Why I fight the BFEE

[Octafish]

16. Who put the 'Buy' into Buy-Partisanship

About three years after the death of President John F. Kennedy, it became a matter of official CIA policy to denigrate anyone who disagreed with the Warren Commission conclusion of Oswald as the lone gunman. So, the agency ordered its "media assets" to label anyone who disagreed with the Big Lie as a "conspiracy nut." Ever hear Corporate McPravda say anything nice about Jim Garrison or Oliver Stone?

Here's background:

How the CIA Killed History

by Ace R. Hayes
(May/June 1997 issue)
From the Portland Free Press

Editor's note: Three decades ago (4 January 1967), the CIA produced adocument (#1035-960), "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report." This document was partly declassified under an FOIA, September 1976. It is the blueprint for employing "CIA media assets" to smear critics of the Warren Commission. The justification for this perversion of truth, justice and democracy was clearly stated: "Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society."

CONTINUED…

http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhreport/flash//ciakillhistory.html

Read this CIA document 1035-960 here:

http://www.discip.crdp.ac-caen.fr/anglais/documents/america2/CIA%20Document%20_1035-960.htm


Countering Criticism of the Warren Report

http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html

The term “conspiracy nut” soon evolved into “conspiracy theorist” as code for “psychotic,” “paranoid” or “kook.” Consider how quickly that label, once pinned on a person, prevents any further consideration of the person’s rhetoric, writings or discoveries.

So people who wonder why the “government” doesn’t give two figs for finding out who killed President Kennedy, a Liberal Democrat, who worked every day of his time as President to keep the peace, make life better for ALL Americans, and make the world a better place (which is a lot more than most presidents since have done or even tried) are called “nuts.”

That's what Allen Dulles, J Edgar Hoover, and their stooges and sub-stooges in Congress and the White House worked to do. And to think so many today continue their work, spreading lies. The hell with such people.

Here’s a bit of real work by David Talbot. The editor of Slate.com, Talbot’s a more accomplished journalist, writer, researcher and an all-around better source than Kos ever will be, IMFO.

The Mother of All Cover-Ups

Forty years after the Warren Report, the official verdict on the Kennedy assassination, we now know the country's high and mighty were secretly among its biggest critics

by David Talbot
This article first appeared in the September 15, 2004 issue of Salon.com

EXCERPT…

There is one sanctuary where the Warren Report is still stubbornly upheld and where its manifold critics can expect their own rough treatment: in the towers of the media elite. Fresh from assaulting Oliver Stone, not only for his film but his very character (a media shark-attack in which, I must confess, I too once engaged), the national press rushed to embrace Gerald Posner's bold 1993 defense of the Warren Report, "Case Closed," making it a bestseller. ("The most convincing explanation of the assassination," historian Robert Dallek called it in the Boston Globe.) And the 40th anniversary of JFK's murder last November sparked a new cannonade of anti-conspiracy sound and fury, with ABC's Peter Jennings making yet another network news attempt to silence the report's critics. Most of the press lords and pundits in the 1960s who allowed themselves to be convinced that the Warren Report was the correct version of what happened in Dallas -- whether because they genuinely believed it or because they thought it was for the good of the country -- are now dead or retired. But after buying the official version for so long, it seems the elite media institutions have too much invested in the Warren Report to change their minds now, even if they're under new editorial leadership.

One of the great ironies of history is that while the media elite was busily trying to shore up public confidence in the Warren Report, the political elite was privately confiding among themselves that the report was a travesty, a fairy tale for mass consumption. Presidents, White House aides, intelligence officials, senators, congressmen, even foreign leaders -- they all muttered darkly among themselves that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, a plot that a number of them suspected had roots in the U.S. government itself. (In truth, some high media dignitaries have also quietly shared their doubts about the official version. In 1993, CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who did much along with his network to enforce the party line on Dallas, confessed to Robert Tannenbaum, the former deputy chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, "We really blew it on the Kennedy assassination.&quot

Thanks to tapes of White House conversations that have been released to the public in recent years, we now know that the man who appointed the Warren Commission -- President Lyndon Johnson -- did not believe its conclusions. On September 18, 1964, the last day the panel met, commission member Sen. Richard Russell phoned Johnson, his old political protege, to tell him he did not believe the single bullet theory, the key to the commission's finding that Oswald acted alone. "I don't either," Johnson told him. Johnson's theories about what really happened in Dallas shifted over the years. Soon after the assassination, Johnson was led to believe by the CIA that Kennedy might have been the victim of a Soviet conspiracy. Later his suspicions focused on Castro; during his long-running feud with Robert Kennedy, LBJ leaked a story to Washington columnist Drew Pearson suggesting the Kennedy brothers themselves were responsible JFK's death by triggering a violent reaction from the Cuban leader with their "goddamed Murder Inc." plots to kill him. In 1967, according to a report in the Washington Post, Johnson's suspicious gaze came to rest on the CIA. The newspaper quoted White House aide Marvin Watson as saying that Johnson was "now convinced" Kennedy was the victim of a plot and "that the CIA had something to do with this plot." Max Holland, who has just published a study of LBJ's views on Dallas, "The Kennedy Assassination Tapes," intriguingly concludes that Johnson remained haunted by the murder throughout his tenure in the White House. "It is virtually an article of faith among historians that the war in Vietnam was the overwhelming reason the president left office in 1969, a worn, bitter, and disillusioned man," writes Holland. "Yet the assassination-related tapes paint a more nuanced portrait, one in which Johnson's view of the assassination weighed as heavily on him as did the war."

Critics of the Warren Report's lone-assassin conclusion were often stumped by defenders of the report with the question, "If there was a conspiracy, why didn't President Kennedy's own brother -- the attorney general of the United States, Robert Kennedy -- do anything about it?" It's true that, at least until shortly before his assassination death in June 1968, Bobby Kennedy publicly supported the Warren Report. On March 25, during a presidential campaign rally at San Fernando Valley State College in California, Kennedy was dramatically confronted by a woman heckler, who called out, "We want to know who killed President Kennedy!" Kennedy responded by saying, "I stand by the Warren Commission Report." But at a later campaign appearance, days before his assassination, Bobby Kennedy said the opposite, according to his former press spokesman Frank Mankiewicz. When asked if he would reopen the investigation into his brother's death, he uttered a simple, one-word answer: "Yes." Mankiewicz recalls today, "I remember that I was stunned by the answer. It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down the questioning -- you know, 'Yes, now let's move on.'"

His public statements on the Warren Report were obviously freighted with political and emotional -- and perhaps even security -- concerns for Bobby Kennedy. But we have no doubt what his private opinion of the report was -- as his biographer Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy "regarded the Warren Commission as a public relations exercise to reassure the public." According to a variety of reports, Kennedy immediately suspected a plot as soon as he heard his brother had been shot in Dallas. And as he made calls and inquiries in the hours and days after the assassination, he came to an ominous conclusion: JFK was the victim of a domestic political conspiracy. In a remarkable passage in "One Hell of a Gamble," a widely praised 1997 history of the Cuban missile crisis based on declassified Soviet and U.S. government documents, historians Alexksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali wrote that on November 29, one week after the assassination, Bobby Kennedy dispatched a close family friend named William Walton to Moscow with a remarkable message for Georgi Bolshakov, the KGB agent he had come to trust during the nerve-wracking back-channel discussions sparked by the missile crisis. According to the historians, Walton told Bolshakov that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed "there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald's rifle" and "that Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime." The Kennedys also sought to reassure the Soviets that despite Oswald's apparent connections to the communist world, they believed President Kennedy had been killed by American enemies. This is a stunning account -- with the fallen president's brother and widow communicating their chilling suspicions to the preeminent world rival of the U.S. -- and it has not received nearly the public attention it deserves.

CONTINUED…

http://home.earthlink.net/~jkelin1/talbot.html

Why is it that some people make the “koo-koo” signal circling their forefinger around their temple and rolling their eyes whenever the subject is something that may be outside their understanding?

People who advance or doubt “conspiracy theories” when they are disagreeing with the “official story” are not nuts. They are not even “theorists.” They are Truth Seekers.

PS & Most importantly: Thank you for sticking up to them, Berlum.