John Lennon

[William Kelly]

http://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/

John Lennon – 30 Years Gone

RIP December 8, 1980 – 2010

On December 8, 1980 I was in Ocean City, New Jersey, making pizza on the boardwalk at Mack & Mancos and writing a weekly music column for the Atlantic City Sun, a now defunct weekl. The Sun was then owned by Jeffrey Douglas, who was hosting an office Christmas party at his Linwood home the following night after the paper was out on the street.

I forget where I was when I first heard that John Lennon was shot and killed, but one of the first things I did when I learned about it was to call my college friend Kathy Engro, who lived right across the street from the Dakota apartments where Lennon was shot.

Kathy was a year behind me at the University of Dayton (Ohio), where we were both radicalized by the Vietnam War and the movement for educational reform. My freshman year Kevin Kief was the student body president, a tall, thin, long haired radical hippie, who went on to become a chief assistant to the spiritual advisor to the United Nations.

There were two other student body presidents after Kevin who were also pretty radical, but then Kathy Engro was elected, I think probably the first women to be in that position. Her boyfriend, John Judge, was also a radical student who had graduated a few years earlier but stayed around to give the administration trouble, or a conscience.

After graduation Kathy moved to New York City where she worked and lived with a few other young women in a bachelorette apartment on the edge of Central Park, where I visited her a few times, even sleeping on her couch on one occasion.

When I learned that John Lennon had been murdered, I recalled how one day while I was visiting her she remarked that Lennon and Yoko Ono lived across the street in the Dakota apartments, which you could see outside one of the windows of her apartment. I remembered she said that they frequently saw Lennon get out of cabs and limos in front of the Dakota, and sometimes they even waved to each other as they naturally passed each other as neighbors on the street.

But she said she never bothered Lennon by stopping him to talk, and she thought that he appreciated that, and was one of the reasons he liked living in that neighborhood, where his celebrity status was not played up on the street.

So I called Kathy in New York City from my Ocean City, N. J. home and got her on the phone. When I asked her what was happening, I could hear sirens and large crowd noises in the background, and she said that Lennon was dead, murdered right outside, and there were huge crowds forming on the street outside her window.

She was pretty excited, though quite sad and distraught, and began to explain, as it sounded like she had put it into words before, “I had just got home myself, I had gotten out of a cab and was going into my apartment building when I saw him pull up.”

She said that just as she got off the elevator on her floor she heard a gunshot, and went into my apartment and opened the window and watched the scene outside.

I got as much detail as I could out of her and wrote it all down in my notes and called my editor on the phone and asked if I could still get it in the next day’s paper. This was years before computers, so I had to write it, type it up and drive it over to the newspaper office in Absecon, which I did.

Although we were a weekly, the paper went to press that night so it was in the next day’s edition and for once I was on the same deadline as the bigger dailies.

They made it a front page story with a nice rendering of Lennon, and I was real proud of it, and didn’t even notice until someone at the party apologized, as they had forgotten to put my name on the byline.

I knew I wrote it though, and others who read it said it was a really good story, as one person noted it was better than the New York Times’ first news story about the murder because it contained an ear witness report as well as an eyewitness account of the arrest of Mark David Chapman.

Although I had placed Chapman in the psycho-killer category, I later learned that the Dakota doorman was a Cuban, a Bay of Pigs veteran who had been on the CIA payroll, and may have been somehow implicated in the murder. His very presence there certainly made the psycho-killer motive more of a cover for a sophisticated political assassination. John Hinckley’s emergence as a psycho-killer-political-assassin wannabe made this idea more feasible.

Another fact I didn’t know at the time was Lennon’s resurgence as a political activist, a new radicalization that was fostered by his hearing some new music that inspired him to return to the recording studio and to begin a new period in his multi-facited career.

Then I heard a radio interview with the author of a book on the FBI’s Lennon files, which documented the extent they went out of their way to intimidate Lennon and keep him from living in America.

The more I think about it, the more important it seems that these political assassinations should be studied and understood, so they can be counter-acted and prevented from ever happening again.

William Kelly billkelly3@gmail.com

xxx

[Duane Daman]

Who Killed John Lennon?

by Fenton Bresler Part 1 of 2 [Excerpts]

"Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot." John Lennon

Part 1

Bresler begins by questioning the "lone nut" theory. Since 1835, 15 men and 2 women have attacked "nationally prominent political leaders in sixteen separate incidents." Of those 17, only 3 have been ruled insane by law. Mark David Chapman was never found to be legally insane. "The 'lone nut' theory simply does not stand up as an all-embracing explanation covering all -- or even most -- instances of American political assassination."

Bresler offers the possibility that "Lennon, the politically most active rock star of his generation... was shot dead outside his own home by a killer who was merely a tool, a human gun used and controlled by others to destroy a uniquely powerful radical figure who was likely to prove a rallying point for mass opposition to the policies soon to be implemented... by the new United States government headed by Ronald Reagan."

Bresler quotes the late radio journalist Mae Brussell, who broke the Watergate story 2 months before the Woodward-Bernstein expose'. Brussell had no doubts: "It was a conspiracy. Reagan had just won the election. They knew what kind of president he was going to be. There was only one man who could bring out a million people on demonstration in protest at his policies -- and that was Lennon."

Bresler speculates that Chapman was a "Manchurian Candidate," brainwashed and pre-programmed to kill on command. When the moment had arrived, Chapman received his signal and performed his task.

The CIA and Mind Control

In April 1950, the CIA began work on PROJECT BLUEBIRD, the agency's fledgling attempt at mind control. "Within two years this had progressed into the substantially enlarged PROJECT ARTICHOKE. According to a later CIA internal memorandum, PROJECT ARTICHOKE was intended to 'exploit operational lines, scientific methods and knowledge that can be utilized in altering the attitudes, beliefs, thought processes and behaviour patterns of agent personnel. This will include the application of tested psychiatric and psychological techniques including the use of hypnosis in conjunction with drugs.' In turn, only one year later, in April 1953, PROJECT ARTICHOKE became MKULTRA, the generic name for a series of on-going investigations by the agency's Technical Services Staff."

Some might object that pre-programming a subject to be a "killer on command" violates the common wisdom that one cannot be hypnotised to do something that is contray to one's individual morals. Yet not all "experts" are in agreement on this. For example Milton Kline, a New York psychologist and former president of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis believes it is *not* impossible to create a "Manchurian Candidate." According to Kline, "It cannot be done by everyone. It cannot be done consistently, but it can be done."

"There seems little doubt that sophisticated techniques have now reached the stage where, if murder is desired, a killer, once programmed and 'on hold', can be triggered into action."

Sirhan Sirhan

Bresler suggests that Sirhan Sirhan, the supposed lone assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, was a pre-programmed killer. Seven years after the RFK assassination, Sirhan was interviewed by psychiatrists. These recorded interviews were analyzed with the help of a Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), a device which measures micro-tremors in the voice. Based on the PSE, former high-ranking intelligence officer Charles McQuiston stated: "I'm convinced that Sirhan wasn't aware of what he was doing. He was in a hypnotic trance when he pulled the trigger... Everything in the PSE charts tells me that someone else was involved in the assassination -- and that Sirhan was programmed through hypnosis to kill RFK. What we have here is a real live 'Manchurian Candidate.'"

After examining Sirhan's PSE charts, Dr. John W. Heisse, Jr., president of the International Society of Stress Analysis, agreed with McQuiston: "Sirhan kept repeating certain phrases. This clearly revealed he had been programmed to put himself into a trance."

More can be found here..

http://www.john-lennon.com/whokilled.htm

[Ron Ecker]

From what little research I did on the Lennon murder, I recall (in addition to the Bay of Pigs doorman) that the fatal bullet was fired from the opposite side that Lennon was fatally shot in. Another magic bullet, presumably from the same arsenal as those that killed JFK and RFK.

[John Dolva]

http://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/

John Lennon – 30 Years Gone

RIP December 8, 1980 – 2010

On December 8, 1980 I was in Ocean City, New Jersey, making pizza on the boardwalk at Mack & Mancos and writing a weekly music column for the Atlantic City Sun, a now defunct weekl. The Sun was then owned by Jeffrey Douglas, who was hosting an office Christmas party at his Linwood home the following night after the paper was out on the street.

I forget where I was when I first heard that John Lennon was shot and killed, but one of the first things I did when I learned about it was to call my college friend Kathy Engro, who lived right across the street from the Dakota apartments where Lennon was shot.

Kathy was a year behind me at the University of Dayton (Ohio), where we were both radicalized by the Vietnam War and the movement for educational reform. My freshman year Kevin Kief was the student body president, a tall, thin, long haired radical hippie, who went on to become a chief assistant to the spiritual advisor to the United Nations.

There were two other student body presidents after Kevin who were also pretty radical, but then Kathy Engro was elected, I think probably the first women to be in that position. Her boyfriend, John Judge, was also a radical student who had graduated a few years earlier but stayed around to give the administration trouble, or a conscience.

After graduation Kathy moved to New York City where she worked and lived with a few other young women in a bachelorette apartment on the edge of Central Park, where I visited her a few times, even sleeping on her couch on one occasion.

When I learned that John Lennon had been murdered, I recalled how one day while I was visiting her she remarked that Lennon and Yoko Ono lived across the street in the Dakota apartments, which you could see outside one of the windows of her apartment. I remembered she said that they frequently saw Lennon get out of cabs and limos in front of the Dakota, and sometimes they even waved to each other as they naturally passed each other as neighbors on the street.

But she said she never bothered Lennon by stopping him to talk, and she thought that he appreciated that, and was one of the reasons he liked living in that neighborhood, where his celebrity status was not played up on the street.

So I called Kathy in New York City from my Ocean City, N. J. home and got her on the phone. When I asked her what was happening, I could hear sirens and large crowd noises in the background, and she said that Lennon was dead, murdered right outside, and there were huge crowds forming on the street outside her window.

She was pretty excited, though quite sad and distraught, and began to explain, as it sounded like she had put it into words before, "I had just got home myself, I had gotten out of a cab and was going into my apartment building when I saw him pull up."

She said that just as she got off the elevator on her floor she heard a gunshot, and went into my apartment and opened the window and watched the scene outside.

I got as much detail as I could out of her and wrote it all down in my notes and called my editor on the phone and asked if I could still get it in the next day's paper. This was years before computers, so I had to write it, type it up and drive it over to the newspaper office in Absecon, which I did.

Although we were a weekly, the paper went to press that night so it was in the next day's edition and for once I was on the same deadline as the bigger dailies.

They made it a front page story with a nice rendering of Lennon, and I was real proud of it, and didn't even notice until someone at the party apologized, as they had forgotten to put my name on the byline.

I knew I wrote it though, and others who read it said it was a really good story, as one person noted it was better than the New York Times' first news story about the murder because it contained an ear witness report as well as an eyewitness account of the arrest of Mark David Chapman.

Although I had placed Chapman in the psycho-killer category, I later learned that the Dakota doorman was a Cuban, a Bay of Pigs veteran who had been on the CIA payroll, and may have been somehow implicated in the murder. His very presence there certainly made the psycho-killer motive more of a cover for a sophisticated political assassination. John Hinckley's emergence as a psycho-killer-political-assassin wannabe made this idea more feasible.

Another fact I didn't know at the time was Lennon's resurgence as a political activist, a new radicalization that was fostered by his hearing some new music that inspired him to return to the recording studio and to begin a new period in his multi-facited career.

Then I heard a radio interview with the author of a book on the FBI's Lennon files, which documented the extent they went out of their way to intimidate Lennon and keep him from living in America.

The more I think about it, the more important it seems that these political assassinations should be studied and understood, so they can be counter-acted and prevented from ever happening again.

William Kelly billkelly3@gmail.com

xxx

I like the article, BK.

To me it opens up avenues to looking at JL in terms of the time.

It was a critical moment in world history.

The FSLN had just overthrown Somoza, The FMLN in El Salvador was on the brink and, Costa Rica, Guatemala and other Latin American countries were in the process of demolishing the Monroe Doctrine. (which I think is fundamental in relation to the JFK assassination). The Contras were in the future (though the infrastructure was getting set in place.)

JL had a Moral Authority. He had announced in a letter to the world his re-emergence.

Largely the US Media ignored the death-squads operating deep into Nicaraguan Sovereign territory. The FSLN's Bill of rights was unlike anything previously presented to the world. As this unreported Vit Nam was on the US dfoorstep, Reagan called these butchers freedom fighgters. A tie in that is worth exploring is the connection between Bruce Jones in Costa Rica, his relationship to SOF Publisher and his connections to the JFK assassination and a full answer to who was this Bruce Jones that flirted with the SDS in the early sixties, appearing in Cost Rica (with a computer which had just become standard issue to CIQA operatives, stacked on a pile of SOF magazines) in 1975, and by the early eighties leading and training the Southern Contras.

Where is he today?

What I'm getting at is that one could see an such activist as JL, again assuming the mantle that earned him the phrase from Jerry Rubin that he considered JL more revolutionary than himself. And that's quite a statement. JL deliberately stayed away from the democratic convention in 68' form memory whe he was convinced that appearing would likely be the death of him. He pushed the establishment to the limit, and I suspect they feared that their planned efforts in the late seventies through the eighties would be hampered with a live JL. Yoko refers him to as a soldier. Their motto became 'imagine'. IOW he signalled an activists return, as I read it.

If the atrocities being committed in Latin America had had someone like JL to champion the cause of human rights the world may have been different, ie I'm suggesting a premptive strike (and it wasn't just John Lennon)

edit:typos

Edited December 9, 2010 by John Dolva

[Len Colby]

The problem with such theories is that Lennon was not a threat to anyone. He was a pop star who had briefly played political activist years earlier. By 1980 he was recording romantic pop ditties and continued his isolated existence in luxury homes in NY and Palm Beach. This was already discussed in an earlier thread.

[Ron Ecker]

The problem with such theories is that Lennon was not a threat to anyone. He was a pop star who had briefly played political activist years earlier. By 1980 he was recording romantic pop ditties and continued his isolated existence in luxury homes in NY and Palm Beach. This was already discussed in an earlier thread.

Maybe they felt that Ronald Reagan would recharge Lennon's activist batteries. Otherwise, why would they waste a magic bullet on him? Just to keep in practice?

[John Dolva]

Posthumously, Yoko referred to John Lennon as a soldier. .

Through from the 'bedins' to the 'war is over camapign' to the latter 'imagine' campaign

There was a reason for the first letter and there was a reason for the second one and there were events in the intervening years

[Len Colby]

This subject has already been extensively debated in a previous thread.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12580

Lennon’s political activism only lasted a little over 3 years (early 1969 – summer 1972) and was more than 8 years in his past when he was shot. The USG saw him as so little of a threat they gave him a permanent visa in 1976 and the FBI stopped following/monitoring him in ’72 or ’73. It seemed to have been a faze he went through like Dylan joining the JDL or Madonna taking up the Kabbalah. He even acknowledged this in a 1975 interview

It [his political actavism] almost ruined it [his music], in a way. It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I'm a poet.… But the unfortunate thing is that most people find the straw hat and hang on to it, like your best friend that got the job at the bank when he was fifteen and looked twenty-eight before he was twenty. … Whether it's a religious hat or a political hat or a no-political hat: whatever hat it was, always looking for these straw hats. I think I found out it's a waste of time. There is no hat to wear. Just keep moving around and changing clothes is the best. That's all that goes on: change.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12580&view=findpost&p=142601

Shortly before he was shot he said:

“Anybody I want to save will be helped through our tithing, which is ten percent of whatever we earn."

“What would you suggest I do? Give everything away and walk the streets?”

“I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and I wanted to be rich. So what the hell -- if that's a paradox, then I'm a socialist. But I am not anything. What I used to be is guilty about money.”

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12580&view=findpost&p=142105

So Lennon was just a self-centered pop star albeit one of the greatest ones of all time, content with his isolated cattle owning existence in his mansions. Long before he was killed he briefly dabbled in leftist politics but shortly before his shooting he dismissed that as something he did due to feeling “guilty about money.” And in 1975 compared it to a “straw hat” that he got bored with and “almost ruined” his music. He has long since given up stuff like “Woman is the n of the World” in favor of “It’s Just Like Starting Over” and was unwilling to give more than 10% of his income (not his total fortune) to the less fortunate. There was no reason for anyone to want him dead except for a demented “fan”.

Ron if you have citation for your “magic bullet” claim I like to see it

[Ron Ecker]

Ron if you have citation for your “magic bullet” claim I like to see it

I have nothing handy. It's just what I remember from what reading I did on the Lennon case. I'm sure you can find the question of the bullet's trajectory wherever I found it, on a website that deals with the murder as a conspiracy.

For the heck of it I just Googled "John Lennon magic bullet," and found where the FBI just recently seized a set of Lennon's fingerprints that were on auction. Wow. I wonder why the FBI won't "let it be." I guess the FBI just doesn't have a lot to do right now.