Although this blog usually steers clear of the JFK assassination, I must make mention of the radio "special" I heard (in part) while driving home from Thanksgiving dinner. The host was the wild-n-woolly George Noori, inheritor of the Art Bell legacy.
For his opening act, Noori interviewed Robert Kiviat, who gained infamy as the producer of the notorious FOX television hoax, Alien Autopsy. Kiviat's new FOX special will draw attention to the claims of one James Files, a convicted murderer who claims that he shot JFK from the grassy knoll.
Kiviat spoke as though he discovered this story, even though Files has been a well-known commodity for some fifteen years. An earlier interview with him is available at most Blockbuster video stores; in it, Files reveals no information he could not have garnered from reading material available to everyone.
Contrary to the impression left by Noori and Kiviat, a number of others have been fingered as shooters, and some have even "confessed." Files' "confession" is particularly problematical -- this page (compiled by a careful pro-conspiracy researcher) details just some of the issues. CIA whistleblower John Stockwell offers his own reactions.
I could go on, but I want to focus on Kiviat's stated reasons for believing Files. He told Noori (the following is from memory) that the Files story exactly matches the conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Matches how, you ask? Well, the HSCA concluded that there was probably a second gunman on the grassy knoll. And Files says that he was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Ergo, he must be telling the truth.
So sayeth Kiviat. I'm not kidding. That was his argument.
Kiviat went on to ask "Why would Files lie?" Well, money may be one motive; years ago, Files asked for remuneration when he peddled his tale to NBC. But even if we discount the financial inducement, we have to recall the example of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, a murderer sent to the gallows in 1892. He yelled "I am Jack the..." just as the trapdoor opened -- even though he had been incarcerated in Joliet prison at the time of the Ripper murders. Files may well be another Cream.
After Kiviat floated off into the ether, Noori took a call from Stephanie Caruana, tirelessly flogging her Gemstone File, a schizy crackpot classic taken seriously by no writer on the assassination. Then we heard the old chestnut about JFK being shot because he was going to put the U.S. back on the gold standard. (It's a lie, foisted upon the world by Jim Marrs, Holocaust revisionist and noted tranny.)
After that, I had to tune out.
The JFK assassination is a serious subject which had once attracted many fine writers. Over the past twelve-or-so years, the kooks have taken over the asylum. I turned away from the subject when the ghastly Jim Fetzer tirelessly promoted his theory that the Zapruder film had been altered in ways unobtainable in the pre-digital age. Not a single expert in the history of Hollywood special effects artistry has ever supported his bizarre assertions. Now Fetzer promotes the idea that space lasers destroyed the World Trade Center.
Whenever these controversies arise, the public is given two -- and only two -- choices: Believe the Official Story, or believe the Tales From Wackyland. Only those who can free themselves from this false dichotomy can ever hope to learn the truth.
6 comments:
We do need to escape from these false dichotomies that pressure us to either buy an obviously erroneous official explanation for events or believe a wildly speculative conspiracy theory.
The plethora of conspiracy theories about the Kennedy/King/Kennedy assassinations, or the events of September 11 could be easily put to rest by the government. All they have to do is authorize and cooperate fully with an thorough independent investigation by a impartial group with full subpoena power and the highest security clearance.
The fact that they don't take this action leaves us to the logical conclusion that our government doesn't want us to know the truth. From there, the speculation as to the reason for their lack of candor runs rampant.
If "we the people" are ever able to regain control of our government, after we stop imprisoning, torturing and murdering innocent people, we should uncover the truth about all these mysteries. Until then, absent the sudden appearance of incontrovertible evidence, it makes sense to put these events on the back burner and concentrate on returning to Constitutional government and some semblance of democracy.
John Birchers float the whole Gold Standard conspiracy whenever they can because the return to the gold standard is their ultimate goal. I never really thought of Marrs as a Bircher, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was one of their tools.
here's some interesting reading- which includes research for a book on Gold
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/gold10a.html
can scan through the book here - if the link works
http://books.google.com/books?id=RvVEqVcdgHIC&pg=PA175&lpg=PA175&dq=seagraves+birch+%22gold+warriors%22&source=web&ots=Ceq27qzzhj&sig=rDimOe-d8eH4erYv4iPJt4m_GkA
and incidentally here's the main reason Birchers like Ron Paul:
http://www.intheagora.com/archives/2007/10/ron_paul_and_th_1.html
Tfort
Even the Spotlight, Willis Carto's publication, spent some column inches debunking the JFK silver certificate story's conclusion.
However, by Joe's typical epistemological theories, since Carto is a a holocaust revisionist and a JBS-leaning theorist and has some other unsavory associations, surely everything he claims is false, and anyone believing anything he asserts is a lying right wing holocaust denier/revisionist.
So, if the Spotlight says JFK did NOT make his executive order to challenge the Fed's Federal Reserve Note monopoly, then he actually MUST have done it for that reason, and others who agree with the Spotlight on this issue (ala the linked piece from the McAdam web site) must share all the negative ethical and moral baggage of Willis Carto & co.
I don't believe in this kind of universalist guilt by association debunking, as it seems quite clear that many persons may hold both true and untrue theories, as a function of their capacity for critical thinking, ability to overcome cognitive dissonance, etc.
But Joe surely does believe in it, by his own manifold uses of this reasoning. Therefore, we can be absolutely sure the JFK DID his silver certificate EO for these reasons that Carto's Spotlight says he didn't. Because it, and Carto, cannot be right about anything, and anyone who believes anything they say is true must be a fellow traveler in all their other misguided beliefs.
Again, I reject this kind of reasoning, but it seems clear that Joe must embrace it, because he uses it so much.
I wonder which others of McAdam's JFK theories Joe would endorse, because McAdam is a WC defender par excellance, I should think.
JFK's true threat against the Fed, which I believe he was making, just as he explicitly threatened big oil, big steel, organized crime, the CIA and the MIC, was in declining to commit the country to the Vietnam War, and working instead towards a modus vivendi with the Soviets that would have seen detente breaking out a decade earlier than it did, with tragic consequences to those who count on the large issuance of new debt for their livelihood and control.
...sofla
What the McAdam site doesn't consider is, if the USA was no longer on the gold standard after gold became illegal to own in '34, then what was Nixon doing when he uncoupled the US dollar from gold by first maintaining a two-tiered gold price, and then closed the gold 'window' altogether?
If we weren't on the gold standard, how could Nixon take us OFF the gold standard?
The answer is, of course, that under the post-war Bretton Woods financial agreements, the US dollar WAS redeemable in gold at a certain par value of the dollar per each troy ounce of gold (only to foreigners or foreign countries, not to US nationals).
Was that still a gold standard? I'd say so, making McAdam appear less than totally reliable, as he'd rather make the point about '34 than explain what continued into effect until Nixon changed it.
....sofla
Joseph,
I've actually seen some of the video of Files telling his story to the Feds. The story is full of technical details BUT if you watch him talk at ease in an unimportant conversation, it's quite a bit different from his recanting of 11/22/63. He's got all kinds of tells in his mannerisms that scream that he knows he's lying. You should try to get a hold of the vid and watch it if you can.
I'm not quite the reactionary you suppose, sofla. I did not know that Carto had published a debunking of the gold standard canard, but now that I think about it, I'm not too surprised. He probably got his information from his son-in-law, Mark Lane.
The marriage of Lane (who is Jewish) to Carto's daughter caused all sorts of strange ripples in the ultra-right underworld. Carto's beliefs seem to have modulated, even as his anti-Semitic compatriots mounted an epic split. Of course, no-one on the left would ever trust Carto -- just as quite a few in the JFK community long ago decided to mistrust Lane.
Strange world!
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