Introduction, Background, and Goals

[Mark Gorton]

I have recently joined the forum, and I have begun to participate, so I would like to properly introduce myself and explain some of what I am trying to accomplish. For the last 5 years or so, I have been extremely interested, some might say obsessed with the JFK assassination and the historical events that emanate from it. Growing up, I had never been very interested in JFK or his assassination, and it never occurred to me that I might some day be engrossed with it. I never paid much attention to the assassination, but somehow, along the way, I picked up that a conspiracy existed. Then about 5 years ago, I read Robert Caro's first book on Lyndon Johnson, "The Path to Power". The first 150 or 200 pages are just an introduction to Johnson; hardly any events after 1940 are even mentioned, but Caro paints a brilliant picture of Johnson as ruthless and determined to be president. It also describes how in college he ran a secret conspiracy to control campus politics. Unsought, a thought popped into my head that Johnson was behind the JFK assassination. I filed that thought away and kept reading.

Several months later, I was browsing in my local Barnes and Noble when I saw on a display table John Newman's "Oswald and the CIA" (the edition before the most recent one). Thinking that if I was to ever start looking into the JFK assassination, I should look at Oswald, I bought the book. Only later did I realize that I was lucky to have picked one of the best researched books ever written on the JFK assassination. I read the book, and I was puzzled by Oswald's behavior. He behaved unlike anyone I had ever known. His defection to Russia just seemed bizarre. I couldn't understand how a guy who never hung out with any liberals or leftists suddenly just picks up and defects to Russia. I puzzled and puzzled over Oswald's behavior, and then I had an insight. What if Oswald was a CIA contract agent? All of a sudden, all of the facts about him just snapped into place. Everything made sense, and I was on my way.

I then began a bout of internet research that lasted a couple of years. I would go through several month stretches where I could come home at night and spend 2-3 hours reading and doing research. I quickly found spartacus, which was a tremendous help to me and greatly accelerated my getting up to speed on the assassination. Oswald lead me to Guy Banister, and I started to climb the ladder of the assassination hiarchy. I discovered stories about Cuban involvement in the assassination and mob involvement, and CIA involvement, and I tried to figure out which stories were the true stories. (Only latter did I come to understand that most of these stories were true.) My vacations began to fill with reading about Havana in the 1950's and Win Scott in Mexico. I was starting to build context and put the pieces together.

I read the story of E. Howard Hunt's deathbed confession, and for a while the map of the assassination that E. Howard Hunt laid out was my map of the assassination. I dug into Cord Meyer and Bill Harvey and David Morales. For a while I had in the back of my head that I should try to find the person in the CIA who was Lee Harvey Oswald's controller when he defected to Russia. But I had no idea how to find this person. Then, I stumbled accross a video that described that Bill Harvey had been in charge of a program that sent fake defectors to Russia. There was no way that this could be a coincidence. This was confirmation that I was on the right track.

Theorizing that if the CIA did kill JFK, they would have needed to kill RFK to avoid being hung for treason, I started looking into the RFK assassination, and sure enough, there was conspiracy, a cover up and the same gang from the CIA lurking in the background.

I then decided to see if there were any good videos on the topic, and I found "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" (parts 1-6). (At that time, I did not know that parts 7-9 existed.) From "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" I learned the story of Lucian Sarti, and more importantly, I learned about the autopsy. The evidence of military involvement in the autopsy changed my thinking. I started to see that there was an interlocking government plot much larger than I had realized. I started reading books on the autopsy and following that thread.

Around this time, I came across the Education Forum. I started noticing that it frequently came up in Google search results. At first I viewed the forum as just a place to get a quick answer, and then I would leave. But over time, I began to perceive the depth of knowledge and expertise on the forum, and I began to read it. After looking as many people's lists of books, I realized that I had not read many of the best books on the topic of the assassination, so I began to plow through these books. I read "Conspiracy" by Anthony Summers and "The Last Investigation" by Gaeton Fonzi and many, many others.

Then I came across Robert Morrow's essay about the LBJ-CIA assassination, and I felt like he had written what was in my head and then some. When I read his essay, I was still giving Allen Dulles the benefit of the doubt. I didn't see him as one of the main planners. As soon as I read the essay, I knew I was wrong about that. Since the begining of my research, I have given people the benefit of the doubt. It seems so shocking and inconceivable that anyone could commit treason. And time and again, I have realized that I have been too forgiving and not suspicious enough. I started reading most of the books on Robert Morrow's list. I googled all his recommended searches.

Just this morning I counted, I now have 80 books on the assassination. I have probably read all of 35 of them. I have read parts of 20 or so. I have skimmed the rest. I have pile after pile of books that I must urgently read. I am tormented by a never ending reading list that only grows. Just last night, I skipped reading my daughters a night time story, so I could read the autobiography of Spiro Agnew. I know that most people consider this strange behavior. I also expect that some members of this forum will find this behavior understandable. (By the way, it looks like the CIA is responsible for pushing out Spiro Agnew, so they could manuever one of their own (Bush, Rockefeller, Ford) into the presidency.))

I have come to realize that the history of the United States for the last 50 years that we are taught in school and that we read in the papers and watch on TV is wrong. There is a secret, parallel true history. This history lays in the open, right in front of our eyes if only we know how to see it. The massive conspiracy behind the Coup of '63 can be proved 1000 times over. The evidence is overwhelming and self supporting. It locks into place in a coherent narative. Using my understanding of events, I have been able to make predictions about a number of different aspects of the conspiracy (RFK's assassination, now Spiro Agnew being pushed out) that are then verified by future research and reading.

The true history of the CIA is one where it behaves more like Stalin's KGB or the Stazi of old with death squads roaming the country for decades and control of the media that I would not have thought possible. The true history is one where Pravda writes the truth and The New York Times is filled with lies.

But the history that I have learned is also one with great heros. This history is filled with brave Americans who have risked their careers and lives to tell the truth, to see that justice prevails. And that bright history is what has brought me to the Education Forum. I can see in this community a passion and dedication to truth and justice. Within the Education Forum community, the knowledge and expertise exists to properly tell the story of what has really happened in the U.S. for the last 50 years.

I have not spent my nights, weekends, and vacations for the last few years consumed with a desire to know the truth out of some idle curiousity. I am dedicated to recovering the good America that lives within the hearts of most Americans. Only when we recognize the errors of the past, can we see many of those same flaws in our society today and work to fix them.

Despite the wealth of information available on the assassination, it takes far too much work to understand what happened. For dedicated researchers, the truth is out there, but for the casually interested, the truth is buried. The top search results on Google for JFK assassination are wikipedia and McAdams. We cannot expect the world to know the truth when we can't even get the top search result on Google.

So I have joined the education forum to ask you to help me compile the mass of information that is buried in the educaton forum into a form that is easily accessible to casual readers. The education forum is great for having discussions. It works less well for reaching consensuses as to what is accept by the community. In order to do this, other software tools are needed. My background is as an engineer, and I have started and run a number of technology companies. I have ideas as to how to build a website that can allow for the better organization of the mass of information buried in the forum and also to allow the community to vote on the answers to various questions.

I have spent the last 6 months looking for a programmer to be the lead for this project, and I have finally found one. His name is Riley Lynch, and most recently, he worked as a programmer at Bloomberg L.P. He just started work yesterday and within a couple of months, I hope to have a crude prototype website available for beta users. I will save a detailed description of the software specification for another post. I have some ideas of how to get started, but building a website to allow a community to organize information is a very general spec. If this website is to be successful, we will need members of the community to help us work out the problems of what functionality is needed/desired and how to design the work flows and lay outs.

It took me a while to gather the courage to join the education forum. I have great respect for many members of the community, and I found it daunting to exchange views with members who have logged 3000 or 5000 or 15000 posts. I also am now building an electronic footprint, and I am not eager to bring down upon myself an IRS audit or whatever other regulatory hassle a malicious government can devise. I look forward to working with the education forum community, and I thank you for the warm reception that I have received.

Best Regards,

Mark

[Dawn Meredith]

What a heartfelt post of introduction Mark. For those of us who have traveled these roads for many decades it is always pleasurable to "meet" someone with such a desire for the truth, no matter where it leads.

I will look forward to hearing about your education as it evolves.

Best,

Dawn

[Guest Robert Morrow]

The JFK assassination is a "false mystery" as Vincent Salandria has written. John Kennedy was murdered by US military intelligence. But understand Lyndon Johnson was at the epicenter of the JFK assassination because he and his Texas oil men had close and longstanding ties with the core of US intelligence.

I suggest reading everything by Vincent Salandria, Martin Schotze and Michael Morrissey. They have pretty much nailed it but I don't think they, unlike Jack White, DAvid Lifton, James Fetzer, Robert Groden, Walt Brown, Phil Nelson, Jim Marrs and many others, have not figured out how central LBJ was to this and for personal reasons. Ed Tatro has an unpublished book called "Urgency to Kill" that is probably going to be definitive on the LBJ angle.

1) False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of JFK - http://www.amazon.com/False-Mystery-Essays-Assassination-JFK/dp/0975494104/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341936695&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=false+mystery+vince+salandria

2) History Will Not Absolve Us : Orwellian Control, Public Denial, & the Murder of President Kennedy - http://www.amazon.com/History-Will-Not-Absolve-Orwellian/dp/0965381404/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341937011&sr=1-1&keywords=history+will+not+absolve+us

3) Correspondence with Vincent Salandria http://www.amazon.com/Correspondence-Vincent-Salandria-Michael-Morrissey/dp/1430326646/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341937050&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=conversations+with+salandria

One group to stay aware from, and be quite wary of, are the "JFK groupies." These are folks who treat JFK assassination research as some sort of hero worship of the Kennedys. They have not just lost their critical thinking skills; they have stacked it on a pyre, doused it with kerosene and then torched it. For them, JFK research is something akin to 15 year old girls squealing at a Beatles concert.

In order to understand the JFK assassination, you have to be well versed in the "Dark Side of Camelot," which is something many JFK researchers refused to grapple with. Robert Kennedy was humuliating and trying to castrate men who were much older, much more experience and who never did play by the "Marquiss de Queensbury" rules of engagement. Key players like Lyndon Johnson, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover.

From Defrauding America, Rodney Stich, 3rd edition 1998 p. 638-639]:

“The Role of deep-cover CIA officer, Trenton Parker, has been described in earlier pages, and his function in the CIA's counter-intelligence unit, Pegasus. Parker had stated to me earlier that a CIA faction was responsible for the murder of JFK … During an August 21, 1993, conversation, in response to my questions, Parker said that his Pegasus group had tape recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy. I asked him, "What group were these tapes identifying?" Parker replied: "Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, Johnson of Texas, George Bush, and J. Edgar Hoover." I asked, "What was the nature of the conversation on these tapes?"

I don't have the tapes now, because all the tape recordings were turned over to [Congressman] Larry McDonald. But I listened to the tape recordings and there were conversations between Rockefeller, [J. Edgar] Hoover, where [Nelson] Rockefeller asks, "Are we going to have any problems?" And he said, "No, we aren't going to have any problems. I checked with Dulles. If they do their job we'll do our job." There are a whole bunch of tapes, because Hoover didn't realize that his phone has been tapped. Defrauding America, Rodney Stich, 3rd edition p. 638-639]

[Douglas Caddy]

Quote from above: "So I have joined the education forum to ask you to help me compile the mass of information that is buried in the educaton forum into a form that is easily accessible to casual readers."

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I have maintained for years that the education forum is a treasure trove of information. Vital documentation is scattered here, there and everywhere among the countless postings that have been made by members who have spent years engaged in research on JFK assassination.

Your goal is a laudable one. To achieve it will take immense work, but based on what I have read in your articulate posting above, you are just the person who could make it a reality.

[Thomas Graves]

Quote from above: "So I have joined the education forum to ask you to help me compile the mass of information that is buried in the educaton forum into a form that is easily accessible to casual readers."

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I have maintained for years that the education forum is a treasure trove of information. Vital documentation is scattered here, there and everywhere among the countless postings that have been made by members who have spent years engaged in research on JFK assassination.

Your goal is a laudable one. To achieve it will take immense work, but based on what I have read in your articulate posting above, you are just the person who could make it a reality.

Douglas,

I concur, wholeheartedly. Mark looks young enough to embark on a project that will probably take a few years, at least, to complete. Heaven help him (and us) if the government ever releases all of the pertinent documents. LOL.

--Tommy

PS: Too bad so many hard-to-find photos have been erased/deleted from the JFK Assassination Debate forum over the years...

Edited July 10, 2012 by Thomas Graves

[Guest Tom Scully]

Mark, welcome to the forum. Please do not let the comments I posted in you Epstein thread fully comprise your first impression of me. I have a prejudice against Epstein and I am not persuaded that this is a personal fault I have to work through. I would enjoy learning more about what Epstein was doing between ages 22 and 29, his age in 1964 when he was a graduate student under professor Hacker. I do not understand how either of them got where they got without external assistance. Neither did Mark Lane.

John Simkin has achieved the best google search results of anyone I've seen who is not what I suspect is a disinformation artist receiving outside "help". Even so, I can provide examples of search terms related to JFK assassination research that do not serve up top ten google search results including a link to a Spartacus page, or a mcadams site page, or of a thread from this forum.

Predictably, there will be a top result displayed of a relevant wikipedia article.

What is your plan to deal with that? If you cannot accomplish competitive search placement, how will your website be worth the tremendous effort I anticipate will be needed? Aren't you attempting to reinvent the wheel?

I'm going to send you a private message with two examples of what can be achieved. I've found no interest in this information although I've offered examples even in the last few days. After you consider the examples I've sent, if you have further interest, I'll send three examples of how the same information can be presented and expanded on.

My advice, and I am open to considering any proposals for solutions to the biggest problems of search placement you are willing to share, is to save yourself a lot of grief, money, and time, and put maximum effort into taking advantage of what is already dominant and methodically exploit it to your best advantage.

Also, you probably know this, but just in case, google serves up whatever the cookies in your browser history influences google forumulaes to present as top search results. Unless you clear existing cookies that tell google what your search interests have been, you will receive new search results which tend to influence you into thinking that Spartacus, this forum, and mcadams are receiving higher search placement than they actually are when the same search term is served up to someone who has not been visiting JFK assassination related sites. I doubt that wikipedia articles are affected in search results to any similar degree.

[Mark Gorton]

Tom,

The problem of search result placement is not an easy one. A whole industry has sprung up to deal with this issue. The Google search algorithm use a number of computational factors to compute the page rank. Although the precise factors used are not publicly known and are being constantly updated, the general principals that Google uses are fairly well know. The search engine optimization (SEO) industry is built upon this knowledge. The SEO industry has its own community with blogs, forums and conferences, so it is not hard to get up to speed on the basics. A lot of it is pretty straight forward, where is the search term used on the page, how often is the search term used, which other sites link to the page, do these sites also use the search term, and lots and lots of others.

You can check out http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics for some pretty good charts with estimates of the weightings of particular factors. It is worth clicking through the nine tabs on the top to get a sense of the different catagories and different factors.

Some of the stuff is pretty straight forward, titling pages with the search terms and tagging pages properly with the search terms. Getting links from other respected sites is also important. Google has an idea of which websites are important (wikipedia, NY Times, CNN, etc.), so links from prominent sites count more than links from some random blog. But lots of little links do add up.

If you look at McAdams, he does a lot of things right. He titles his page, "The Kennedy Assassination" in large text on the top. He has catagories of prominent names/words in big print. He links to lots of revelant (textually) sites. It doesn't take that much effort to do these things ourselves. We just need to be conscious of it.

Also, check out: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/search-engine-optimization-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html This is a good quick guide for what needs to be done.

I certainly agree that we should work to populate other existing sites with information. Get the word out is a multi-dimensional effort. But having one website that is easily accessable and clear to the general public that is a good guide and portal to the history of the assassination will be key to expanding the public understanding. If this site is clear enough and of a high enough quality, then other sites will want to link to it, and its importance in Google will increase over time.

Best,

Mark

[Mike Rago]

I think you have a good idea.

One thing that I would offer your visitors is a way to order some of the known photos chronologically. There should be only one ordering. You provide the initial ordering but members, like in wikipedia, would have the right to say that they believe a picture is out of order and they have to state their reason why. If the reason is obviously correct the chronological ordering will change. In an added dimension you will place times on the photos. I believe that over time your site will become the place where the correct ordering of the photographic evidence will be found.

I see your site as a place where visitors are given the tools to evaluate the evidence.

This is just an example. I really just want to say that I like your idea.

Edited July 11, 2012 by Mike Rago