Doug Horne

Al Fordiani · January 19, 2010

Mr. Kelly,

I did. I printed one out for my Inside the ARRB set.

Great job and thanks for your efforts,

ALF

January 20, 2010

I have just printed it out, too, Bill. I agree with Al: this looks very good and should be quite helpful! Thanks!

William Kelly · January 21, 2010

Thanks Al and Prof. Jim,

I'm glad somebody is using it. I'll try to make it complete when I get a chance.

Maybe somebody with a lot of time on their hands could put together an updated Horne Chronology.

BK

"....The fact that numerous individuals in the Federal government engaged in such a massive (and dangerous) effort to lie to its citizens about a matter of such import tells us that JFK’s death was not a random act by a deranged individual, or even the act of angry mobsters intent on revenge: such acts do not merit a massive coverup, only honest and efficient prosecution of the guilty parties. If the assassination had been carried out by a foreign government and a benign Federal coverup had been instituted to prevent war, that circumstance would long ago have been revealed in an attempt to assuage the national angst—either at the time of the HSCA’s investigation in the late 1970s, or during the activities of the ARRB during the mid 1990s. The continuing government silence about an obvious coverup of the medical evidence implies guilt. Furthermore, the fact that the medical coverup alone was so extensive, and so determined, tells us that a coup d’etat was carried out in November of 1963 by persons in positions of high authority in this country—people with both the resources and the resolve to wield the power demonstrated during the coverup—in order to change the direction of national policy."

-Doug Horne Chapter 11, p. 880

William Kelly · January 21, 2010

AFTERWORD

In a work of this complexity, it also imposes upon an author a great sense of responsibility to explain things properly, and to provide the necessary background for his readers when embarking upon a new topic. I have expended a lot of time and effort 'laying foundation' in this book, and have intentionally engaged in a certain amount of repetition, knowing that some chapters will be read months after others, rather than just a few days later. Context is everything when it comes to understanding and interpreting evidence, and this was constantly on my mind.

Between the autumn of 1998 (when the ARRB ceased operations) and early 2006, I was not only burned out on the JFK assassination, I was filled with the greatest possible sense of cynicism and despondency. I had come to conclude that many people believe what they want to about the universe around them, regardless of the facts, and asked myself: Why should I bother to try to persuade readers to adopt my mind-set about the Kennedy assassination? What was the point? I cannot remember any single event that served as a catalyst in 2006, but somewhere along the line I had become angry—angry that a President who represented real change and hope in our society had been murdered, and that the government, and the national media, and academia, had repeatedly lied about what had happened in 1963, or had engaged in knowing denial about this 'taboo subject,' and in doing so had consistently misrepresented it as a random event, devoid of any political meaning. Just possibly, Vince Bugliosi's book had something to do with my continuing sense of outrage over thisnstate of affairs; if there was one principal motivation that kept me writing after 2007, when the task ahead of me appeared quite daunting, perhaps that was it. Following the release of Reclaiming History, I was driven by the conviction that if I did not publicize what I had learned and experienced while at the ARRB—if I did not share it with others in a format and style that was widely accessible—then I had essentially 'accomplished nothing.' It is this concern with legacy, with building on the existing database and 'moving the ball down the field' toward the goal line, that has driven me to complete this magnum opus of mine. My preoccupation with letting those who are both interested, and intelligent enough to care, know exactly what happened from 1995-1998 with the medical evidence—and what that paradigm shift means about how we interpret the events of 1963—had become the demon that would not let me rest until the effort was completed. I came to the realization that while there are indeed many people in the world who believe what they choose to believe about politics and history regardless of the facts, there are many more—countless intelligent citizens and readers—who are hungry to learn about their hidden history, and who are willing to go where the evidence takes them, even if is occasionally unpleasant, or causes them to reconsider previous opinions or assumptions.

Concurrent Lines of Research

Readers will surely have noted that there are many similarities between my final chapter, David Talbot's book Brothers, and Jim Douglass's book JFK and the Unspeakable. I wrote most of before either of their books were published. Our collective realization that JFK was done in by his own national security establishment was reached independently, using much of the same evidence. And certainly, we were not the first researchers to come to this conclusion. Where one of those two authors expressed an idea or reached a conclusion that went beyond my own research in 2006, I have tried to credit them, with proper attribution. Both books are excellent counterparts to this work, and I highly recommend them.

In case anyone has missed the point thus far, or possibly misunderstood my message, let me make it clear here and now that I consider the assassination of President Kennedy to have been an action of the state: the national security establishment made a decision late in 1962 or early in 1963 to fire the President, and it was a broad consensus. The decision was made to assassinate him because President Kennedy's health was improving over what it had been in 1961, and there seemed no likelihood that he would die in office of natural causes—and because polling data showed he was highly likely to win a second term in 1964. Although I have spent much time discussing the key roles of Lyndon Johnson and John Connally in luring Kennedy to Texas, and of J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson in covering up the crime, I still view them principally as "enablers" whose corruption and lust for power permitted covert operatives who were experts in "wet affairs" and propaganda to safely proceed with the detailed planning and execution of the assassination. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor J. Edgar Hoover were 'masterminds' of any JFK assassination plot—and I furthermore do not believe that the assassination was simply a "Texas plot," as some have alleged—but I do believe both men had foreknowledge of the event and assented to it beforehand, making them just as guilty as any of the rogue CIA operatives and officials who set up Oswald as the patsy and carried out the shooting in Dealey Plaza. In fact, their cooperation was absolutely essential to the perpetrators getting away with the crime, and escaping prosecution.

I consider Jim Douglass' 2008 book JFK and the Unspeakable an absolutely essential counterweight to this work. While I necessarily spent much time documenting the details of the massive and immediate destruction and manipulation of much of the medical evidence (and film evidence) by the national security establishment, Jim's book states in a truly profound, and even poetic manner, the reasons for his death: JFK was an effective change agent, who by early 1963 wanted to end the Cold War, not win it—and this was unacceptable to the nation's Cold Warriors, who believed it was essential to eventually achieve absolute military victory, on the battlefield, over America's ideological adversaries. This apocalyptic imperative grew out of having won World War II so decisively—unconditional victory in which the enemies of the Allies lay completely prostrate at its end—and out of having this unusually lopsided military victory followed by the profound frustration of the Korean War stalemate, and then JFK's refusal to engage the Communist Bloc in 'hot wars' in either Southeast Asia or Cuba. The establishment came to believe its own propaganda which so demonized our Communist adversaries, and as a result it viewed a progressive and visionary President—who came to question all of the Cold War's assumptions, and who was attempting to break the paradigm of the bipolar world struggle between East and West, and establish a new one centered around humanism, and a world safe for diversity—as patently unacceptable. It was in the self-interest of the military-industrial complex to support and embrace the twin dogmas of monolithic Communism, and the supposed Communist desire for world domination, that were offered up by the High Priests of the Cold War in Langley, Foggy Bottom, and at the Pentagon. JFK was a dangerous heretic who challenged the orthodoxy of the times, and had to be eliminated before he could checkmate and nullify the old way of thinking—before his new, post Cold War paradigm for viewing the world could gain ascendancy in our society and culture. In the end, JFK was assassinated because the national security establishment was afraid of him and what he represented, and could not control him. JFK was eminently aware of the uphill nature of the battle he was fighting with the Defenders of the Faith, and nevertheless courageously proceeded with his political reformation, in spite of the difficulty and the danger. As Jim Douglass demonstrates, President Kennedy knew he was marked for assassination, yet in the final year of his life, he did not waver in either his courage, or in his determination to change our political culture, and reduce the risk of nuclear conflagration.

Pet Peeves

I now turn from weighty matters to irritants. One pet peeve I have is that the mainstream media, and academia, intentionally continue to denigrate the importance of the work done by researchers investigating the seminal JFK, RFK, and MLK murders by tagging us with the epithet, "conspiracy theorists." The implication, of course, is that we live in such a healthy society that conspiracies do not exist, and that therefore anyone who claims to have uncovered one is wrong-headed, or delusional. This smug attitude, of course, is itself an example of the power of political mythology in this country, and of the mind-numbing denial knowingly engaged in by the establishment.

Certainly not every assassination, or attempted assassination in recent times, was a conspiracy. I am personally convinced that President Gerald Ford was attacked by two bonafide lone nuts while he was Chief Executive. President Reagan's would-be assassin, Hinckley, may have been a lone nut also. But surely the assassinations of Lincoln, JFK, RFK, MLK, Indira Ghandi, Yitzhak Rabin, and Benazir Bhutto were conspiracies, and furthermore, at the very time President Kennedy was in office, President Charles DeGaulle of France was the subject of unsuccessful assassination plots that were without question conspiratorial activity. Let us not forget that the subsequent coverup and denial by the authorities that a conspiracy has taken place, in blatant opposition to the overwhelming weight of the evidence, often has a more corrosive effect upon society, in the long run, than the murder itself.

Another pet peeve I have is the false association by many in academia and the media of all JFK assassination researchers with persons who don't believe we landed on the moon six times (from 1969-1972); or with persons who believe that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were really 'controlled demolitions' set off by the government, and were not caused by fanatics flying airplanes into buildings.

I think the principal lesson of the JFK assassination is that we should not defer to arguments about major historical events (such as assassinations, and how wars begin) based on authority—we should study the primary evidence ourselves and reach our own conclusions. If people don't learn to do a better job of this in the United States, our democracy will remain in peril, and our society will continue to just 'muddle through,' rather than excel in tackling its many challenges.

I was very stubborn about the kind of book I wanted to write. I was determined not to write a book that had arbitrary constraints placed upon its length, or that was aimed at the lowest common denominator in our society. This book was written for intelligent, questioning, and well-informed people — people who want to know even more about their country's history during a crucial period in its recent past. If I had desired, I could easily have obtained a mainstream publisher who would have printed a handsome cloth edition for sale in bookstores (with a sophisticated photo section full of glossy or color illustrations), but without exception they all would have insisted that I reduce the length of my manuscript by at least 60% (I know; I tried.) To me, that was patently unacceptable. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, and to Rex Bradford in particular, for allowing me to "do it my way."

Carl Sagan once said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Since I am alleging a massive medical coverup in the JFK assassination, and that the murder of President Kennedy was an 'inside job,' I knew I would not persuade anyone unless I could back up my claims with the necessary evidence. Because of the length of the book, and the sure knowledge that no reader could possibly read a book of this size or subject matter in one sitting, without setting it aside temporarily to catch his or her breath before coming back to it, I consciously engaged in a certain degree of repetition. Some material needed to be reviewed and summarized in future chapters simply because I knew that months might go by before the reader resumed his or her reading. Furthermore, tackling this book is unquestionably a journey into darkness, and it would be very difficult, and most unusual, for anyone to swallow it whole, all at one time.

I have chosen to challenge the reader with this sobering and disturbing material because out of it, I truly believe, can come a much more alert and enlightened citizenry, and therefore a better democracy. I love this country very much; I believe in its promise. I believe that the promise of our democracy stands a much better chance of being fulfilled when we have a good understanding of how it has been subverted in the recent past. Eternal vigilance really is the price of freedom.....

Edited January 21, 2010 by William Kelly

Pat Speer · January 21, 2010

Thanks, Bill, it's most enlightening. I wonder if Horne was thinking of anyone we know when he wrote the paragraphs above.

Jack White · January 22, 2010

Horne's specialty is JFK, not 911 nor Apollo nor Oklahoma City etcetcetc.

On these issues he is as uninformed as the average person.

Jack

John Bevilaqua · January 22, 2010

My list of pet peeves would begin with the identical short list cited by Doug Horne regarding the Lunar Landing "Loonatics", the 9/11 conspiracy buffs who could find "nanothermite" in a bowl of Rice Krispies and swear it was a government conspiracy, the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy nuts and others of their ilk. Certainly they do more harm than good to our cause, attempting to "prove" that since 9/11, Apollo and OK Murrah were all "massive all-pervasive US government conspiracies" then it adds weight to their theory that JFK was a "massive all-pervasive US government conspiracy", attempting to indict even innocent bystanders like Senator Claiborne Pell whose entire family was very close to the entire Kennedy clan, Frank Wisner who was in a hospital, incapacitated and bedridden during the entire "plot" and the execution and others in that category. And of course, they will argue until they are blue in the face that Wisner could have run the plot via phone just as well.

I would also include, in a second category, people whom I will call the "Kitchen Sink" types who also want to draw in as many non-US Gov affiliated participants in the JFK Assn as alleged "US Gov Agents" in an attempt to taint and bolster their attempt to widen the breadth of the plot in order to further indict "our Government" in the events in Dealey Plaza. Without mentioning names, these "Kitchen Sink" types are very quick to characterize people like Guy Banister as an "active ONI agent" or as a "covert CIA agent" when they were never part of either group. Yet they persist despite the evidence presented to them. Or they might insist for 10-20 years consecutively that a pipsqueak like David Ferrie was in Winnipeg, that he was a CIA agent and that therefore this is convincing evidence that dozens of people in the CIA were involved in the JFK plot even though a newspaper article in the Cleveland Plains Dealer finally burst their artifice and their fragile little bubble. Or other "Kitchen Sinkers", one person in particular, might boldly and blatantly state that "Wickliffe Draper" had nothing to do with the JFK Assn despite reams of documents released from the Miss Sov Comm and reams of testimony from Mary Ferrell's "best source", Roy Hargraves who was hired as an expert by Oliver Stone for JFK. This same "Kitchen Sinker" also maintained that just because a beneficiary of funding to take care of food and housing, provided years earlier from an alleged "CIA front foundation" was later vaguely associated with the JFK plot, this is inscrutable evidence of CIA involvement even though a person like Nathaniel Weyl offered testimony to the contrary regarding the attitude of Cuban exiles towards any more joint CIA projects. And this person even interviewed Nathaniel Weyl himself and reached these conclusions despite Weyl's generous candor on the topic of Operation Red Cross. This same person still insists that Operation Red Cross was 100% CIA based, and that the perps eventually moved on to the JFK hit, But when he is confronted with the evidence that Red Cross was an operation done by James Eastland, Wiliam Pawley, Robert Morris and even Nathaniel Weyl himself, for the sole benefit of Barry Goldwater and the Far Right Wing, he is not so willing to tie Operation Red Cross participants into the JFK hit because it would be yet antoher example of his carefully constructed subterfuges being blown out of the water, yet again. The same applies to those who are willing to tie WACL into the JFK hit as long as you bundle the CIA in with WACL. When the CIA links to WACL are destroyed due to the fact that Roger Pearson and Elmore Greaves, former US contingent leaders in WACL, were identified as Pioneer Fund and Wickliffe Draper cronies, then all of a sudden WACL loses importance within their delusional constructs.

It is very easy to shrug off or laugh off the rantings of the "loonatics", the "nanothermiters" and the "OK fertilizer bombers" but not so easy to see through the subterfuges of either the head "Kitchen Sinker", Mr. COPA-cabana who was directly involved with all of these patently obvious ruses cited above, or his legion of willing sycophants and toadies.

What is the purpose of floating all of these "false sponsor" theories? So that the real perps can go on their merry way, scot free and as non suspects.

So who has done more to impair the honest attempts to find out who really killed JFK? Mr. "White" Washer, Mr. "No-no" nanothermite or Mr. "COPA" Cabana? I think that title belongs to Mr. COPA Cabana, because no one takes either Mr. "White" Washer, Mr. "No-no" nanothermite seriously anymore. Are they all to be considered "anarchistic?" Yes. Are they all "obstructionists" and "illusionists" and "disinfo artists" as well? Absolutely.

Were you drawn in by any of these guys? Probably. Reach your own conclusions but as for me, they are all "persona non grata" forever more.

John Bevilaqua · January 22, 2010

And just what exactly are the "issues" about 9/11, Apollo and Oklahoma City? Do you have any "photos" of these events to be

able to prove something sinister about these events as well? You just stated that all you are capable of doing is to examine photos and to reach conclusions from photographic evidence or analysis, right? Could you please post these alleged photos for all of us to see?

Do you still think that the flag planted on the moon was "blowing in the wind" or something equivalent to that? Do you believe that there is a photo of the "nanothermite" found in the World Trade Center wreckage or photos of something else that is incriminating? If so, post it or forever hold your piece. And how about Oklahoma City? Do you have a "photo" of someone else speeding off from the bomb in the truck and then "planting" the license plate of Tim McVeigh on the ground? Please post that one as well. You have a Burden of Proof to provide such photographic evidence which you claim you have before you post scurrilous and outrageous items on this or any other forum. You continue to make other serious researchers look bad by the use of your spurious research techniques which lead you to illogical and erroneous conclusions. Thank you.

William Kelly · January 25, 2010

Doug Horne - 20 Questions

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Pat Speer · January 25, 2010

But doesn't his not-so-subtle wish to separate himself from your work make him a party to the cover-up?

I mean, since he is uninformed, shouldn't he submit to your authority on these matters?

Jack White · January 25, 2010

What is meant by "separate himself from my work"? What kind of fiction is that?

I presume he thinks for himself; he is free to adopt any opinion.

Jack

William Kelly · January 25, 2010

Martin Hinrichs · January 25, 2010

Thank you William!

Martin

Anthony Thorne · January 25, 2010

I disagree with Doug's dismissal of the likelihood of a 9/11 conspiracy but this doesn't affect my interest in his work. The contents as outlined by Bill (thanks Bill) look great. I can only afford to get these volumes one or two at a time, especially as the Amazon price has jumped back up. I'm considering grabbing the first, and the last, and going from there. I hope these sell well and get the recognition they evidently deserve.

Did Doug really start writing this series of books in 2006? That's the impression I received from the Afterword posted by Bill. It's an impressive achievement if he managed that amount of text in just a few years. Bugliosi was chugging away on his heavy brick of nonsense for longer than that - to match the amount of writing and detail in a notably shorter amount of time is a notable achievement.

Edited January 25, 2010 by Anthony Thorne

Pat Speer · January 25, 2010

Good to hear, Jack.

Doug Horne

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