Travis Kelly

[Travis Kelly]

I'm 57 and I grew up in the suburbs around Ft. Worth. Until the early '90s, I was one of the ignorant sheeple -- Oswald was a communist nut and all the conspiracy talk so much unfounded blather. I was not politically naive in general, but I had absorbed the conventional wisdom, dismissing "conspiracy theory" as so much paranoid speculation. Like so many others, I had never read a single book about the case. Then I encountered the Texas Monthly article about Roscoe White -- the same thing that spurred Oliver Stone to produce JFK. The Earlene Roberts revelation struck me like a Magic Bullet of satori -- a cop car stopped and honked in front of Oswald's rooming house immediately after the assassination? What the hell?

I then read Henry Hurt's Reasonable Doubt, and I have to rate it as one of the greatest shocks of my life: how blatant and thorough the case for a conspiracy, how outrageously I had been betrayed by the minions of our "free press." I then devoured all the major books on the case and became an advocate for truth, appearing on radio talk shows in Tucson and Moab, UT, writing editorials and eventually doing cartoons for Probe.

As I studied the case more, I was surprised to learn that LHO had attended the same elementary school in Benbrook, TX where I attended 1st and 2nd grade. Later, as an ad agency art director in Dallas in the '80s, my main graphics vendor was Jaggers-Chile-Stovall -- I was in their offices almost daily for 4 years. I had no idea at the time then that LHO had worked there after his return from the Soviet Union. I was beginning to feel a little like Kerry Thornley, following in the footsteps of Oswald. In 1964, my father began his career with Bell Helicopter in Hurst, TX. He died before I became obsessed with the case and could ask him if he knew Michael Paine.

I am particularly incensed by our left gatekeepers -- Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Justin Raimondo and so many of our university professors, who still defend the absurd Lone Nut fable. Are they blissfully ignorant of the massive body of dissident research, as I was for so many years? Or, like the old apparatchiks of the S.U., they have to tow the party line for the sake of their careers and perks? I don't know, but when they disparage the work of so many dedicated investigators, and the testimony of so many witnesses who have lost their lives in this case, they cross the line of mere timidity and become despicable accomplices to the whole reign of escalating bloody black ops that continue to plague our nation -- MLK, RFK, OKC, 9/11, and... what atrocity next?

Although we may never force our government or the corporate media to divulge the whole truth about Nov. 22, it is a triumph that 75-80% of the public now disbelieves the Lone Nut myth. Thusly armed, we are innoculated against gullibility, and this makes it more difficult for the covert operators to pull off their crimes with plausible deniability in the future. So the truth about JFK is not some antiquarian hobby -- it is vitally relevant to us today.

"Who control the past, controls the present. Who control the present, controls the future." George Orwell

"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." Marshall McLuhan