reporters at the Ambassador that night told the authorities that the rushed off to file stories. One has to assume Pilger did exactly the same. If he did, that story needs to be run down. If it is closer to the Goodman interview version than the FBI/LAPD version, we have proof of further malfeasance by the investigators. If on the other hand, it confirms what the LAPD/FBI reports state, Pilger needs to be confronted and publicly exposed.

Truth shall set us free: There is a huge public hunger for incisive political documentaries. If only the media had the courage to show them

By John Pilger

The Guardian, Film, Friday, 15 September 2006, p.5

The political documentary, that most powerful and subversive medium, is said to be enjoying a renaissance on both sides of the Atlantic. This may be true in the cinema but what of television, the source of most of our information? Like the work of many other documentary film-makers, my films have been shown all over the world, but never on network television in the US. That suppression of alternative viewpoints may help us understand why millions of Americans display such a chronic ignorance of other human beings.

It was not always like this. In the 1930s, the Workers' Film and Photo League in New York produced a dazzling series of "neighbourhood documentaries" that presented the world in decidedly non-Hollywood and non-stereotypical terms, including the US, where epic documentaries such as The Scottsboro Boys and The National Hunger March recorded America's "lost period" - the incipient revolution of working people suffering the Depression and their brutal repression by the police and army. Shown in trade union halls, workers' clubs and at open-air meetings, these films were very popular. Thanks to George Clooney's superb movie Good Night, and Good Luck, we know of Edward Murrow's See It Now, which, in the 1950s, gave millions an unsentimental and truthful view of their nation, stirring and angering and empowering rather than pacifying, which is the rule today.

I learned my own lessons about the power of documentaries and their censorship in 1980, when I took two of my films, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia and Cambodia Year One, to the US in the naive belief that the networks would want to air these disclosures of Pol Pot's rule and its aftermath. All those I met were eager to buy clips that showed how monstrous the Khmer Rouge were, but none wanted the equally shocking evidence of how three US administrations had colluded in Cambodia's tragedy; Ronald Reagan was then secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Having bombed to death hundreds of thousands of Cambodians between 1969 and 1973 - the catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, according to the CIA - Washington was imposing an economic blockade on the most stricken country on earth, as revenge for its liberation by the hated Vietnam. This siege lasted almost a decade and Cambodia never fully recovered. Almost none of this was broadcast as news or documentary.

With the two films under my arm, my last stop in Washington was PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, which has a liberal reputation, rather like the BBC. During a viewing with a senior executive, I discerned a sharp intake of breath. "Great films, John," he said, "but ..." He proposed that PBS hire an "adjudicator" who would "assess the real public worth of your films". Richard Dudman, a journalist with the rare distinction of having been welcomed to Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, was assigned the task. In his previous Cambodia dispatches, Dudman had found people "reasonably relaxed" and urged his readers to look "on the bright side". Not surprisingly, he gave the thumbs down to my films. Later, the PBS executive phoned me "off the record". "Your films would have given us problems with the Reagan administration," he said. "Sorry."

I offer this charade as a vivid example of the fear and loathing of the independent documentary's power to circumvent those who guard official truth. Although its historical roots are often traced back to the work of Robert Flaherty, the American director who made Nanook of the North in 1922, and John Grierson, the British documentarist, in Britain the modern documentary's political power is often measured against a specious neutrality invented by John Reith, founder of the BBC, while he was writing and broadcasting anti-trade union propaganda during the 1922 general strike. The stamina and influence of this pervasive BBC myth are reflected in the rarity of truly independent political documentaries.

Some remarkable films are made, however, testaments to a faith in the documentary form. One comes readily to mind: A Letter to the Prime Minister: Jo Wilding's Diary from Iraq. Jo Wilding, a trainee lawyer and human rights worker in Iraq, produced some of the finest frontline reporting of the war online from Falluja, then under siege by the US Marines. She all but shamed the embedded army of reporters in her description of the atrocious US attack on an Iraqi city that had been no friend of Saddam Hussein. Her documentary, directed by Julia Guest, presents the evidence of a crime and asks Tony Blair to take his share of the responsibility: a basic question now asked by millions of Britons. The film was offered to TV, and rejected. It has been shown at festivals around the world, but "painfully little" in Britain, says Guest, apart from single screenings at the Barbican and a forthcoming screening on October 15 at the Curzon Soho, London.

One problem facing political documentaries in Britain is that they run the risk of being immersed in the insidious censorship of "current affairs", a loose masonry uniting politicians and famous journalists who define "politics" as the machinations of Westminster, thereby fixing the limits of "political debate". No more striking example currently presents itself than the relentless media afforded the infantile scrapping of the political twins, Blair and Gordon Brown, and their tedious acolytes, drowning out the cries of the people of Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon. Similarly, the fifth anniversary of September 11 proved a lost opportunity to rest the reverential and the ghoulish and describe how George Bush and his gang used the tragedy to violently renew their version of empire and world domination.

Like the best of commercial TV, cinema does offer hope for the political documentary, although film-makers who believe they can follow the success of Michael Moore beware. Moore's work is popular, and makes money: the two vital ingredients for distributors and exhibitors. To get into cinemas, documentaries need to have at least a hope of repeating something of Moore's success. But there is no doubt in my mind that outstanding documentaries, if promoted imaginatively, can attract huge public interest. When this has happened on television, the reward has been not so much ratings as a "qualitative" audience: that is, people who engage with the work. (When Death of a Nation, the film I made with David Munro about East Timor, was shown on ITV late at night, it prompted 5,000 phone calls a minute.)

What we need are more "citizen" documentary-makers, like Jo Wilding and Julia Guest, who are prepared to look in the mirror of our "civilised" societies and film the long rivers of blood, and their ebbing truth. It took Peter Davis's Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds to make sense of the mass murder that was the invasion of Vietnam. Two sequences brilliantly achieved this. There was General William Westmoreland, the American commander, declaring: "The oriental doesn't put the same price on life as the westerner," while a Vietnamese boy sobbed over the death of his father, murdered by GIs. And there was a naked Vietnamese girl, running from a napalm attack, her body a patchwork of burns, and followed by a woman carrying a baby, the skin hanging off its body. Thanks to Hearts and Minds, they are now unforgettable evidence of the barbarity of that war.

There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Allan Francovich achieved this. Francovich, who died in 1997, made The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie. This destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting "mule", with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot's investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion). The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the US. In this country, the threat of legal action from a US government official prevented showings at the 1994 London film festival and the ICA. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.

To make sense of the current colonial war in Afghanistan, I recommend Jamie Doran's Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death, which describes how the country's liberators oversaw the secret killing of 3,000 Afghans - the number killed in the twin towers. To begin to make sense of the news, I recommend Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, and to understand one of the major reasons why Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, I recommend Greenwald's latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. All are available on DVD. In these dangerous times, with countries about to be attacked and many innocent lives already condemned, we urgently need more documentaries like these, for the simple reason that the public has a right to know in order to act.

The John Pilger film festival runs at the Barbican, London, to Thursday. Today, Pilger's Vietnam films are shown, including The Quiet Mutiny. Details: www.barbican.org.uk/film or 0845 120 7500. John Pilger - Documentaries That Changed the World is released by Network DVD

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

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/st...1872153,00.html

Highlight of the festival was Pilger’s documentary on the presence of a second gunman in the pantry of the Ambassador on June 5, 1968.