My New Book, A Heritage of Nonsense: Jim Garrison's Tales of Mystery and Imagination

[Greg Doudna]

W., I might have been more inclined to give a thoughtful brief answer to your question if you weren't so incredibly rude as to proudly refuse to read the argument at issue which in my attempt to write a helpful comment on the topic of this thread, a new book out on topics of interest to this community, I said that chapter was convincing--rude to say you won't look through the telescope, so to speak, while demanding that people who have looked through the telescope explain to you what convinced them Jupiter has moons which you are certain aren't there. (Alluding to an apocryphal story of Galileo that actually isn't true but fictionally serves to illustrate the point.)

And if you showed any sign of a discussion having the prospect of being fruitful--an actual discussion in which there is willingness to consider if there is new information or a better narrative explanation of existing information contrary to one's beliefs, or if that is not possible, still to listen and understand the argument being disagreed with.

On the basis of my understanding of the Rose Cheramie story, I am aware that Dr. Weiss believed she had foreknowledge, and officer Fruge. I believe they were mistaken, for reasons I thought Litwin explained well.

If you won't read, show no sign of being open to reevaluating existing beliefs on the matter if there is different information shown, but come across as saying belligerently, "YOU try to prove it to me--I dare you!" ... are you surprised at someone not having motivation to recite to you the specific content discussed in Litwin's chapter that you say you will refuse to look at, while demanding to have explained to you what is there and showing no sign of interest in actually learning, but only attacking?

Why not read Greg Parker's article? It is a somewhat different but complementary angle of analysis arriving at the same conclusion, and I think Parker's analysis on this is pretty convincing too. On this issue, it doesn't matter who writes an argument. The facts and documents and judicious assessment thereof on that subject matter are what matter.

As mentioned before, I have had a long interest in the Rose Cheramie story from having lived in the tiny town in east Texas where, about seven years before I arrived as a college student, she had been killed. I wrote a thoughtful, reflective piece earlier in this thread on a particular detail of the Rose Cheramie (Mercades) case from my own personal analysis. To that I can add one point, on the question of why she was hitchhiking where she was in the isolated area the night she was run over.

I don't know why, but (if I had the location right when I went to see where she was killed) there is an entrance to a state park there. I got the impression she was near if not right at that entrance, which could suggest she came out of that park, or else was dropped off there by a car which did enter or leave that park.

A second fact is the location where she was killed, from my memory, was actually within walking distance of Big Sandy itself--not a short walk, a couple of miles or so, I don't recall, but not impossible to walk--and from there one could hitchhike on Highway 80 straight shot west to Dallas, or to points east in Louisiana, whichever way she intended. However without someone coming forward who had been with her or driven her there who could explain, which never is known to have happened, it remains ultimately a mystery as to how she got there. 

[Steve Roe]

22 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

This is a highly objectionable comment from a forum moderator and amounts to accusing another forum member of being a paid government propagandist. Why is this being allowed?

Yes, it is Jonathan. Perhaps someone has reported this obvious infraction of the rules. 

[W. Niederhut]

Greg,

    I'm planning to study the Rose Cheramie story-- including Greg Parker's essay-- in more detail.

    But, meanwhile, let me point out that you never even responded to James DiEugenio's detailed, scholarly references on this very thread about Fred Litwin's work!  

    That seems quite odd.  Why the silence?

     After all, Mr. Litwin's recent Tales of Mystery and Imagination about Jim Garrison didn't appear ex nihilo.  

    Here's the backstory-- four James DiEugenio essays about Fred Litwin's previous two books on the subject of the JFK assassination and Jim Garrison's investigation.

     I'm re-posting these for you, Jean Ceulemans, and the Education Forum.

     

Litwin and the Warren Report (kennedysandking.com)

Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part One (kennedysandking.com)

Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part Two (kennedysandking.com)

Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion - Part Three (kennedysandking.com)

 

Edited Friday at 05:10 PM by W. Niederhut

[Joe Bauer]

5 hours ago, Paul Rigby said:

Really? This is only the UK, and long before Covid and Ukraine. The US effort dwarfs Britain's.

Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine

They are soldiers, but the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts. Welcome to the age of information warfare

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-77th-brigade-britains-information-warfare-military/

A barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard’s hut in the middle of the road. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. They call it the 77th Brigade. They are the troops fighting Britain’s information wars.

“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software. The men and women of the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.

From office to office, I found a different part of the Brigade busy at work. One room was focussed on understanding audiences: the makeup, demographics and habits of the people they wanted to reach. Another was more analytical, focussing on creating “attitude and sentiment awareness” from large sets of social media data. Another was full of officers producing video and audio content. Elsewhere, teams of intelligence specialists were closely analysing how messages were being received and discussing how to make them more resonant.

Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: “key influencers", “reach", “traction". You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. But the skinny jeans and wax moustaches were here replaced by the crisply ironed shirts and light patterned camouflage of the British Army. Their surroundings were equally incongruous – the 77th’s headquarters were a mix of linoleum flooring, long corridors and swinging fire doors. More Grange Hill than Menlo Park. Next to a digital design studio, soldiers were having a tea break, a packet of digestives lying open on top of a green metallic ammo box. Another sign on the wall declared, “Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”. What on Earth was happening?

“If you track where UK manpower is deployed, you can take a good guess at where this kind of ‘influence’ activity happens,” an information warfare officer (not affiliated with the 77th) told me later, under condition of anonymity. “A document will come from the Ministry of Defence that will have broad guidance and themes to follow.” He explains that each military campaign now also has – or rather is – a marketing campaign too.

Ever since Nato troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that Nato soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of Nato information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of Nato troops happily working with Baltic hosts.

Information campaigns such as these are “white”: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military. But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, “grey” and “black” too. “Counter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,” he explained. There, the messaging doesn't have to look like it came from the military and doesn't have to necessarily tell the truth.

I saw no evidence that the 77th do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.

My goodness. Makes you want to escape from the internet entirely.

We are all continuously watched, surveilled, studied, analyzed, and manipulated by entities such as the one described above.

When camping in the woods of Big Sur and the Santa Cruz mountains and leaving laptops at home and smart phones turned off... you really begin to feel private again. And to appreciate the soul soothing sanctity of that freedom.

[Jonathan Cohen]

16 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

Fred Litwin, like Jonathan Cohen, seems to visit

this site just to keep repeating "It's not true" about

any assertion that contradicts the lone-nut theory.

It gets tiresome real fast and is not helpful discourse.

It's just a mantra that one-liner specialists such

as Jonathan toss out for no apparent purpose other

than to try to discourage genuine researchers. That

tactic is meaningless; it doesn't work.

I'm not discouraging anything. In fact, I am PROMOTING the work of unbiased, scholarly researchers not afraid to go against the usual conspiracy nonsense proffered for 60-plus years and especially rampant on this forum.

[Pat Speer]

13 hours ago, Denny Zartman said:

There's this thing...called a joke... remind me to explain it to you sometime.

Cool

[Joe Bauer]

Who Are These Jim Garrison Detractors Comparing Him To?

In justifying their almost manic compulsion to paint him as this outrageously bad character who did such harm to our nation and the JFKA truth research effort and record?

Please tell us what White Knight other high-profile individual tried to find the real truth about the JFKA at great personal sacrificing risk, for the good of our traumatized, doubting and grieving country and all it's citizens?

Some may suggest Mark Lane and other early research writers.

As I read the heated back and forths on this thread with Garrison being portrayed as some type of wildly out-of-control self-aggrandizing obsessed charlatan or even a conspiracy kook mental case, I found myself wanting to step back to assume a broader, more real-life grounded and less emotional view and evaluation of the Garrison investigation affair and the man himself versus an almost fanatical, micro-focused negative view promoted by his detractors.

Considering his entire life experience doings as much as the hyper-inflamed government, media and writer furor reaction to his JFKA/Clay Shaw investigation he is mostly known for.

Garrison and his investigation have been simply trashed by so many for so long and even to this day, often to a degree that borders on irrationality in it's hyper angry obsessiveness imo.

So, what was it about Garrison that was so bad? Up until his JFKA investigation efforts the man had a lifetime of mostly admirable and healthy minded achievement.

If he had never taken on the investigation, no one would or could validly disparage the man, his character and lifetime achievements with any rational and worthy weight. He certainly was not known as a crook or mentally imbalanced person in any way.

Yet, unlike almost every other American who may have had the means, position, talent and patriotic conviction to do any investigation of the JFKA beyond the universally doubted Warren Commission finding, only lawman Jim Garrison took on this daunting and great risk task. 

His doing so and seeing it through to it's Shaw trial end came with a lifelong beating that left him reputation wounded and with other great loss ( including his family ) and is still going on today!

What other high-profile American felt inspired enough, courageous enough to even consider finding the truth about the JFKA beyond the disbelieved Warren Report for the good of our traumatized "Truth, Justice And The American Way" lost faith and trust nation?

Our mainstream media and their leadership didn't even try! The WC failed in that effort according to the views of the strong majority of the American public disbelieving the WC conclusion of Oswald as the lone gunman and no conspiracy involved. To this 61 year long day!

Do these Garrison bashers feel LBJ, Hoover, Dulles, Angleton, and others in that realm deserve more admiration, respect and blind JFKA truth trust than him?

I'll take Garrison and his life-long good character over those other nefarious actors in a heart-beat second.

LBJ was so crooked. Hoover so compromised. Both coddled by big oil titans, Dulles fired by JFK and said about him ..."he thought he was a little God!"

Now THERE'S a highest esteemed trio ( all with a shared hatred of JFK ) of trustworthy men of good, honest and unbiased character... eh?

Yet none of them have ever been trashed like Jim Garrison.

The evil, attention seeking, false lie promoting boogie man of the JFKA investigation historical world? 

And nothing Garrison did "came close" to the monumentally destructive impediment to the JFKA truth mission that the Dallas Police Department ( specifically Chief Curry and Captain Will Fritz ) caused by their epically inept ( or suspect? ) security failure with the killing of the most important criminal suspect in American history - Lee Harvey Oswald "right inside" their own Police Department building!

After ignoring repeated rational warning concerns from their own staff to not move Oswald except under the cover of night, with no press and public announcement of the place and time. 

That singular event triggered more loss of trust in our government than any before and since.

You want to trash someone in this JFKA truth damaging realm... those two deserve it more than Garrison.

And if the full truth of just LBJ's life-long corruption were to be finally seriously and honestly revealed ( not the Robert Caro whitewash ) Jim Garrison would be /should be looked upon as a Frank Capra-ish George Bailey Jimmy Stewart type hero in comparison imo.

 

 

 

 

Edited 19 hours ago by Joe Bauer

[Greg Doudna]

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Greg,

    I'm planning to study the Rose Cheramie story-- including Greg Parker's essay-- in more detail.

    But, meanwhile, let me point out that you never even responded to James DiEugenio's detailed, scholarly references on this very thread about Fred Litwin's work!  

    That seems quite odd.  Why the silence?

Whataboutism W.?

The reason I didn't respond to that is because I saw nothing relevant to the specifics of my comments on the content of the book upon which I offered my comments.

Here I respond. I read what DiEugenio cited. I think DiEugenio scored some points. I think Litwin scored a few more points answering back, which is not to say DiEugenio didn't score any. Its obvious there is very bad blood there. I would never take an all-or-nothing approach to any author whether Litwin or DiEugenio or any other as you are trying to box me into.

I thoroughly disagree with the DiEugenio theme that people should literally refuse to read or cite specific data or information or argument based on attacks on the authoring sources. I believe that is fundamentally wrong both in principle as method, and strategically.

It sounds as if you were trying to crush or shut down or silence my honest response to the content of the specific chapters in the book under discussion, as if I had committed an affront to decency or a crime by saying what I think.

Edited Friday at 07:43 PM by Greg Doudna

[W. Niederhut]

C'mon, Greg.  

DiEugenio "scored some points" in his detailed critiques (above) of Litwin?

That's a ludicrous understatement.

As for Greg Parker's essay on Cheramie, his quotation from DiEugenio is worthwhile, but his neuropsychiatric diagnosis is simply silly.

Encephalitis is not acutely re-activated by car accidents.

If visual hallucinations occur with encephalitis, it is in the context of acute inflammation and delirium.

You need to read DiEugenio's excellent 1999 essay on Rose Cheramie, which I posted on a new thread today.

[Joseph McBride]

Jonathan, why don't you offer something

substantial for a change, not just

undocumented naysaying one-liners?

Your posts are just clutter. They are

not even effective trolling.

Edited Friday at 08:25 PM by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

Nice one Joe.  Nice to see you back.

BTW, there were even more witnesses to the Cheramie incident than I initially named.

There was also L. G. Carrier who heard her at Moosa Hospital

Plus, when I interviewed McGehee, he said an intern  came in from Jackson State and told him about her.

Cheramie is such a powerful witness because her experience ended up leading to Sergio Arcacha Smith and Emilio Santana. And the Hochian forces inside the community, like Litwin and Doudna, don't like that.  But its true.

 

Edited Friday at 08:49 PM by James DiEugenio

[Michael Kalin]

51 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

As for Greg Parker's essay on Cheramie, his quotation from DiEugenio is worthwhile, but his neuropsychiatric diagnosis is simply silly.

Encephalitis is not acutely re-activated by car accidents.

Thanks, good to see a medical person refute cyber quack Parker's diagnosis.

Another bogus Parker diagnosis is his finding that Oswald was an aspie, possibly a topic some day for another thread.

[Jonathan Cohen]

27 minutes ago, Joseph McBride said:

Jonathan, why don't you offer something

substantial for a change, not just

undocumented naysaying one-liners?

Your posts are just clutter. They are

not even effective trolling.

I have offered plenty of substance, and I have never once posted here for the purpose of "trolling." In this particular case, the "substance" is Litwin's research, which is now available for all to examine (or, apparently, for one of the moderators to demean as paid CIA disinformation without even bothering to read it).

[Robert Reeves]

2 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

I have offered plenty of substance, and I have never once posted here for the purpose of "trolling." In this particular case, the "substance" is Litwin's research, which is now available for all to examine (or, apparently, for one of the moderators to demean as paid CIA disinformation without even bothering to read it).

You post zero substance. In fact, you constantly disagree with members. You belittle their views:  but you have no research done by yourself to qualify your views. And when pointed out that you are, in fact - wrong ... you go underground and refuse to even acknowledge or debate the claims you've spewed.

I see you!

[Benjamin Cole]

7 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

W., I might have been more inclined to give a thoughtful brief answer to your question if you weren't so incredibly rude as to proudly refuse to read the argument at issue which in my attempt to write a helpful comment on the topic of this thread, a new book out on topics of interest to this community, I said that chapter was convincing--rude to say you won't look through the telescope, so to speak, while demanding that people who have looked through the telescope explain to you what convinced them Jupiter has moons which you are certain aren't there. (Alluding to an apocryphal story of Galileo that actually isn't true but fictionally serves to illustrate the point.)

And if you showed any sign of a discussion having the prospect of being fruitful--an actual discussion in which there is willingness to consider if there is new information or a better narrative explanation of existing information contrary to one's beliefs, or if that is not possible, still to listen and understand the argument being disagreed with.

On the basis of my understanding of the Rose Cheramie story, I am aware that Dr. Weiss believed she had foreknowledge, and officer Fruge. I believe they were mistaken, for reasons I thought Litwin explained well.

If you won't read, show no sign of being open to reevaluating existing beliefs on the matter if there is different information shown, but come across as saying belligerently, "YOU try to prove it to me--I dare you!" ... are you surprised at someone not having motivation to recite to you the specific content discussed in Litwin's chapter that you say you will refuse to look at, while demanding to have explained to you what is there and showing no sign of interest in actually learning, but only attacking?

Why not read Greg Parker's article? It is a somewhat different but complementary angle of analysis arriving at the same conclusion, and I think Parker's analysis on this is pretty convincing too. On this issue, it doesn't matter who writes an argument. The facts and documents and judicious assessment thereof on that subject matter are what matter.

As mentioned before, I have had a long interest in the Rose Cheramie story from having lived in the tiny town in east Texas where, about seven years before I arrived as a college student, she had been killed. I wrote a thoughtful, reflective piece earlier in this thread on a particular detail of the Rose Cheramie (Mercades) case from my own personal analysis. To that I can add one point, on the question of why she was hitchhiking where she was in the isolated area the night she was run over.

I don't know why, but (if I had the location right when I went to see where she was killed) there is an entrance to a state park there. I got the impression she was near if not right at that entrance, which could suggest she came out of that park, or else was dropped off there by a car which did enter or leave that park.

A second fact is the location where she was killed, from my memory, was actually within walking distance of Big Sandy itself--not a short walk, a couple of miles or so, I don't recall, but not impossible to walk--and from there one could hitchhike on Highway 80 straight shot west to Dallas, or to points east in Louisiana, whichever way she intended. However without someone coming forward who had been with her or driven her there who could explain, which never is known to have happened, it remains ultimately a mystery as to how she got there. 

GD--I appreciate your collegial tone.

At times, being civil is akin to casting pearls before swine.