Wake up, CTers

[Tom Graves]

I have previously informed Tom that he is on Ignore, which he is, but I gather from the various threads he's started that I have set him off.

My point here is not directed at the substance of Newman's work. I find it boring and mind-numbing. My life for the past 75 years has been rather pleasant, so hats off to the KGB if they've been in charge all that time. Keep up the good work, comrades!

I was struck by Royden's article about Angleton's KGB mania and his paranoid view of the KGB as being "10 feet tall." My view of the KGB (including several trips to Belarus) is pretty much the same as my view of all government agencies: mostly bureaucratic clowns, "Boris and Natasha" stuff in the case of the KGB.

My point was that if Newman purports to be doing serious, scholarly work, then (1) he would be publishing in the numerous scholarly, peer-reviewed outlets for precisely this sort of work instead of self-publishing unintelligible document dumps, and (2) his work would have caused at least a ripple in the community of serious scholars interested in precisely this aspect of Cold War history. The fact that the only ripples have been in the CT community should tell CTers something about the quality of the work. That's all.

Dear Fancy Pants Lance,

Former high-level Army Intelligence analyst John Newman has always been strong on interpreting and deciphering CIA cables, memos, and routing slips, etc. but he's always had "the gift of gab" and he's always been a JFKA conspiracy theorist kook.

Probably because he doesn't believe in the so-called "Single Bullet Theory" (because he hasn't taken a close look at it?), or some-such thing.

Unlike you, however, I don't believe in throwing out the baby with the bathwater, metaphorically speaking.

But he's making progress, I guess, because although he now believes that some high-level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Moscow and Peking in 1963, at he least now, thanks to LNer Tennent H. Bagley and CTist Malcolm Blunt, no longer believes that father-figure-requiring James Angleton was the mastermind of the assassination, but that JJA was duped, Kim Philby-like, by his CONFIDANT and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie, into sending Oswald to Moscow in 1959 in a, unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald, planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole." Which mole hunt lasted nine years, tore the Soviet Russia Division apart, protected Solie from being uncovered, and drove Angleton nuts.

Btw, your putting me on "ignore" reminds me of what Jim "I Never Met a Communist I Didn't Cherish" DiEugenio does at the so-called Ed Forum whenever he gets flustered.

Carry on, Fancy Pants Lance, you Trump-supporter and Putin apologist, you.

Don't you want The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") to release the Epstein Files, Fancy Pants?

I do, even if the tapes do show "hated Dems" like Bill Clinton or Barak Obama or [fill in the blank] doing you-know-what to 12-year-old girls.

-- Tom

PS According to Tennent H. Bagley and Angleton, himself, Angleton didn't think Russians were ten feet tall, he had just knew that the Kremlin, having realized that the USSR and the Warsaw Pact couldn't defeat the U.S. and NATO militarily, decided at the 21st Party Congress in February 1959 to get us to tear ourselves apart by setting up a top-secret, deception-based Department D in the First Chief Directorate (today's SVR) to wage disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies, and that risk-taking General Oleg Gribanov, not to be outdone, set up his own deception-based Department 14 in his Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB). Tennent H. Bagley tells us in Spy Wars that as soon as Gribanov had trapped CIA's spy, GRU Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky, in such a way that wouldn't reveal who in U.S. or British Intelligence had betrayed him in April 1961, he sent GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak, in late 1961 and early 1962, respectively, to the FBI's NYC field office to "volunteer" to spy for it at the U.N., and six months later sent putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling Angleton (and Angleton was sharing with his confidant, Solie) about possible KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the Intelligence services of our NATO allies.

[Tom Graves]

I have previously informed Tom that he is on Ignore, which he is, but I gather from the various threads he's started that I have set him off.

Dear Fancy Prancer Lancer,

Your abject "Ostrich-With-Head-In-Sand" ignorance on certain historical issues, your all-American facility of wishful thinking and self-deception, and your Dr. Gary Aguilar-like arrogance could "set off" a lot of people.

Since I believe Oswald probably killed JFK without help from the KGB or the DGI, and that the KGB has taken advantage of the anomaly-replete assassination to help it tear down our social fabric and our body politic (thank you very much "Paese Sera" newspaper, Ralph Schoenman, Jim Garrison, Ellen Ray, and Oliver Stone, et al. ad nauseam), and since I believe that "former" KGB officer Vladimir Putin installed his "useful idiot" (or worse), Donald Trump, as our "President" on 20 January 2016, I gotta ask you -- are there any Trump policies that you dislike, or is everything hunky dory as far as you're concerned?

[Lance Payette]

Oh my goodness. This is beyond silly. This gives new meaning to the terms "grandstanding" and "posturing." This is making a mountain out of a nearly flat mole hill. It is also very misleading. You lone-gunman theorists have made countless egregious errors and bogus claims in this forum and elsewhere, and when you're confronted with facts that refute your claims, you refuse to admit your error.

For the benefit of any guests/visitors, a little perspective will be helpful, in the form of these three points:

One, Lance Payette belongs to the 1/4 to 1/3 of adults in the Western world who still believe that Oswald shot JFK all by himself and had no accomplices before or after the shooting. For at least the last 20 years, numerous opinion surveys have found that 2/3 to 3/4 of those surveyed about the JFK case have said they do not believe only one person was involved in JFK's death. So it is a bit odd that so many lone-gunman theorists posture as though pro-conspiracy researchers belong to some kind of unserious fringe and that few experts support the conspiracy view.

Two, literally hundreds of accomplished people and experts in various fields have rejected the lone-gunman theory and have presented evidence that JFK was killed by multiple gunmen and that a cover-up followed. These people include history professors, law professors, medical professionals, former military snipers, attorneys, acoustical scientists, former staffers on government boards/committees, research scientists, and physicists. Pro-conspiracy experts have had articles published in several peer-reviewed professional and/or scientific journals, including the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Medical Research Archives, and Science and Justice. 

Three, in 1979, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations formally concluded that JFK was probably killed by a conspiracy, that two gunmen fired at JFK, that a shot came from the grassy knoll, that Jack Ruby had Mafia ties, that Ruby stalked Oswald before killing him, that Ruby lied about why he killed Oswald, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police department basement to kill Oswald, that Silvia Odio's account is credible (her account shows someone was trying to frame Oswald before the assassination), that JFK was hit before frame 190 in the Zapruder film, that the autopsy doctors mislocated the back wound, that the autopsy doctors failed to follow basic autopsy procedures, that the back wound's abrasion collar proves the bullet hit at an upward angle, that the tunneling inside the back wound ranges upward, that the Secret Service protection of JFK in Dallas may have been "uniquely insecure," and that the Warren Commission failed to follow up on leads that indicated conspiracy, among other findings.

I think I've made my points, but will simply note:

1. The HSCA is basically WC+. Time and science have not been kind to the sole basis on which the HSCA concluded there had been four shots and thus a second, frontal gunman. The HSCA accepted the LN narrative virtually in its entirety, including the SBT and Walker attempt. The HSCA exonerated most of the agencies and organizations that are CT favorites, leaving open the possibility that "individual members" of organized crime (Blakey's obsession) or anti-Castro groups may have been involved. CTers make as much hay out of the HSCA's dubious "conspiracy" conclusion as they do out Oswald's completely out of context "patsy" statement.

2. The truth of the JFKA is not determined by public opinion polls. Virtually all the brouhaha over the past 60 years has been conspiracy-oriented. The WR and LN narrative scarcely make for breaking news. As Walter Cronkite famously said, "We don't run news stories about all the cats who don't get stuck in trees and don't have to be rescued by the fire department." Most of the people who think there was a conspiracy couldn't tell you the most basic facts about the JFKA or what they think the conspiracy was - merely "there's just so much weird sh*t, dude, there had to be a conspiracy."

3. Every field of weirdness - Young Earth, Flat Earth, 9/11, JFKA, alien abductions, you name it - has lunatic fringe proponents with impeccable academic and professional credentials. This fallacious appeal to authority thus doesn't carry much weight insofar as JFKA conspiracy theories are concerned. The overwhelming consensus of the professional and academic communities is that the WC basically got things right.

4. The number of diverse and often diametrically opposed conspiracy theories that have been proposed and are still promoted is almost breathtaking. Far from coalescing around the HSCA's suspicion that individual members of organized crime and/or anti-Castro groups may have been involved, the loudest voices of the CT community virtually ignore those possibilities because they aren't sexy enough for their political/ideological agenda in which the JFKA is merely a chess piece. The sheer number and diversity of conspiracy theories is the best evidence that this is just a silly game, a Star Trek convention rather than an historical quest.

5. In the world of conspiracy factoids, we are not talking about innocent errors that might creep into anyone's work. We are talking about demonstrable falsehoods that get repeated, over and over, until they harden into conspiracy gospel and the original source is long forgotten. Our expert here, Michael, said the Walker note surfaced two months after the assassination when it in fact surfaced the week of the assassination and Marina was first questioned about it nine days after the assassination. He relied on a "usually reliable" and prominent JFKA site for a factoid about the HSCA that was completely false. This is, alas, business as usual in the CT community. As I pointed out with Newman's work, it's slapdash, sling-the-mud-and-hope-it-sticks, agenda-driven blather posing as serious research and scholarship.

Bingo indeed.

[Tom Graves]

John Newman's work is slapdash, sling-the-mud-and-hope-it-sticks, agenda-driven blather posing as serious research and scholarship.

Dear Lance,

Given what you've learned about Bruce Leonard Solie from Tennent H. Bagley's book, Spy Wars (including his "clearing" Nosenko in October 1968; you've read it, right?), and from Solie's discovered-by-Newman travel records from his February 1957 trip to Beirut and his two trips to Paris within 30 days of each other in mid-1962, and from Malcolm Blunt's discoveries that in April 1964 Solie tried to talk W. David Slawson into letting Nosenko testify to the Warren Commission even though the Soviet Russia Division and the Counterintelligence Staff believed he was a false defector, and from Blunt's discovery that Solie hid Office of Security files from the Church Committee, etc., etc., do you think Newman is wrong to conclude that Solie was a KGB "mole," and from Tennent H. Bagley's pointing out to Malcolm Blunt that since some CIA documents indicated that someone in the CIA arranged ahead-of-time for all of the incoming non-CIA cables on Oswald's defection to go to Solie's office in the Office of Security instead of where they would normally go, Oswald must have been a "witting defector," i.e., he'd been led to believe he was on a mission for the non-KGB-controlled CIA?

-- Tom