Why Col. L. Fletcher Prouty's Critics Are Wrong

[James DiEugenio]

The other trash artist was Epstein.  (Man, can you imagine being on the side of Epstein and McAdams?) 

Take a look at how correct Fletcher was on a charge by Epstein. (And how lucky BOR is to have such good listeners.)

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/fletcher-prouty-vs-edward-epstein 

[Michael Griffith]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

The other trash artist was Epstein.  (Man, can you imagine being on the side of Epstein and McAdams?) 

Take a look at how correct Fletcher was on a charge by Epstein. (And how lucky BOR is to have such good listeners.)

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/fletcher-prouty-vs-edward-epstein 

So after all the facts I've documented in this thread about Prouty's bogus and/or nutty claims, you are still defending him??? 

BTW, just this morning I stumbled across another Prouty howler on YouTube. In his April 5, 1975, lecture titled "Anatomy of Assassination" at Yale University, Prouty claimed that Saudi Arabia's king, Ibn Saud, secretly took part in the Cairo Conference! Here's the LINK (1:10-1:20).

As with Prouty's fiction that Chiang and his group attended the Tehran Conference, not a single one of the hundreds of primary sources on the Cairo Conference says anything about Ibn Saud taking part in the conference. Many of these sources are available and searchable online. 

Saud was famous for refusing to travel outside his country's boundaries. The first time he did so was in February 1945, when he met FDR at Great Bitter Lake in Egypt when FDR was on his way home from the Yalta Conference.

Prouty loved to make up false history to impress his gullible audiences, none of whom seemed to know enough history to realize what a fraud Prouty was.

[W. Niederhut]

Question for the mods.

If a guy like Michael Griffith keeps repeating debunked claims, ad infinitum, is there a point where the Education Forum finally says, "No mas?"

Griffith has now posted pages and pages of redundant, defamatory McAdams-type disinformazia about Col. L. Fletcher Prouty and JFK's 1963 Vietnam policy decisions.

Whenever the subject, or honest questions, arise, Griffith simply re-posts the same debunked McAdams talking points.

It's not a debate.  It's like trying to converse with a television broadcasting the same Swift Boat Vet ads.

 

Edited October 26, 2023 by W. Niederhut

[Michael Griffith]

7 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Question for the mods.

If a guy like Michael Griffith keeps repeating debunked claims, ad infinitum, is there a point where the Education Forum finally says, "No mas?"

Griffith has now posted pages and pages of redundant, defamatory McAdams-type disinformazia about Col. L. Fletcher Prouty and JFK's 1963 Vietnam policy decisions.

Whenever the subject, or honest questions, arise, Griffith simply re-posts the same debunked McAdams talking points.

It's not a debate.  It's like trying to converse with a television broadcasting the same Swift Boat Vet ads.

You post this pitiful reply after I just presented new evidence of another Prouty whopper. Can you find me one shred of evidence that Ibn Saud took part in the Cairo Conference?

You're the one who keeps posting "debunked claims." Any rational, objective reader who reads this thread will be amazed at your refusal to acknowledge the facts about Prouty. 

BTW, where are the pictures that Prouty claimed he took of the Chinese delegation during his fictional trip to Tehran? 

[Greg Kooyman]

2 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

You post this pitiful reply after I just presented new evidence of another Prouty whopper. Can you find me one shred of evidence that Ibn Saud took part in the Cairo Conference?

You're the one who keeps posting "debunked claims." Any rational, objective reader who reads this thread will be amazed at your refusal to acknowledge the facts about Prouty. 

BTW, where are the pictures that Prouty claimed he took of the Chinese delegation during his fictional trip to Tehran? 

Great reply Michael,

There’s no rational way to debate this guy. W Neiderhut is the proverbial “Boken Record” In the conversation. 
It’s also pretty clear that there are several Prouty apologists on this forum that can’t seem to square themselves with what Fletcher Prouty has said over the years and the actual facts. 

[James DiEugenio]

Greg:

Jeff did provide info about the Tehran Conference and that was pages ago.

So then, whenever one replies to one of these charges, Mike goes to another one.

Diverting from the fact just established.

And make no mistake, virtually all of these were  brought up by McAdams in the first place.  You can check that for yourself.  And almost all of them were replied to by Len Osanic years ago.

 

[W. Niederhut]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

You post this pitiful reply after I just presented new evidence of another Prouty whopper. Can you find me one shred of evidence that Ibn Saud took part in the Cairo Conference?

You're the one who keeps posting "debunked claims." Any rational, objective reader who reads this thread will be amazed at your refusal to acknowledge the facts about Prouty. 

BTW, where are the pictures that Prouty claimed he took of the Chinese delegation during his fictional trip to Tehran? 

I posted the archived NYT cable indicating that Chiang Kai-shek had been officially invited, in Cairo, to meet with Stalin in Tehran.

I also debunked your timeline claiming that Chiang and his delegates could not have conferred with Stalin in Tehran, en route to Karachi.

Your other defamatory claims about Prouty have been repeatedly debunked during the past year, after you joined this forum.

But at least Greg Kooyman is cheering for your bunk, while dodging Paul Brancato's question.

[Michael Griffith]

5 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Greg:

Jeff did provide info about the Tehran Conference and that was pages ago.

Uh, I soundly refuted that "info." The "info" was a single unsourced sentence buried in a paragraph about a different subject in a book about U.S. Government policy and the Vietnam War. The author clearly confused and conflated the Cairo Conference and the Tehran Conference.

So then, whenever one replies to one of these charges, Mike goes to another one.

What??? Uh, I responded to Jeff's reply. Compare his lone item of dubious evidence on Prouty's Tehran claim with the numerous sources that I cited. Did you even read my responses to his replies? 

You are badly damaging your credibility with these kinds of erroneous replies in defense of an anti-Semitic crackpot.

Diverting from the fact just established.

Ha! This is comical. He established no fact. He cited a lone, obviously errant and unsourced statement. I cited numerous scholarly sources, including many primary sources. But somehow you conclude that he made the better case. Curious.

And make no mistake, virtually all of these were  brought up by McAdams in the first place.  You can check that for yourself.  And almost all of them were replied to by Len Osanic years ago.

One, I've raised many issues that McAdams never mentioned. Two, just because McAdams said something does not automatically make it false. Are you saying McAdams was wrong about Ricky White, Robert Morrow, Beverly Oliver, and Madeleine Brown, for example? Three, Osanic's explanations for Prouty's bogus claims and craziness are lame. 

And, I must say that Jeff's excuses and explanations for Prouty's documented, undeniable prolonged associations with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers are just pitiful. As I've said many times, if we had the same evidence on a lone-gunman theorist, no conspiracy advocate be caught dead offering such excuses and explanations. 

 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Jeff Carter]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Jeff did provide info about the Tehran Conference and that was pages ago.

Uh, I soundly refuted that "info." The "info" was a single unsourced sentence buried in a paragraph about a different subject in a book about U.S. Government policy and the Vietnam War. The author clearly confused and conflated the Cairo Conference and the Tehran Conference.

Buried? It appears on the first page of the first chapter, rather obvious in a brief paragraph. The volume in question is an authoritative official history assembled for a US Congressional Subcommittee by a researcher from the Library of Congress. The factual assertion in question is backed up by multiple sources both contemporaneous to 1943 and current to the present day.  You dismiss it only because it undermined your expressed opinion. Your expressed opinion not only denied the authoritative history existed in the first place, but asserted that the person who had provided the correct information regarding the source had instead made it all up. 

Its the Education Forum equivalent of Monty Python’s “Argument Sketch”:

M: An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
O: No it isn't!
M: Yes it is! 'tisn't just contradiction.
O: Look, if I *argue* with you, I must take up a contrary position!
M: Yes but it isn't just saying 'no it isn't'.
O: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!
O: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!
O: Yes it is!
M: No it ISN'T! Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
O: It is NOT!
M: It is!
O: Not at all!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ

[Michael Griffith]

12 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

Buried? It appears on the first page of the first chapter, rather obvious in a brief paragraph. The volume in question is an authoritative official history assembled for a US Congressional Subcommittee by a researcher from the Library of Congress. The factual assertion in question is backed up by multiple sources both contemporaneous to 1943 and current to the present day.  You dismiss it only because it undermined your expressed opinion. Your expressed opinion not only denied the authoritative history existed in the first place, but asserted that the person who had provided the correct information regarding the source had instead made it all up. I

This is just sad. It is also unbelievable, given the evidence I have presented to you.

I dismiss the lone unsourced sentence that you keep desperately relying on because it is refuted by literally every other primary and scholarly source on the subject. As I have proved, the vast collection of records on the conference available at the State Department's website say that only FDR, Churchill, and Stalin attended the conference, and they contain no mention of Chiang and his group even being in Tehran--and most of them specify that Chiang did not attend the Tehren Conference but only the Cairo Conference. The same is true of the available Russian records on the conference. 

But you brush aside this powerful mountain of evidence and rely on a single unsourced statement in a book about the Vietnam War. 

Yes, the unsourced statement is indeed "buried." Have you read it in its original context, or are you going by how Prouty misleadingly quotes it? It is in the middle of a long paragraph, and it is not even the topic of the paragraph, much less the book. 

And, sheesh, just because Gibbons' book was done for a Congressional subcommittee does not make it "authoritative." You must be kidding. Gee, is the Warren Report "authoritative" because it was done for the U.S. Government and was overseen by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court? 

Gibbons clearly simply confused and conflated the Cairo Conference with the Tehran Conference. This is obvious. It is also understandable. Gibbons was not writing about the Tehran Conference or Chiang, but about the Vietnam War. These kinds of errors sometimes creep into a book when the author is making a  brief comment about a peripheral subject that is not the focus of the book.

Why are all the other scholars who've written about Chiang and/or the Tehran Conference wrong and Gibbons' single unsourced statement right? I've cited and quoted from book-length studies on the Cairo and Tehran conferences that specify that Chiang only attended the Cairo Conference and that he returned to China after leaving Cairo. Yet, you rely on a single unsourced statement and ignore all other sources.

Furthermore, I have also proved that the subject of Mao's military operations was never even discussed at the Tehran Conference. I have also proved that Prouty's Tehran-trip story is full of holes. I have further proved that Chiang's own diary and his wife's 12/5/43 letter to FDR refute Prouty's mythmaking. But you just don't care because you are oddly determined to believe Prouty's nonsense no matter what. 

Edited October 27, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Jeff Carter]

Quote on -  At the Teheran Conference in 1943, Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek both approved Roosevelt’s proposal for a trusteeship for Indochina, but Churchill was vehemently against the idea.  - quote off

You haven’t proven or refuted anything on this topic. The person you insisted was making it all up, also correctly pointed out the above information did not appear in any other volume - which is exactly all you have confirmed here.

 

M:  Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
O: It is NOT!

[Sandy Larsen]

On 10/26/2023 at 8:16 PM, Jeff Carter said:

The factual assertion in question is backed up by multiple sources both contemporaneous to 1943 and current to the present day.

Jeff,

I don't understand. I thought that the "assertion in question" was known to be documented in only one book. (One by Gibbons?)

Where am I wrong?

 

[Sandy Larsen]

Maybe the whole thing can be explained this way:

Prouty flew Chiang Kai-shek's delegation to the Tehran conference. But he never saw Chiang Kai-shek himself.

Later he read that book (by Gibbons?) and saw that Chiang Kai-shek did indeed attend the conference. Having never heard that, Prouty figured it must have been a highly secretive meeting.

And so he would say so in his interviews.

But what he didn't know is that Gibbons (?) had made a mistake in writing his book and had conflated Tehran for Cairo.

That makes sense to me. Any problems with that from either side?

 

[Jeff Carter]

5 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Maybe the whole thing can be explained this way:

Prouty flew Chiang Kai-shek's delegation to the Tehran conference. But he never saw Chiang Kai-shek himself.

Later he read that book (by Gibbons?) and saw that Chiang Kai-shek did indeed attend the conference. Having never heard that, Prouty figured it must have been a highly secretive meeting.

And so he would say so in his interviews.

But what he didn't know is that Gibbons (?) had made a mistake in writing his book and had conflated Tehran for Cairo.

That makes sense to me. Any problems with that from either side?

 

It is my understanding that the production of “official history” by Library of Congress researchers for government departments is a task taken with seriousness and attention to factual detail. In this case, a contrary opinion has been expressed holding that the author of one of these histories made not just one but two massive errors in a single sentence, and it somehow got past the proofreading and into print. This doesn't rise above the mere expression of opinion, as there is no corresponding evidence of previous sloppiness on behalf of the author or of general poor attention to detail in these works.

Also, as has been shown, a meeting between Chiang Kai-Shek and Stalin in Teheran was announced in a contemporaneous newspaper article, and the diplomatic discussions in preparation of such meeting are detailed in a more recent scholarly paper. It is quite a remarkable coincidence that Prouty’s supposed “deranged fantasy” (as portrayed) is supported by such disparate sources.

[W. Niederhut]

5 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Maybe the whole thing can be explained this way:

Prouty flew Chiang Kai-shek's delegation to the Tehran conference. But he never saw Chiang Kai-shek himself.

Later he read that book (by Gibbons?) and saw that Chiang Kai-shek did indeed attend the conference. Having never heard that, Prouty figured it must have been a highly secretive meeting.

And so he would say so in his interviews.

But what he didn't know is that Gibbons (?) had made a mistake in writing his book and had conflated Tehran for Cairo.

That makes sense to me. Any problems with that from either side?

 

Sandy,

    What evidence has Michael Griffith presented to support his claim that Chiang Kai-shek and/or his delegates did not meet, secretly, with Stalin in Tehran?  On the contrary, Prouty, himself, flew the delegates to Tehran in a VIP Lockheed Lodestar.

     Griffith's timeline has been debunked, in which he claimed that Chiang and his delegates could not have met with Stalin en route to Karachi from Cairo.

      Meanwhile, the larger picture in this Tehran debate is that Griffith has posted a redundant series of false, defamatory claims about Prouty on the forum during the past year-- apparently, for the purpose of promoting the false impression that Prouty was not an honest, rational witness of CIA and U.S. military ops.

      This 30 year-old Prouty defamation campaign is similar to the well known U.S. government defamation campaigns attacking the credibility of Prouty's associates, Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone.