Myths and Errors in ABC's "Truth and Lies" Documentary

[Steve Barber]

Three of the less pleasant years of my legal career had me representing the local mental health agency. I was the “prosecutor” (as it were) for the involuntary commitment of folks suffering from serious mental disorders. In every case, I had to present the testimony of two licensed psychiatrists. Hence, I eventually had a pretty good grasp of the medical issues. It was unpleasant because many of these folks were intelligent and had loving families; they just badly needed help and were incapable of facing this reality on their own.

As I’ve described in other posts, conspiracy-prone thinking is not necessarily pathological – but don’t kid yourself, much of it is. What passes for “normal” on a JFKA forum is definitely not normal in the outside world. I see little thinking in the CT community, even at the highest levels, that I wouldn’t describe as “highly aberrant” at best. (Some, yes.)

I won’t engage in amateur diagnosis* but anyone who can’t see that the posts of someone like MTG and several others here do not reflect a mind tracking in the channels of normality needs to take a hard look in the mirror at himself.

*With the exception of OCD/TDS Tom, of course – but that’s just so obvious it scarcely even requires an amateur diagnosis.

It is entirely rational to see that the LN narrative is less than watertight and to attempt to think through whether the holes can be plausibly plugged. It is entirely rational to entertain a conspiracy theory that bears at least some resemblance to what a real-world Presidential assassination might have looked like. To become caught up in the sort of nonsense propounded by MTG and his ilk, and to fail to recognize it for what it is, is ... well, an epistemological problem in itself. The sort of CT stuff propounded by MTG and his ilk actually does a disservice to serious, rational analysis of the JFKA.

The thought process seems to be, "If I can argue that absolutely everything associated with the JFKA was in furtherance of a conspiracy, then people are sure to believe that at least some of it was." Well, no, that's not how rational analysis works.

   

[Michael T. Griffith]

Howard Brennan's work supervisor, Sandy Speaker, told Jim Marrs that federal agents applied enormous pressure on Brennan to ID Oswald as the man he'd seen in the sixth-floor window:

Brennan’s job foreman, Sandy Speaker, told this author:

They took [Brennan] off for about three weeks. I don’t know if they were Secret Service or FBI, but they were federal people. He came back a nervous wreck and within a year his hair had turned snow white. He wouldn’t talk about [the assassination] after that. He was scared to death. They made him say what they wanted him to say. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, Basic Books Edition, revised and expanded, p. 25)