JFK Assassination Forum

Dear Fancy Pants Rancid,

The following is what your bugbear, Tennent H. Bagley, wrote about John L. Hart, his anti-Golitsyn "Monster Plot" report and his pro-Nosenko HSCA testimony.

Read it and weep.

My comments are in brackets.

[...]

-- Tom

PS:  You can look up the footnotes yourself.

It will be good for you.

https://archive.org/stream/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames/Spy%20Wars%20-%20Moles%2C%20Mysteries%2C%20and%20Deadly%20Games_djvu.tx

When are you going to address the disclosure, discovered by the ARRB, that Ruby had foreknowledge of the assassination?

The disclosure was made by a former informant for the Intelligence Division of the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service, Bob Vanderslice. When Vanderslice saw news reports in early 1977 that the HSCA was going to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, he decided he should tell his IRS contact about the incident. 

The Dallas FBI report noted that the IRS agent said Vanderslice was a reliable informant. The report also noted that Vanderslice’s undercover work involved gathering information on the “criminal element” in Dallas, and that he had known one of Jack Ruby’s nightclub strippers.

I discuss the Vanderslice disclosure at length in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy (pp. 28-30).

"If there had been conspiracy, someone would have talked." A number of people did talk, including Bob Vanderslice.

When are you going to address the disclosure, discovered by the ARRB, that Ruby had foreknowledge of the assassination?

The disclosure was made by a former informant for the Intelligence Division of the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service, Bob Vanderslice. When Vanderslice saw news reports in early 1977 that the HSCA was going to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, he decided he should tell his IRS contact about the incident. 

The Dallas FBI report noted that the IRS agent said Vanderslice was a reliable informant. The report also noted that Vanderslice’s undercover work involved gathering information on the “criminal element” in Dallas, and that he had known one of Jack Ruby’s nightclub strippers.

I discuss the Vanderslice disclosure at length in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy (pp. 28-30).

"If there had been conspiracy, someone would have talked." A number of people did talk, including Bob Vanderslice.

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.