The Nature of Human Intelligence: A Textbook

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-nature-of-human-intelligence-a-textbook/

The Nature of Human Intelligence: A Textbook

James Thompson • July 3, 2018

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Online publication date: January 2018
Print publication year: 2018
Online ISBN: 9781316817049

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316817049

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/nature-of-human-intelligence/EA400EC57513FF0E7742ED32F6E0A5AE

I do not wish to quote myself too often, but in my 2013 review of Sternberg’s Handbook of Intelligence I raised an eyebrow about how often he quoted himself, and by means of an internal citation count questioned whether his choice of authors constituted a fair representation of the field. In a reply, Sternberg said that since he was developing the field beyond general intelligence, it was natural that he should be quoting the new approaches he had initiated.

Sternberg begins his latest volume with an explanation: he has invited the 19 most cited psychometricians to contribute (the late lamented Buz Hunt was too ill to participate). This method is good, and will set a standard for other editors to follow. Respect.

1. Intelligence as Potentiality and Actuality. Phillip L. Ackerman
   
2. Hereditary Ability: g Is Driven by Experience- Producing Drives. Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr.
   
3. Culture, Sex, and Intelligence: Descriptive and Proscriptive Issues. Stephen J. Ceci, Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn, & Wendy M. Williams
   
4. The Nature of the General Factor of Intelligence. Andrew R. A. Conway & Kristof Kovacs
   
5. Intelligence in Edinburgh, Scotland: Bringing Intelligence to Life. Ian J. Deary & Stuart J. Ritchie
   
6. Intelligence as Domain-Specific Superior Reproducible Performance: The Role of Acquired Domain- Specific Mechanisms in Expert Performance. K. Anders Ericsson
   
7. Intelligence, Society, and Human Autonomy. James R. Flynn
   
8. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences: Psychological and Educational Perspectives. Howard Gardner, Mindy Kornhaber, & Jie-Qi Chen
   
9. g Theory: How Recurring Variation in Human Intelligence and the Complexity of Everyday Tasks Create Social Structure and the Democratic Dilemma. Linda S. Gottfredson
   
10. Puzzled Intelligence: Looking for Missing Pieces. Elena L. Grigorenko
    
11. A View from the Brain. Richard J. Haier
    
12. Is Critical Thinking a Better Model of Intelligence? Diane F. Halpern & Heather A. Butler
    
13. Many Pathways, One Destination: IQ Tests, Intelligent Testing, and the Continual Push for More Equitable Assessments. Alan S. Kaufman
    
14. My Quest to Understand Human Intelligence. Scott Barry Kaufman
    
15. Mapping the Outer Envelope of Intelligence: A Multidimensional View from the Top. David Lubinski
    
16. The Intelligence of Nations. Richard Lynn
    
17. Intelligences about Things and Intelligences about People. John D. Mayer
    
18. Mechanisms of Working Memory Capacity and Fluid Intelligence and Their Common Dependence on Executive Attention 287 Zach Shipstead & Randall W. Engle
    
19. Successful Intelligence in Theory, Research, and Practice. Robert J. Sternberg

First up is Phillip Ackerman, distinguishing between intellectual potentiality and actuality. I don’t agree with many of his arguments, so let me explain them. Ackerman is good at distinguishing between sheer general problem-solving brain power and accumulated, skilled knowledge. Intelligence testing includes plenty of the former, and a selection of the common denominator of the latter. He notes that when you get into wide ranging content areas, men and women differ considerably, and argues that the only reason we don’t have separate normative data for the sexes is that Lewis Terman preferred that the sexes be declared equal on the Stanford Binet, and achieved this by counter-balancing items so they appeared the same. One learns something every day. Academic domains of general knowledge usually show a male advantage, but women are ahead in health matters. Ackerman proposes that effort is a big part of actual human achievement, and who would quibble with that, save some of the facts? Practice makes one third perfect.

His chapter has one data table, and one theoretical figure.

Thomas Bouchard next, on hereditary ability. He immediately counters (and refines) Ackerman’s effort argument with Darwin’s admission that Galton has convinced him that intelligence is hereditary and of major importance:

You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.

It is worth emphasizing Darwin’s astute comment that there is a difference between intelligence and motivation (zeal) and effort (hard work), and that the difference is important. Galton himself was well aware of the difference and argued that all three were influenced by heredity. “The triple event, of ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour[,] is inherited”. Galton’s speculative proposal has been nicely confirmed. We now know that virtually all traits (human and nonhuman, psychological and otherwise) are influenced by heredity.

Bouchard goes through a scrub-clearing exercise on the hoary objections about what intelligence is (Gottfredson’s explanation is perfectly good); the reality of g: g is inevitable if the range of tests and range of intellects is wide enough and sample sizes big enough; the notion that at some threshold higher intelligence doesn’t matter: it is monotonically effective;

This chapter is more evidence based, in my view, but that may be because it is treading a path I am in favour of. This chapter gives one figure with data.

Chapter 3
Culture, Sex, and Intelligence: Descriptive and Proscriptive Issues
Stephen J. Ceci , Donna K. Ginther , Shulamit Kahn , & Wendy M. Williams

Lots of data and figures on sex differences, stereotypes and a growth mindset.

Chapter 4
The Nature of the General Factor of Intelligence
Andrew R. A. Conway & Kristof Kovacs

About the relationship between working memory, executive attention, and intelligence. This line of work has culminated in a new theory of the positive manifold of intelligence and a corresponding new model of the general factor, g. We refer to this new framework as process overlap theory (POT) (Kovacs & Conway, 2016b ).

Chapter 5
Intelligence in Edinburgh, Scotland: Bringing Intelligence to Life
Ian J. Deary & Stuart J. Ritchie

People who tend to be good at one mental ability tend to be good at others also; these include remembering things, manipulating information, working out general principles from a set of examples and then applying them more broadly, thinking quickly, organising mental work, working things out in two or three dimensions, knowing word meanings, and knowing facts about the world.

These are action packed pages, written with aplomb by leading researchers in the business.

Chapter 6
Intelligence as Domain- Specific Superior Reproducible Performance
The Role of Acquired Domain- Specific Mechanisms in Expert Performance
K. Anders Ericsson

The two of us started a long- term practice study with a CMU student, Steve Faloon (SF), whose initial span was around seven digits. After several hundred hours of practice with the digit- span task, SF attained a digit- span of 82 digits, which is an improvement of more than 1,000%. Th is research has been described in considerable detail elsewhere (Chase & Ericsson, 1981 , 1982 ; Ericsson, 2013 ; Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980 ), so I will focus on the implications for immutable mental capacities as well as for how very high levels of performance in domains of expertise can be acquired. In fact, when SF was presented rapidly with lists of consonants (digit span for consonants), his span was unchanged (around six consonants) even after SF’s digit span had been increased by well over 300%. Some of my colleagues argued that these demonstrations of improved memory for rapidly presented digits, but only for digits, were relatively uninteresting because nobody cares about acquiring such a useless memory skill with no obvious real- world benefits. A fundamentally different interpretation of our findings is that they demonstrate evidence that anybody interested in acquiring increased ability to rapidly store and retrieve information in a particular domain of activity should be able to do so by acquiring domain-specific memory skills.

He concludes:

First, the standard practice of selecting children and adolescents for future advanced- level education based on the traditional tests of intelligence needs to be reconsidered, given their lack of relation to performance among skilled performers. Second, our educational system should not simply train students to rapidly acquire introductory and relatively superfi cial knowledge in many domains. Students should be taught and trained to attain an advanced level of performance in at least one domain, so they will know how they can improve performance in their future profession and how expert performance can be attained with appropriate practice with feedback under the guidance of teachers.

I must say that I think he is demonstrably incorrect. General intelligence remains the best predictor across the whole range of ability. I think that Ericsson should at least note the problem of restriction of range. The top performers on intellectual tasks are far brighter than average. If you then go on to correlate intelligence test scores with elite performance, you should correct the correlations for restriction of range.

Also, in describing the heroic individuals who spent two years boosting their forwards digit span from 7 digits to 80 digits (without it boosting any other form of working memory) I think it would be good to mention Shannon on information theory and “chunking”

Chapter 7
Intelligence, Society, and Human Autonomy
James R. Flynn

James Flynn’s chapter is very different in style from the others. It is written in philosophical terms, and often advances very general concepts, like “mental exercise”. It is engaging, easy to read, yet to my mind often speculative. (However, I know that some of his speculations have received strong support). Flynn argues that even if mental skill improvements “are not on g” they are still of real-life importance. That makes sense to me. He argues that minds adapt to the needs of the times, and brain change with mental exercise, such that the hippocampus enlarges when tasks require considerable memorization. Perhaps so.

Here I wish to introduce some all- important concepts: that the brain is like a muscle that profits from exercise; over time, society changes in terms of what cognitive exercise it asks us to do; and the very stuff of our brain alters to allow us to meet the challenges of our time and place. These concepts apply to our physique. If we all went from swimming to weightlifting in a generation, our physical muscles would alter dramatically. If no one drives a car in 1900 and everyone drives a car in 1950 and all cars have an automatic guidance system in 2000, the size of the hippocampus (the map- reading area of the brain) would increase and then decrease in a few generations (Maguire et al., 2000 ). What IQ gains over time deliver is a historical message about new demands on our cognitive abilities.

I know that I am somewhere between agnostic and just confused about secular rises in intelligence, and generally not on Flynn’s side of the argument about the changes in scores, and that will have influenced my reading of his chapter. I suppose the stumbling block in my mind is that there has been no Flynn Effect on maths and digit span. On the most basic tests: no change.

Chapter 8
The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Psychological and Educational Perspectives
Howard Gardner , Mindy Kornhaber , & Jie- Qi Chen

Gardner describes his ideas, their origins and development.

Support from psychometric findings: Gardner acknowledges the “positive manifold” across standardized tests, but correlations will be much reduced if the intelligence can be assessed in context;

No figures or tables. Supportive evidence referenced in a link. It would have been better to have discussed it in the chapter.

Chapter 9

g Theory
How Recurring Variation in Human Intelligence and the Complexity of Everyday Tasks Create Social Structure and the Democratic Dilemma
Linda S. Gottfredson

Gottfredson explains how she began to get interested in the topic of intelligence, and asked the basic question: “does the inherent nature of some work tasks and jobs require workers to do more difficult mental processing to carry out the tasks?”. Gottfredson factor analyzed the attributes of occupations, not workers. She tested claims from sociology with data from other disciplines.

She provides a data-rich account of what intelligence means in everyday life. Gottfredson connected dots that traditional psychometricians left dangling in space, because they thought everyone understood percentile ranks, and that the cognitive demands of tasks did not need to be explained in any detail.

Spotting and Confronting the Use of Deceptive Science
There was tremendous political and legal pressure on employers in the 1980s and 1990s to use “nondiscriminatory” tests, meaning ones having no disparate impact (different pass rates by race or gender; Gottfredson & Sharf, 1988 ). Efforts to increase test reliability and validity had boomeranged because they tended to increase, not reduce, disparate impact by race by better measuring g. Adding personality tests to a selection battery hardlydented the disparate impact. The temptation to “psychomagic” grew.

Chapter 10

Puzzled Intelligence
Looking for Missing Pieces
Elena L. Grigorenko

Grigorenko describes the work which needs to be done to substantiate the epigenomic hypothesis for intelligence.

Currently, there is no published human work substantiating the hypothesis that both across development and within individuals, fluctuations in intelligence can be attributed to individual differences in the epigenome in general and in the methylome in particular.

Chapter 11
A View from the Brain
Richard J. Haier

Excellent review of the field. Since I recently reviewed Richard Haier’s book on the subject I will not add anything further.

Chapter 12
Is Critical Thinking a Better Model of Intelligence?
Diane F. Halpern and Heather A. Butler

We agree with Stanovich ( 2010 ), who wrote that critical thinking is “What intelligence tests miss.” He argues that a critical piece is missing from the traditional conceptualization of intelligence or IQ, namely a rationality quotient (RQ). Stanovich and his colleagues question why seemingly smart, accomplished people do blatantly foolish things. They argue, and we agree, that IQ and rational thinking are different constructs.

However, they correlate 0.7. I think Stanovich has failed to substantiate his extensive claims.

With diminished interest I read the rest of the chapter, but there were better things waiting. In a study whether an intelligence test and a test of critical thinking were used to predict self-reported real-life errors of judgment, both were predictive, but the critical thinking test somewhat more so. However, self-report has notorious shortcomings. If critical thinking can really be taught, successful students should have achievements which are evident to others. For example, proportional to their incomes, and with due allowance for charitable donations, they should have more savings than uncritical thinkers.

Predicting real-world outcomes: Critical thinking ability is a better predictor of life decisions than intelligence
Heather A. Butler, Christopher Pentoney, Mabelle P. Bong
Given that such skills can be trained, even after allowing for weak confirmation, this is a promising result.

Chapter 13
Many Pathways, One Destination
IQ Tests, Intelligent Testing, and the Continual Push for More Equitable Assessments
Alan S. Kaufman

A good potted history of intelligence testing, particularly the Wechsler tests. Kaufman says they did not innovate from 1915 until 2008. This is exactly the date at which many British clinicians think that they deteriorated, becoming faddish, over-factored, less reliable, and impossible to compare with almost a century of clinical history. Some notable clinician stick to the old versions, and regard the new ones as publisher’s hype. However, Kaufman rightly makes fun of the habit of over-interpreting subtest score patterns.

I investigated data for the 2,200 children and adolescents in the WISC- R standardization sample and discovered that it is normal to have scatter. The average child had a V- P discrepancy (in either direction) of 10 points (Kaufman, 1976b ). One in four children had IQ discrepancies of more than 15 points, supposedly conclusive proof of brain damage. And subtest scatter? Th e WISC- R was comprised of 10 subtests whose scaled scores (standard scores with mean = 10 and SD = 3) could range from 1 to 19. Thus, one’s scaled- score range (highest scaled score minus lowest scaled score) could potentially be as high as 18. The average person had a scaled- score range of 7 + 2 points; a range of nine was entirely within normal range (Kaufman, 1976a).

Kaufman is someone I could talk to for a long time. The number of people who have administered more than 400 Wechsler tests is probably falling fast, and the number having done that as well as being active in intelligence research is pretty small.

He signs off his chapter by talking about the intelligence research his children are doing. Good news. Psychometrics is hereditable.

Chapter 14
My Quest to Understand Human Intelligence
Scott Barry Kaufman

Begins with a strong and touching personal story about being kept in special education for years because of a long-resolved hearing infection. No wonder this child wanted to learn about intelligence. He kept quiet about this early experience for years. Wise.

Kaufman describes his theory of personal intelligence.

Of course, the Theory of Personal Intelligence was influenced by many different perspectives, and I really view it as a synthesis rather than a completely new theory. According to Sternberg (1997, 2011), successful intelligence is defined as the ability to achieve one’s goals in life (in terms of one’s own personal standards), within one’s sociocultural context, by capitalizing on strengths and correcting or compensating for weaknesses, in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments, through a combination of analytical, creative, and practical abilities. Many elements of this theory have inspired the Theory of Personal Intelligence, including the personal definition of success, the importance of context and building on strengths, and the inclusion of abilities that go beyond IQ. The Theory of Personal Intelligence goes beyond ability, however, including engagement, character strengths, and other “noncognitive” traits in the model (Heckman, 2000 ; Peterson & Seligman, 1994 ).

As you may surmise, I don’t agree with this formulation. Eratostenes surpassed his sociocultural context, and whether he achieved his own goals in life might have been of interest to him, his mother and his friends, but did not influence his estimate of the circumference of the world. I see the above list as a way of asking another question “Did person X do well in life?”. That is, “did they use their talents well?” An important question. I would consider it the Mark Twain version of life success, in that if a kid gets to St Louis, they do well. As to actual success, then boring old IQ is the best predictor available, out of a weak bunch. I am all in favour of casting the net widely to catch abilities not yet detected, but when those focus on imagination (a great time waster) and creativity (a great morass of imponderables) barely a mouse crawls out from those mountains.

Chapter 15

Mapping the Outer Envelope of Intelligence
A Multidimensional View from the Top
David Lubinski

This is a very good summary of the work on high ability. It points out that there is no replication crisis in psychometrics. Many writers try to attach new labels to old constructs, but the underlying factors remain pretty constant, whatever they are called. I rate this work highly, and have covered it often, so I will commend it once again and pass on to other chapters, beyond asking you to remember the number 5.

Some years ago I was at a Royal Society conference, and over coffee heard two Fellows discussing that although the difference between elite athletes and average fitness could be measure accurately no such metric was available for mental ability. Boldly, I said that the brightest thinkers were 5 times as fast as the slowest, basing this on some observations by Jensen. They seemed will to accept this approximation.

Ninety- five years ago, Carl Emil Seashore (1922) pointed out that among a random sample of college freshmen, the top 5% can learn five times more academic material than the bottom 5% (per unit time), and that there are successive gradations in between these levels.

That is the forgotten aspect of intelligence: you can cover more ground faster, and so can travel further.

On page 251 there is a most interesting note on the Graduate Record examination, revealing that a score of 500 on the verbal scale puts you at the 59th percentile rank, but a score of 500 on the maths scale merely at the 18th percentile. Never accept a score without seeing the score distributions. Also, make a mental note that tests of maths ability are probably the most informative.

Chapter 16
The Intelligence of Nations
Richard Lynn

This is a very good summary of the work Richard Lynn has done for years on the ability levels of nations. He once said that, if only Physics is of any value, and all other disciplines are mere stamp collecting, then he has been a mere collector of country IQs. This chapter gives the correlations between national level and lots of other economic and social indicators. I have covered the national data many times before, so will not add further comment other than to say that the chapter is a very good starting point for new readers.

Chapter 17
Intelligences about Things and Intelligences about People
John D. Mayer

John Mayer is interested in social intelligence, and whether this exists as a separate ability. He also considers emotional intelligence and personal intelligence.

Here is an example from Mayer’s Test of Personal Intelligence which includes items such as:

If a person is outgoing and talkative, most likely, she is also inclined to be:
a. self- controlled
b. more assertive than average
c. anxious and impulsive
d. altruistic

The correct answer here is “b. more assertive than average,” because research on the big five personality traits indicate that talkativeness and sociability are more highly correlated with assertiveness than with the other listed alternatives.

So, if a person has personal intelligence, they will have noticed those features of human behaviour which are detected and confirmed by personality questionnaires.

Personal intelligence may also divide into two subsidiary factors that correlate about r = 0.80 with one another (Mayer, Panter, & Caruso, 2014 ). The first factor involves perceiving consistencies in people’s behaviors. The second factor represents reasoning about personality dynamics, such has how goals interrelate, and how multiple observers each may perceive the same person differently.

For example, personal intelligence correlates just r = 0.17 and r = 0.20 with SAT- Math and spatial intelligence measures, but rises to r = 0.39 with verbal intelligence (which presumably is midway between thing- and person- focused), and rises again to r = 0.53 with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes scale, a measure of understanding people, and exhibits an r = 0.69 with the MSCEIT understanding emotions and managing emotions areas (the latter, managing emotion area, arguably blends somewhat into personal intelligence at a conceptual level).

Chapter 18
Mechanisms of Working Memory Capacity and Fluid Intelligence and Their Common Dependence on Executive Attention
Zach Shipstead and Randall W. Engle

We did not set out to study intelligence. The question at the origin of this line of work was why complex memory span tasks correlate so highly and so consistently (Turner & Engle, 1989 ) with a huge array of real- world tasks when simple span tasks do so less well and very inconsistently (Dempster,1981 ). We attempted to answer this question by a combination of methods taken from both experimental psychology and differential psychology – a response to Cronbach’s ( 1957 ) complaint that the two approaches to psychology historically have disregarded each other.

Chapter 19

Successful Intelligence in Theory, Research, and Practice
Robert J. Sternberg

My reaction is that Successful Intelligence is a tautology: unsuccessful thinking is hardly intelligent.

Sternberg says:

Intelligence really is nothing in particular, as it is a construct humans have invented, largely to explain why some people are better at performing some classes of tasks than others (Sternberg, 1984a ). Many different metaphors can characterize intelligence (Sternberg, 1990 ), but these too are creations to help us understand our own invention

Well, all constructs are invented by humans, including “nothing” “particular” “people” “performing” and “tasks”. Are there more trenchant points to follow?

Sternberg continues:

Successful intelligence is one’s ability to choose, reevaluate, and, to the extent possible, attain one’s goals in life, within one’s sociocultural context. A successfully intelligent person recognizes his or her strengths and weaknesses and then capitalizes on strengths while compensating for or correcting weaknesses. He or she does so through a combination of analytical, creative, practical, and wisdom- based/ ethical skills (Sternberg, 2003 ).

I have an immediate problem with this definition, namely criterion heterodoxy, or the “rubber ruler” mistake. People’s goals in life differ, and their concepts of success. It would put me, as someone who became an academic to read, write and discuss psychology in relative tranquillity, on a par with others who also wanted and did those things, but who actually published more widely and consequently had a greater impact. I rank Sternberg more highly than myself. My next problem is that the actual ingredients in this successful intelligence turn out to be analytical, creative, practical and wisdom based. Agreed. Intelligent people are good at those things, some far more so than others, and all of these intellectual abilities correlate with each other, and with real life achievements.

Sternberg says:

what constitutes intelligent behavior may differ radically from one culture to another in terms of the adaptive requirements of the culture. For example, in a rural Kenyan village, knowledge of natural herbal medicine used to combat parasitic illnesses may be key to adaptation and hence intelligence (Sternberg et al., 2001); in the United States, such knowledge may be useless.

Well, no, actually. The rural Kenyan village in this story had many children with parasitic illnesses, so there was zero evidence that herbal concoctions were effective. When you read the small print in this study, the authors in fact gave the infested children US developed modern drugs, and showed that after proper treatment they functioned better. It also turned out that the measure of knowledge of herbal medicine they used was one in which agreeing that herbal medicines were effective counted as a point towards knowing things about herb medicines. I don’t think that this study proves anything about radical differences in what constitutes intellgent behaviour. Don’t let anyone sell you this argument in an Ebola epidemic. Equally, Sternberg notes that precocity in children is welcomed in the US but frowned upon in Kenya. This would be interesting if Kenya exceeded the US in intellectual achievements. This not being the case might suggest, if early child interventions have any influence at all, that Kenyans should try applauding their youngsters when they venture their premature observations.

Later in the chapter there is much work on the contributions of Successful Intelligence tests to the selection of university students, and this is the strongest aspect of the chapter.

Conclusions

I am sorry that I did not cover all the chapters in equal detail, and also sorry that this review is too long. I have not had time to make it shorter.

Textbooks are far more likely than original papers to be read by students. Textbooks also carry an air of authority not achieved by other publications, so may well determine how a topic is seen by a generation that will read little else on the subject. This textbook will convince them that there is real content in psychometric research. Those with more knowledge of the field may feel that some researchers are highly quoted on the slender basis that their conjectures seem uplifting, and that their schemes of self-improvement give heart to many hopeful readers. Other researchers provide results which may be less welcome, but their papers come out with a frequency and a wealth of content which demands attention.

Robert Graves was chastised by the tutors examining his thesis on the White Goddess of inspiration “for having favoured some poets over others”. All reviewers must do so. Must editors?

At one stage when reading this volume I thought that the noble plan of asking the most cited psychologists to contribute had gone horribly wrong. There are citations and citations. I wanted to admit that the editor should decide which sort of psychology they value and must invite contributions from those they regard as having the best ideas and supportive evidence, and must stand or fall on that. As I continued to read I returned to my view that gathering the most-cited authors has paid off.

I think that this is a better representation of the field than was achieved in previous volumes. It also shows many authors at their best, in that they have compressed their work into considered and readable summaries. The format of scientific papers, nobly striving for dispassionate rectitude, is too often stale and humourless, and proves hard going for most readers. These chapters are often better, with a moiety of conversational asides and personal disclosure.

We have had a good, well-balanced look at the most cited scholars on intelligence. Some are better than others. Are some of them cited purely because they have an uplifting message, and are on the side of the angels? Could be. Authors certainly differ in how much they are research based. Some rely on a few confirmatory studies, others are supported by a very wide range of research results. What unifies them is a deep interest in the subject, and the willingness to pursue their speculations by putting them to the test.

If students still read textbooks in university libraries, looking out at the campus lawns as their more feckless colleagues make their way to sunlit assignations, I think this volume will merit their quiet, scholarly approbation.

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Ron Unz: the JFK Assassination, Comments 3

Ron Unz: the JFK Assassination, Comments 3

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/#comment-2389456

COMMENTS
===============


Bardon Kaldian says:
June 25, 2018 at 10:23 am GMT • 300 Words

This is a very good continuation of RU’s previous article & I agree with most of it to different degrees re candidates for conspiracy: LBJ (probably), Israel/Mossad (possibly, not probably).

But, more important, at least to me, is the question: does it really matter, anymore?

In 1963, US was mostly Euro-American country, with 85-90% whites & “normal” behavior.

Now, 55 years later, both US & most of the white countries, excluding many ex-Communist lands, are so different that Kennedy’s ideas, motives,… hardly matter. We live in a radically altered world.

Whites in the US are now 60-65% of the population & dominant discourse is anti-white, anti-European, Negromaniac, Mestizophilic, Asian-fetishist & Judeo-idolatrian. Everything historically Western is demonized.

Lunatic ideologies are step-by-step destroying the West: radical feminism (http://diversitymachtfrei.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-problem-with-feminism-why.html ), homosexualism (not homosexuality) as ideology, media manipulation in favor of miscegenation (always at the expense of whites), deathly combination of crass materialism & failure of nerve- probably in past 400 years European peoples had never been so well off & so hopeless simultaneously. All industrialized people do not procreate at satisfactory levels (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans,..), but there is a bunch of them & at least they are not letting foreigners in. Only various white peoples both invite masses of racially or culturally unassimilable foreigners (Muslims, Africans, Mestizos) & refuse to have progeny because they want “good and unencumbered life”.
Add media moronization & addiction to technologies making ego-centric (and anti-individualistic) idiots of most people- what could get wrong?

After counter-cultural 60s that had catastrophically changed Western countries (US, France, UK, Germany,..) for good & the dominance of New Left world-view (loony fake anti-Fascism, hostility towards working class, free sex & promiscuity, homosex popularization, obsession with drugs, radical feminism, hatred toward historical Western culture, moral relativism, hatred for Christianity, anti-male animus, Negrolatry, anti-rationalism & dumbing down of entire generations, ..) for at least 2-3 irredeemable decades – does it matter who & why killed JFK, anymore?
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Iris says:
June 25, 2018 at 11:37 am GMT • 100 Words

The killer shooting the fatal shot at President Kennedy’s head from the Grassy Knoll was captured on the Orville Nix film.
Anybody can judge by themselves on this extract:

https://youtu.be/ZYUXeTmFFZw

https://youtu.be/YoMDVEKnyHM

https://youtu.be/m1wJ6NmL5IY

The Orville Nix film was “lost” by the authorities before the Warren Commission proceedings. Fortunately, a secret copy had been made, and was broadcast in the 1988 documentary “The day the dream died”.
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gsjackson says:
June 25, 2018 at 12:30 pm GMT • 200 Words

I’ve heard Stone talk about Nixon’s reaction to seeing Ruby shoot Oswald, but this surely wasn’t an eyewitness account, as Stone was in 6th grade at the time. His career as a political operative goes back about 45 years to volunteering for CREEP as a college student in 1972, somewhat less as an influential one.

Apparently Johnson’s mistress said he told her in so many words that the assassination was going to happen. I think there’s little doubt that he was aware and acquiescent, perhaps an active participant. Ruby probably was his man, and he and Ruby both likely were Israel’s men. A few years later Johnson was blood in the water for the mainstream media shark tank over Vietnam and civil disorder. If he were the prime mover of the JFK assassination, I doubt that the media would uniformly have laid off the subject. Only Israel, it would seem, could have orchestrated such a massive and continuous cover up.
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TonyVodvarka says:
June 25, 2018 at 3:15 pm GMT • 100 Words
@Buzz Mohawk

Viewing the Zapruder film carefully, one can see that, during the six seconds of shooting, the limousine’s brake lights are on and it almost comes to a halt. The chauffeur is looking back all this time and does not speed off until he sees JFK’s head explode. There is a film clip that shows that, as the cortege begins to leave Love Field, the SS agents that attempted to ride in the normal protective position on the back bumper were called away by the chief of the detail. The two men protested strongly but were ordered back to a car. There were no motorcycle outriders, a standard security procedure. The 1112th Military Intelligence group, which normally would have secured the parade route was ordered to stand down and there was no additional security to replace them. Make of it what you will.
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CanSpeccy says: • Website
June 25, 2018 at 3:27 pm GMT • 300 Words

    the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion. At best, we can evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high likelihoods let alone near certainties. And given the total absence of any hard evidence, our exploration of the origins of the assassination must necessarily rely upon cautious speculation.

What pathetic bollocks. You should write for CNN.

If the doctors attending on Kennedy at the Parklands Hospital, men experienced with gunshot wounds, all agreed, as they did, that Kennedy was killed by a bullet to the front of his head, then he was not killed by bullets from the Texas School Book Depository window where Oswald is alleged to have been. Therefore, the Warren Commission Report is based on lies. In particular, a phony autopsy report and a rewriting of the autopsy report findings by none other than President-to-be, Gerald Ford. That’s not a matter of plausibilities or possibilities, liklihoods or non-certainties. It’s as hard evidence as you ever likely to get in a court of law.

But Israel didn’t do it! LOL. Who said Israel did do it? Only some of the nutters that comment freely here.

What would be interesting, if anyone would take the trouble to do it, is to delve more deeply into the political connections of the people in the CIA who organized the crime. If LBJ was the greatest beneficiary, it is nevertheless likely that there were Republicans on side with the killing, otherwise the CIA would surely not have acted. That E. Howard Hunt, Mexico City CIA station chief at the time of the assassination appears to have been connected with the event through (a) Oswald’s visit to the Mexico City CIA office, and (b) Hunt’s alleged presence in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, suggests that Hunt’s role in the Watergate burglary was to see what information the Democratic Party may have had relating to the assassination that could have been used to damage Richard Nixon in his run for re-election.
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jdf says:
June 25, 2018 at 4:33 pm GMT • 300 Words

Nice summary of the salient points of the assassinations. A couple of things that did not get mentioned:
The “wink” as LBJ was being sworn in. It clinches it.
Marion Brown’s statement that LBJ, her lover, told her well in advance that JFK was going to be killed.
Peter Dale Scott stated: The door to the assassination is through Jack Ruby.
Ruby’s phone calls were looked at by the FBI and Justice Dept., and catalogued. Almost all were to Jewish mafia figures–not Italians. When the House Assassinations Committee asked for these transcripts, they were told they no longer existed! But old copies were eventually found. Someone in DOJ tried to scrub them from the records.
One of the best books on the assassination IMHO is Gaeton Fonzi’s “The Last Investigation.”
Piper’s book is essential reading, but he focuses only on Israel and the Jewish connections. Because of its lack of “balance”, it should not be read as a stand-alone treatise on the JFK assassination.
Among my top ten books are–admittedly a list long out of date:
On the Trail of the Assassins
The Last Investigation
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
JFK and the Unspeakable
Final Judgment (with above reservations)

Probably more important would be a list of books absolutely NOT to be read–among them Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed.”

As a general rule, you can consider ANYONE arguing that Unz is full of s$#t and Oswald did it as a crazed lone assassin, is a paid TROLL. The assassinations are grounded in solid research that has been going on since the 1970s, when I attended a four-hour lecture by David Lifton at SUNY Stony Brook–an event that literally toppled my world. It has never recovered.
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Buzz Mohawk says:
June 25, 2018 at 4:47 pm GMT • 200 Words
@TonyVodvarka

Watch the film. You can casually count off five or six seconds just between the second and third shots (the neck wound and the head wound). The first shot (assuming you agree with most witnesses that there were three heard at least) happened some time before, missed and is not seen in this film.

For years people have been making a simple, common mistake and thinking there were only six seconds for all three shots, when in fact approximately six seconds passed between the last two shots. This simple thought error has been the basis of a lot of claims that the shooter didn’t have time for three good shots. He missed, then hit the neck, and six seconds later hit the head while the car was nearly motionless.

As to the driver slowing down. Think. He is looking back because his passengers are screaming. He hits the brakes and tries to find out what is happening. There is no reason to think he stopped so somebody could shoot.

Again, watch the stabilized, panoramic film. Then, if you need to, go to Dallas and see how small Dealy Plaza really is and how easy it would have been to make those shots from that window.

As I say about 9/11: You don’t need to construct some Rube Goldberg series of actions and a magic team to have a conspiracy. There can be a conspiracy even if you agree with Occam and take the simplest route.
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Ron Unz says:
June 25, 2018 at 5:24 pm GMT • 300 Words
@JohnnyWalker123

    You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing LBJ’s likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have them killed?

I very much doubt that. Johnson died at the beginning of 1973, a very widely despised and hated figure, and surely few people feared any retaliation much after that, let alone Talbot and Douglass writing forty years later.

I suspect there were several factors, mostly the ones I outlined in my discussion.

First, most JFK researchers were strong liberals or otherwise admired “Camelot,” and it surely would have been very difficult for them to psychologically accept that most of JFK’s top people were perfectly willing to continue working for LBJ, if the latter had murdered the former.

Also, “LBJ Killed JFK” might sound like such a ultra “crazy conspiracy theory” to publishers and editors who overwhelmingly may still believe that a “lone gunman” killed JFK. So writers who considered making such a claim might fear having their careers totally ruined. I think fear of humiliation, reputation-loss, and the resulting financial damage is a far greater factor than fear of physical harm.

Here’s another factor. Having a vice president come to power by assassinating his predecessor is the sort of thing that just doesn’t happen in developed First World countries. Offhand, I can’t think of even a single case in any major country over the last couple of hundred years. It would probably be pretty embarrassing for even a Third World banana-republic. What respectable American historian would want to admit that the politics of our own country at the height of its international prestige during the early 1960s may have actually made Guatemala look like a shining example of orderly, constitutional government?…
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Abe says: • Website
June 25, 2018 at 5:55 pm GMT • 200 Words

Very nice. Just one thing, though- anyone who was an adult during the Cold War understands the immense importance of propaganda and ‘optics’ as they say now. In 1981 the French Communist Party won 15% of the Presidential vote. Together with the Socilaist Party that was a combined 40%.

Much of what constituted American’ political theater’ in the Cold War era consisted of ‘double bank-shot’ efforts to convince a somewhat cold and borderline hostile European public to support the trans-Atlantic alliance and the American system which underlay it, a difficult proposition given that European leftists were ideologically opposed to America’s capitalist system, while seemingly natural-ally European rightists were often repulsed by the gauche nature of American culture, critical of unrestrained ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism, plus resentful of American pop-cultural ‘imperialism’ as well.

In such a climate the cultivation of a positive American image abroad was a primary concern of the Deep State, and given what immeasurable harm the exposure of a CIA coup would have done to America’s standing as ‘leader of the free world’ I cannot imagine the plot was CIA-hatched or led. CIA connivance and behind-the-scenes assistance raises very interesting possibilities, though.
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Carlton Meyer says: • Website
June 25, 2018 at 5:56 pm GMT • 100 Words

I recently learned of another smoking gun. After JFKs Limo arrived at Parkland hospital, many people looked it over and took photos. There was a bullet hole through the front windshield. It entered from the front, yet was never discussed afterwards by anyone. The Limo was hauled away to Washington within hours and secretly repaired. There are lots of links about this, such as:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/06/douglas-p-horne/photographic-evidence-of-bullet-hole-in-jfk-limousine-windshield-hiding-in-plain-sight/
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ians says:
June 25, 2018 at 6:02 pm GMT • 100 Words
@Buzz Mohawk

‘hit the neck’. There you go, bs on stilts, proving instantly you know damn all. The bullet hit in the back, several vertebrae down from the neck. The holes can be seen in the jacket and shirt. This bullet did not penetrate more than a couple of inches, as established at autopsy. Therefore, it could not have traversed the body and gone on its magical mystery tour, grievously wounding Connally, yet remaining virtually pristine. Ford, as he admitted, moved the notation of the location in the back upwards to the neck in the Report in an unsustainable attempt to make the Magic Bullet bs believable for cretins who hadn’t the wit nor the inclination to do any digging. The earth is not flat, there was no lone nut.
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Bardon Kaldian says:
June 25, 2018 at 7:05 pm GMT • 700 Words
@utu

    If Israel and Jewish Power killed JFK it matters very much. If by a magic wand I could make people believe that Israel and Jewish Power were behind JFK assassination it would be much easier to stop and undo all those things that you have listed:

This is simply wrong. Basically, it’s the Joo (or any other) conspiracy, according to this world-view.

The crucial mistake virtually all conspiracy- theories minded people make is that they try to pin-point a clearly defined group (mostly religious, ethnic, racial,..) as the source of major socio-cultural changes, and frequently it’s Jews (sometimes masons or something similar).

And this is a major misfire, because no such group exists. There is no causal connection between any ethnicity/race/… & great upheavals in the West (and in the US) in past 3-4 decades, especially re immigration debates, influx of culturally & racially foreign and inimical masses, disintegration of family & denigration of national loyalties etc. To think that a group (or groups), which is relatively easy to identify, can be the source of such monumental upheavals bespeaks of historical illiteracy.

There was no ethnic nor ideological group of people behind such shattering revolutions & world-view changes like transition from Roman republic to Imperial Rome, Protestant Reformation, Crusades, formation of national monarchies, Enlightenment, collapse of “divine rights” of kings, imperialist expansion of European powers, national awakening in the 19th C, WW1 and WW2,… Not Jews, not masons, not Illuminati, not Rosicrucians, not some occult brotherhood residing in the Himalayas.

Simply, Western civilization has come to a dead end -as it was the continuity of the 18th C Enlightenment- and we are witnessing the processes of further decay, encapsulated in famous hypothetical question ascribed to Lenin: ” Are the forces which propel us to greatness the same that will, transformed by mutations of History, eventually lead to our collapse ?”

A man who, despite his shortcomings & delusions about the role of technology, various national cultures and their dominant currents, understood this better than most was Oswald Spengler. The Western civilizational matrix is old and tired. And this is the root of the Western decline. That what plagues the West & the US the most (race replacement, PC “liberal” ideological muzzle, hedonist emptiness & biological collapse manifested in infertility, pathological altruism, lunatic ideological fashions like n-th wave of feminism, media aggression promoting “diversity” & homosexualism- as different from homosexuality, self-hatred of European & Western culture….)-this is as present, although a bit modified, in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, Switzerland,.. as in the US. And in these countries Jewish presence in the media & the overall life is negligible or non-existent.

Although ruling elites differ in these countries, they are a mixture of hereditary aristocracy, established bourgeois families & plutocratic oligarchs. These groups have, historically, served their countries. Now, they are morally & culturally bankrupt and serve outmoded gods whose future is annihilation- similar situation that had befallen pompous & deluded aristocrats in the 18th-19th C or imperialist jingoists in the 20th.

The failure of nerve that comes with exhausted & geriatric social-cultural matrix is to blame, not some group conspiracy.

But, the societal-cultural matrix is exhausted, not the people. Our flaw is linear extrapolation of current events which leads to paralyzing pessimist fatalism. We should know from history this is a fatal mistake. Just compare Europe in 1930 (cars, planes, fascism, communism, cubism, quantum mechanics, relativity, psychoanalysis, radio, tanks, films, ..) and during 1900 (technologically, scientifically, ideologically and artistically more or less the same as 1880).

So, we should not give up hope, and some of us who are obsessed with Jews, should give up this tired old chestnut. If all of US Jewish ethno-nationalists were booted to Israel, life would be somewhat easier for Euro-Americans in some respects, but not essentially different. Blacks would remain blacks, PC muzzle would remain PC muzzle, dopeheads would remain dopeheads, Pentagon would remain Pentagon, …
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Anon[257] • Disclaimer says:
June 25, 2018 at 7:32 pm GMT • 100 Words

Blood Money & Power by Barr McClennan

Murder From Within by Fred Newcomb

Both books claim Johnson killed Kennedy.

McClennan is the son of one of Johnson’s attorneys

I read them both along with Piper’s book.

They make a lot more sense that the right wing atmosphere of hate Dallas PD including officer Tippett another of Oswald’s Victims and president bush & cia fbi secret service army navy Air Force departments of agriculture and every other government department and of course the man directing the military ambush by 15 shooters, umbrella man.

Have fun with your myths legends and fairy tales, naive credulous gullible idiots.
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Been_there_done_that says:
June 25, 2018 at 8:26 pm GMT • 500 Words

While we’re on the topic of nefarious conspiracies to kill a U.S. President for the sake of promulgating various policy objectives that were not being pursued theretofore, I was curious how many readers of this thread have considered the following “Plan-A” objective embedded inside the larger 9/11 operation, for which planning obviously began more than a year before finally being executed. For instance, do people really believe it was just a coincidence that the film Pearl Harbor, over three hours long, just happened to be the blockbuster hit at the theaters earlier that summer, conveniently entrenching the often recited “New Pearl Harbor” meme into the minds of millions?

Since a common expectation during the time of the earlier planning stages of the operation was that Al Gore would be the new President, beginning in 2001, getting rid of him in the context of dynamiting the three World Trade towers in Manhattan could have subsequently been presented in the media almost as incidental, within the scope of thousands killed, though nonetheless highly unfortunate and grave. Joe Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, would then have succeeded Gore and would subsequently have surely pursued military wars on behalf of Israel far more vigorously, among other things.

Perhaps Gore should consider himself lucky that he lost the 2000 election. Instead, on that fateful day we got to see the following scenario, during which the Secret Service exposed that they somehow knew that George W. Bush was not a target of the big attack operation, as it was still unfolding; otherwise, had it been a surprise to them, they would have immediately taken him away, out of the classroom to an undisclosed location.

Bush & Kids – Six Minute Video Without Narration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTDixBG5qF4

Lest somebody think the choice of the children’s book (The Pet Goat, 1995) being recited in a well rehearsed cadence that morning was purely coincidental, take note that while attending Yale as an undergraduate, Bush, like a few previous American presidents, was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon (ΔKE) fraternity, for which a controversial initiation rite is to sexually copulate with a goat, a theme even alluded to as a double entendre in at least two of the published fraternity songs, and a practice that has repeatedly gotten this fraternity into trouble over the years. Since Bush himself was likely “out of the loop” about what was happening, event planners may have wanted to subtly remind him that, if he didn’t play along with The Script, their cohorts in the media could easily make a very big issue of him having drunkenly played out the role of the Greek God Pan in his youthful college years, as shown in a famous sculpture at the archaeological museum in Naples.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea if the term coincidence theorist were to become more widely used.
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Anon[257] • Disclaimer says:
June 25, 2018 at 8:42 pm GMT • 300 Words
@jdf

Did you read Lifton’s book? He claimed that sometime between landing in Washington and the arrival of the corpse in the autopsy room; the conspirators has a Dr standing by.

The Dr dug big holes in the wounds. The Drs who did the autopsy were fooled by the wounds dug in a corpse that had been dead several hours.

Apparently the navy Drs who did the autopsy didn’t realize that bodies don’t bleed after death.
If all the JFK killing books I’ve read, Leftin’s is the most ludicrous and unlikely.

And like so many idiots, he seems to think endless speculation about the wounds would prove who did the killing and why.

Start an investigation by asking who benefits. Insurance & arson investigators are experts at this. Police detectives start with an open mind.

Insurance investigators start out assuming that the beneficiary set the fire, committed the burglary car theft himself or killed the insured business partner or spouse.

As I see it, none of the authors of the books I read are investigators or even bothered to learn a bit about investigations before they decided that CIA FBI Dallas PD secret service did it.

Rib was right that almost all the books were written by leftist liberals seeking to prove that the lefts bete noir, law enforcement was responsible.

Remember that by the time Rush to Judgemetn and other leftist propaganda was written the blacks were rioting. , The Jewish left led the black rioters. The Jewish press defended the black rioters and castigated and blamed the the police.

It was no different from the recent Ferguson Mo riots after the vicious thug Michael Brown was shot as he attacked a police officer.
The left has always hated the police because the police are the only defense against the criminal blacks who target Whites.

The left has been attacking the police since the 1920s. That’s why the left myth makers attacked Dallas PD. That’s why the left will
always attack the police who control the criminal underclass tools of the left.
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Anon[257] • Disclaimer says:
June 25, 2018 at 8:59 pm GMT • 100 Words
@Ron Unz

I agree with you completely. Great minds think alike.

I was in my late teens when it happened and virtually every magazine and newspaper article and book written for the next 30 years was written from a left liberal propaganda point of view.

Much of it was the shock that the only suspect was a left liberal who had defected to the left heaven, Soviet Russia.

2 days later a man with an obvious Jewish name shot the only suspect. And this Jew was not a poor but honest small businessman, attorney crusading for social justice or refugee from anti Semitic Poland.

He was a pimp and sleazy strip club operator.

The left spent 30 years spouting ever more fantastic theories.
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Si1ver1ock says:
June 25, 2018 at 9:46 pm GMT • 100 Words

    On these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion.

Perhaps. One thing that becomes more clear over time is who benefited. Look closely at those who were put into positions to enable the coverup, people like George Joannides and Richard Helms. Who was promoted?

The Israel angle is interesting, but Israel doesn’t work for me. My government owes me an explanation. They have a duty to uphold the constitution. They swear an oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed. It is their duty to protect America from All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
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Iris says:
June 25, 2018 at 10:37 pm GMT • 100 Words
@Buzz Mohawk

“JFK’s head actually did move forward before it moved backward, whether or not Rather or anybody else noticed at the time. (This neither negates nor confirms a conspiracy, BTW.)”

The fact that the President’s head first moved forward would very much confirm a conspiracy.
If the agent driving the limousine applied the brakes, the head would go forward first.

Braking amounts at applying a negative acceleration to the car.
The negative acceleration does not however apply to a body inside the car, which will go forward until stopped by its own inertia. (This is a simple application of Newton’s second law of motion).

So the head going forward could indicate the driver was braking to make the President an easier, slower target, which in turn would confirm a conspiracy.
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redmudhooch says:
June 25, 2018 at 11:42 pm GMT • 300 Words

All signs point to Israel, as usual. The USS Liberty and Lavon Affair give them away, if they’re willing to attack an American ship, attempt to murder everyone on board that ship, no doubt they would kill the prez if needed. Just imagine if they had succeeded in sinking Liberty and killing everyone, we would have never known. The Zionists are well known for assassinations and false flags, they threatened Obama with assassination if he stepped out of line, all of this makes them prime suspect in 9/11 as well. Who benefited from 9/11? Certainly not Muslims. Just ask Netanyahu.

It all makes sense once you start looking at Israel/Zionists and their history of lies and murder to get their way.
Why does it still matter today? Just look at what The Lobby is doing to American politics, congress is subservient to AIPAC and the 6 million other Jewish lobbies, wonder why America is going down the drain? Had a real investigation taken place into JFK and RFK assassinations, USS Liberty would have never happened, 9/11 would have been prevented, Libya, Syria, Iraq would have been saved, the thousands of Christians slaughtered, all of the Palestinians murdered and kicked off of their land. All of the young Americans sent to die fighting the “neocons” wars. They’re currently doing their best to provoke real WW3, which not many of us if any will survive. Why does it still matter?
It matters a lot! If you have children, and you want their future to be better than what we have now, not worse, cause it’s gonna get a LOT worse, you better start caring, the Zionists intend to rule the world from Israel, it won’t be a world worth living in. Conspiracy FACT!
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Sean Sean Sean says:
June 25, 2018 at 11:59 pm GMT • 200 Words
@Sean

“I really doubt that anyone, even the US vice president or director of the CIA has the authority to order anything like a political assassination of a sitting President.”

Authority is not the word you’re looking for. The appropriate term, depending on your point of view, is either absolute sovereignty or impunity. A US Secretary of State formally defined sovereignty in absolute life-and-death terms repudiated two millenia ago by the Germanic tribes of pre-modern Europe. The entire world has negated this viewpoint by acclamation, so the USA’s a throwback.

In universally-acknowledged law, sovereignty is responsibility. But the US government thinks state responsibility is bullshit, and always did do. The US government has been assiduously undermining it ever since WWII. The US fights tooth and nail to make sure its citizens have no recourse to actions of the state, lawful or not.

Congress wrote absolute sovereignty into municipal law in the Central Intelligence Agency Act, various bureaucratic loopholes, and secret confidential legal pretexts. They gave it to CIA. The CIA command structure exercises not authority, but something akin to the divine right of kings, concealed for appearances’ sake as state secrets. So you misunderstand, or misrepresent, the government bureaucracy when you imagine that there’s that someone CIA would be scared to kill. They do what they want. And you do what they tell you to, or else.
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utu says:
June 26, 2018 at 12:01 am GMT • 600 Words

Here is a commenter at Mondoweiss who brings up many assassinations linked to Israel.

    http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/president-inspections-facility/
    July 28, 2015, 3:40 am

    What we have in the case of the Zionist movement and Israel is a pattern of a serial perpetrator of murder, mass murder and terror. This is a well established fact. That pattern started well before the creation of Israel, see eg the murder of Jacob Israël de Haan on 30/6/1924 or the King David Hotel bombing on 22/7/1946. That murderous pattern continued after the creation of Israel, see for the early days for example the murder of Folke Bernadotte on 17/9/1948 and then read “Israel’s sacred terrorism” based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary:

    https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/rokach.html

    Since the early days of Zionism there are so many proven Zionist and Israeli state sponsored murders that it is hard to keep tracking them all. The murderous pattern of Israeli behaviour continues to the very recent time, think for example of the attampted assassination of Khaled Mashal on 25/9/1997, the car bomb killing Imad Mughniyah on 12/2/2008, the murder of Brig Gen Mohammed Suleiman on 1/8/2008 (which was just recently proven by US documents to be an Israeli job), the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh on 19/1/2010 or the recent serial murder of Iranian scientists.

    The murder of Jacob Israël de Haan proves that the Zionist movement targeted also jews. It was not a single case. Naeim Giladi wrote in detail about his role as a Zionist in attacking Iraqi jews on behalf of Israel in his book: Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. We also know from things like Operation Susannah and the attempt to sink the USS Liberty that Israel also has already attacked US targets in the past.

    Generally I’ld say Israeli murders and terrors fit in two motive categories: either Israel committed state sponsored murders to get rid of anactual or perceived enemy like Khaled Mashal or Imad Mughniyah or someone deemed otherwise harmful to Israeli interests like Folke Bernadotte, or Israel committed acts of terror and murder with the intention of blaming the crime on someone else, ie perpetraiting “false flag operations”, like it was the case with attacking Iraqi jews or Operation Susannah. One regular motivation for Israeli false flag ops was to enlist the US in fighting Israel’s real or perceived enemies, ie starting US-led wars of aggression in the service of Israel. AIPAC/WINEP operatives publicly talk about using such “options” in the service of starting wars Israel wanted to get started:

    A typical Israeli method to ensure false blame was faking signal intelligence. Victor Ostrovsky wrote about how the Mossad did falsely blame Libya of terror in his time with radio signal boxes placed by the Mossad in Libya for that purpose. In the case of the Ghouta chemical false flag terror attack, Israel simply provided the US with faked signal intelligence, essentially saying to Obama: now you must go to war, because we proved hereby that Syria crossed your chemical red lines.

    So, now comes the funny thing. Despite this whole record of serial Israeli murder, terror and false flag terror targeting likewise enemies and friends, terrorists and innocents, Arabs and Westerners, Muslims, Christians and Jews, Syrians and Americans, and clear motives for Israel to perpetrate the crimes, there still exists a big taboo of talking about and investigating a possible Israeli sponsorship of the JFK murder and 9/11. It’s even deemed anti-semitic to speak about this.
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Paul Jolliffe says:
June 26, 2018 at 1:23 am GMT • 200 Words
@Ivan2

I agree.

The late Harold Weisberg once told me exactly the same thing: figuring out precisely who was in control of the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of 11/22/63 was the key to unraveling the cover-up.

U. S. Military authorities ran that thing and made every single damned decision. (Not RFK or Jacqueline Kennedy.)

Hell, there is credible, provocative and reasonably persuasive evidence the no less a figure than the legendary USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay flew in to Bethesda and was playing a major role in directing the autopsy.

The (suspiciously undated) autopsy report was re-written after Ruby shot “Oswald” on Sunday morning, and the original “draft notes” were burned. The hand-written version was then edited with very significant changes, most infamously the original wording that JFK had a “puncture” wound in his neck – WHICH MEANT A SHOT FROM THE FRONT! – was changed in the typed version as “much smaller”.

These changes were not because Humes, Boswell and Finck demanded them. These changes were done at the behest of military brass, for reasons known only to themselves.

The autopsy was the start of the cover-up, and the autopsy was controlled by the U.S. Military.

By the way, LeMay was the inspiration for the General Buck Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove”.
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renfro says:
June 26, 2018 at 1:29 am GMT • 700 Words

RE: USS LIBERTY

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/uss-liberty/

Entries categorized “USS Liberty”

”It appears that Belfield, an Englishman, has obtained through FOIA the tapes of the in flight conversations among the Israelis concerning the strikes on USS Liberty. I wrote in my post quoted below of having read transcripts in the Spring 0f 1968 that were of exactly the same material. It seems likely that this is the same material now released by NSA. .
pl

”I quote below from my Athenaeum post written in 2010 and entitled “What I know About the USS Liberty.

“What I know about the USS Liberty” re-published from October, 2007

Jim Ennes, who was a watch standing officer on the USS Liberty asked me for a statement as to what I knew of the transcripts of Israeil conversations and the ship. This is what I sent him. I was quoted about this in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Monday. pl
(Wednesday, 19 July 2017) I have re-published this because people have written to me saying that the transcripts were not published before the recent Haaretz article. pl
———————————————
“Dear Jim

I was a student in the Military Intelligence Officer Advanced Course at Ft. Holabird, Maryland (Baltimore) in 1967-1968. The course lasted about ten months. We students were required to take several electives from a group offered and I took a course in Cryptology. This was taught by people from the NSA School at nearby Ft. Meade. This course was taught in the winter or early spring of 1967-1968. There were several sub-courses, one of which had to do with voice intercepts. In the course of this, the instructor introduced a booklet produced at Ft. Meade as material for the course. It contained various course materials. Among them were transcripts of the translated intercepts of radio conversations between the Israeli strike commander and his base before and during the attacks on USS Liberty. The instructor, a retired cryptologic warrant officer or NCO identified the transcript as being of the Liberty incident. It was also so marked in the booklet.

In the transcript, the flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the US flag. I think he said that the ship was displaying the US flag on an upper deck, but my memory of that might be inexact. He asked for confirmation of his orders to attack the ship and seemed reluctant (understandably) to attack the ship. He asked more than once and was told to carry out his orders and attack the ship.

There was some further discussion of damage to the ship.

That is all I remember.

Regards

W. Patrick Lang
Colonel (Ret.) US Army”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,1050179.story

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2007/10/what-i-know-abo.html

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/httpwwwhaaretzcomus-news1800584.html

The BBC documentary on this is ” Dead in the Water ”……https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOH1XMAwZA

The film by Belfield ”The Day Israel Attacked America”…..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RE4hMlB9ZU

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2014/10/day-israel-attacked-america-20141028144946266462.html

Extensive Interviews with USS Liberty Survivors’ – Audio tapes obtained by award winning British film maker Richard Belfield prove what every USS Liberty survivor, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer have said all along: that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship. The plan was to sink it, blame Egypt, and draw the US into the Six Day War on the Israeli side, but the heroism of the Liberty crew in fighting ship damage, often while wounded, prevented it from sinking with all hands. The tapes are featured in “The Day Israel Attacked America” by film-maker Richard Belfield, whose previous production credits include National Geographic TV and Discovery Channel.”

You can read the audio tapes of some Israeli radio transmissions here…..https://archive.org/stream/CopyOfUSSLibertyCard2/Jerusalem%20Post%20confirms%20Israel%20knew%20USS%20Liberty%20was%20American-7_djvu.txt
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Ron Unz says:
June 26, 2018 at 1:33 am GMT • 300 Words

One important aspect of Piper’s book is that his overwhelming focus on Israel and the Mossad provides a very helpful corrective to the CIA-centricism that I’ve noticed among so many “conspiracy people,” who seem to believe that the CIA is some sort of all-powerful controlling force.

For example, in Appendix Six, Piper suggests that Mossad may have assassinated former CIA Director William Colby, as well as John Paisley, another former high-ranking CIA official:

http://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/#appendix-six-retribution

I certainly don’t know enough about these cases to comment, but the NSA is supposedly also a pretty powerful intelligence organization, and lots of NSA people were killed or wounded during the Liberty attack, with absolutely no apparent consequences. And if top CIA people could also occasionally be killed with relative impunity, maybe that organization also isn’t really so all-powerful.

Furthermore, one of Piper’s major arguments is that long-time CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton had effectively become a Mossad intelligence asset at least by the 1960s, and he seems to provide a great deal of circumstantial evidence in favor of this notion. Therefore, he points toward Angleton as the likely CIA figure who spearheaded the CIA involvement in the JFK assassination.

One nice thing about my HTML Book software is that it allows full text searches of the books in question, controlled by the little Search icon next to the Email button. Or you can use this link:

http://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/?search=angleton+and+mossad
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Iris says:
June 26, 2018 at 2:08 am GMT • 100 Words
@Ron Unz

“..CIA-centricism that I’ve noticed among so many “conspiracy people,” who seem to believe that the CIA is some sort of all-powerful controlling force.”

The CIA was also the “easy” and “obvious” culprit after 9/11. It came under an incredible amount of criticism from the “courageous” media, and George Tenet, its director at the time, was almost forced to resign.

It turned out later that the CIA had previously warned G. Bush about the increased risks of terror attack, and that their warnings were dismissed by Rumsfeld and the NeoCons, who a contrario were never blamed for anything.

This really shows who is higher up the food chain.
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Achilles says:
June 26, 2018 at 2:35 am GMT • 1,000 Words

    Jack Ruby was running guns and ammunition from Galveston Bay to Fidel Castro’s guerrillas in Cuba about 1957, a former poker-playing partner of the Dallas nightclub owner told The News Thursday.

    James E. Beaird said he waited until 1966, almost three years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and “nothing had come out so I called them (FBI) just to find out why … I was curious. However, they didn’t see fit to even mention it to me again, so I never heard of anything they ever opened up on it.”

    Beaird said the FBI finally “sent a man out in 1976. I don’t know why they did it then.”

    …The FBI agent who interviewed Beaird in 1976 didn’t mention in his report that Beaird had volunteered information about Ruby’s gunrunning to the bureau in 1966. The report stated that since the 1963 assassination, “there had been so·much speculation as to possible foreign connections and he (Beaird) thought it better not to mention his knowledge of Jack Ruby in Kemah (southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay).”

    The Warren Commission in 1964 investigated numerous allegations of gunrunning by Ruby but concluded that no factual information existed.

    Beaird told the FBI that he “personally saw many boxes of new guns, including atltomatic rifles and handguns,” stored in a 2-story house near the channel at Kemah and loaded on what looked like a 50-foot surplus military boat.

    “He stated each time that the boat left with guns and ammunition, Jack Ruby was on the boat,” the FBI report said.

    Beaird, who was an automobile dealer in Houston from 1955 to 1957, said Ruby “was in it for the money. It wouldn’t matter what side, just one that would pay him the most…I don’t even know who the ship belonged to. But he was in command of it. He went out every time it went. It was meeting a connection down there (in Cuba), that’s all I ever heard.”

    Ruby would show up in Kemah, generally on weekends, to play poker and “just killing time until the boat was loaded,” Beaird said, and usually was there not more than one or two hours.

    “They loaded up at least twice while I was down there,” be said. “Pickup trucks would carry it from the house over to this boat.”

    By 1959, Castro had taken control of Cuba and Ruby was beginning to switch sides as Castro threatened to force Mafia-backed professional gamblers out of the casinos in Havana.

Dallas Morning News, 18 Aug 1978

What was Ruby’s connection to the splinter groups of left-over Cubans in Dallas? Was he selling them guns? Was he hiring them for odd jobs? Did he hear of the crazy violent commie anglo Oswald through his connections to these Cubans?
    What were these Israeli goats doing in Cuba shortly after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power? It turns out that Castro had taken notice of Israeli goats and was just waiting for the chance to taste their milk following the establishment in 1960 of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

    “Fidel thought there were goats in Israel that produced milk like cows,” recounted Clarita Malhi, who worked at the Cuban embassy in Israel. “He was really enamored by the technical progress Israel had made in the field of agriculture.”

    The Cuban ambassador in Israel was a Jewish millionaire revolutionary by the name of Ricardo Wolf (Ricardo Subirana y Lobo in Spanish), who decided to fulfill the dream of his boss who had sent him to Israel. The ambassador went looking for goats that “produced milk like cows” and could be shipped far across the ocean.

    Yitzhak Zilber, a Cuban Jew and a member of Kibbutz Gaash, was chosen for the mission. Zilber, 89, sent Haaretz photos in which he is seen with the goats he found, waiting for a plane at the airport and travelling around Cuba.

    …Ultimately, when the goats for the mission were found, they were brought together at the airport, awaiting the moment when they could be airlifted to Cuba. An El Al plane landed in Israel from Cuba with new immigrants from the Cuban Jewish community who had decided to flee Castro’s revolution. They came as part of an agreement under which Cuba effectively exchanged the immigrants for the goats.

    …The Haaretz archives contain a piece of information that might buttress the story about Castro and his Israeli goats. In an article in July 1961, it was reported that the Israeli Agriculture Ministry had sent an expert to Cuba to help the Cubans improve goat breeding.

    …Wolf, who was born in Germany, emigrated to Cuba in the 1920s and became a close associate of Castro. As a wealthy industrialist, he gave a large sum of money to finance the revolution. He later politely declined the offer of a cabinet position, but asked Castro to appoint him ambassador to Israel. Castro assented and Wolf arrived in the country in 1960 as Cuba’s first – and only – ambassador. The trade involving the goats and the new immigrants was funded by Wolf personally.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-jews-for-goats-castro-s-secret-deal-with-israel-1.5475376

    ‘Twas not ever thus. Not only did Cuba establish ties with nascent Israel in 1949, but Castro dispatched a key supporter, Ricardo Wolf, as his ambassador to Israel in 1960.

    Dworin says Wolf, who made his fortune as a pioneer in the metal industry, helped finance the purchase of the yacht Granma, the cabin-cruiser built for 12 that ferried the Castro brothers, Che and 80 other revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 — on the voyage that would culminate in the overthrow of Batista.

    “What can I do to repay you?” Castro, once installed in power, asked Wolf, in Dworin’s telling. “I want to be ambassador to Israel,” he replied.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-our-woman-in-havana-asked-fidel-castro-to-the-synagogue-hanukkah-party/

Was Ricardo Subirana Y Lobo (Ricardo Wolf), a Cuban Jew and supporter of Castro, the bridge between Castro and Mossad? Castro originally offered Wolf the post of Minister of Finance in the communist government, but Wolf preferred to be Ambassador to Israel.
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Kiza says:
June 26, 2018 at 3:08 am GMT • 300 Words
@Ron Unz

Hello Ron, I found your comment about growing up with the belief in the lone gunman official story interesting. I grew up in a communist country which was not part of the USSR block and I grew up with a belief in the official story that CIA was the main culprit in the JFK assassination although without a direct mention of LBJ. I would be interested to learn also what the official story inside the Eastern block was.

Even to this day, I have to admit that this official story was actually very close to the truth. So many years later and even after reading your high quality article I tend to believe that LBJ was heavily involved but at arms length distance, that CIA has done all of the ground work, that Mossad probably assisted and that Oswald did not even shoot let alone kill anyone.

Why is a local belief relevant? Well because whoever killed Kennedy tried to point blame at communists, those of USSR and Cuba. What I was lead to believe in this instance proves the old saying audi alteram partem – do not form any belief before you hear both sides. This applies to practically all strange events of history. Historical, geographical and ideological distance make quite a difference in the beliefs that we grow up with.

Next, the culprits would probably be mirrored in the case of 911, where the Israelis have done most of the ground work, whilst the dual citizens and the US agencies they control played the supporting and enabling role.

Obviously, the logistics of 911 dwarfs the logistics of the Kennedy assassinations, but it would be the same team, different era and with a different emphasis. The acts becoming more self-confident and brazen.
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Ron Unz says:
June 26, 2018 at 3:12 am GMT • 100 Words
@Wizard of Oz

    The account you are responding to has Macnamara ordering back nuclear armed planes which obviously had nothing to do with seeing off Israeli fighters and gunboats.

The more “mainstream” account that has been widely reported is that squadrons of U.S. jets were twice dispatched to rescue the Liberty, and then twice recalled based on top-level instructions from D.C.

I’ve sometimes seen another account floating around on the Internet that the Johnson and the Israelis had concocted a plan to have the latter sink the Liberty with all hands, after which Johnson would blame the attack on Egypt and launch a nuclear attack against Cairo in retaliation. Frankly, I find this scenario *extraordinarily* implausible, and until someone provides a credible source, I would just dismiss it. And by a “credible source” I mean something more than some random guy making the claim somewhere in some book.
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Sam J. says:
June 26, 2018 at 3:59 am GMT • 300 Words
@Bardon Kaldian

“…That what plagues the West & the US the most (race replacement, PC “liberal” ideological muzzle, hedonist emptiness & biological collapse manifested in infertility, pathological altruism, lunatic ideological fashions like n-th wave of feminism, media aggression promoting “diversity” & homosexualism- as different from homosexuality, self-hatred of European & Western culture….”

Well who is the primary promoting this? We know. It’s not difficult. It has been 70,80 maybe a 100 years of this.

“…So, we should not give up hope, and some of us who are obsessed with Jews, should give up this tired old chestnut…”

I agree we should not give up hope but the Jews must go. We need to get rid of them. A simple analogy, if someone is stabbing you in the back you don’t worry about the guy down the street that might stab you later. You first deal with the guy stabbing you in the back. Dealing with the Jews, getting rid of them, is a first step towards renewal. That we may have other problems is immaterial to the problem with the Jews and they are exacerbating all the problems we have.

I would be fine and dandy with the Jews doing whatever they want but as far as I can see it’s impossible to have them in your country without almost civil war level constant destruction. The only way that’s 100% shown to deal with them is to deport them. This has worked every single time. We just need to make sure they never come back this time.
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renfro says:
June 26, 2018 at 4:28 am GMT • 500 Words
@Ron Unz

    I certainly don’t know enough about these cases to comment, but the NSA is supposedly also a pretty powerful intelligence organization, and lots of NSA people were killed or wounded during the Liberty attack, with absolutely no apparent consequences

There are never any consequences for Israel. Not even in the case below where Mossad impersonated CIA agents and faked American passports in order to recruit terrorist to carry out bombings and assassinations in Iran and elsewhere.
The thing is Mossad isnt even particularly skillful, but they are ‘brazen’ because they can always play the Jew card to escape any punishment, at least by the US……and that brazen reliance on going scott free regardless makes them mostly successful. Trump made a statement to the effect that he could shoot someone down in the street and get away with it—the Israelis have the same belief.
And posing as Americans is a habit with Zionist—they posed as US officials in 1948, visiting countries to threaten them with dire US actions against them if they didn’t vote in favor of the partition of Palestine to create Israel. Truman got wind of it when calls from those countries seeking clarification started coming into the WH and State Department but Truman did nothing about it then ether.

A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.
By Mark Perry
| January 13, 2012, 3:13 PM

”Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah — a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.
But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.
The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad’s efforts.
“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” the intelligence officer said. ”

continued……http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/13/false-flag/
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renfro says:
June 26, 2018 at 5:28 am GMT • 400 Words

RE: Johnson

My thinking right now is that Johnson may have ‘suspected’ something , may have inferred something from conversations he had with certain people or a light bulb went on in regard to the murder after it happened based on something he had previously heard…..even if he was not outright involved.

I have come to this consideration after reading thru his diary and phone conversations during that time period.

What they reveal:

*Johnson didnt actually want any investigation at all. He wanted it left to the Texas police and AG to declare Oswald the lone shooter. iow he wanted the assassination to be under state of Texas jurisdiction with FBI findings sent to them.

*While Johnson was calling friendly reporters at the NYT and WP seeking their support they told him that the country would demand a ‘bigger investigation.’

*At the same time congress was making noises about a full house investigation into the assassination.

*Johnson called Hoover and told him about congress planning a investigation and said he didnt want that—that it would be , quote–’a three ring circus’. And that it would be better if the FBI just issued a report on it for the public.

*Congress balked at this and then Johnson suggested a compromise….a commission of a few senators and congressmen with ‘outside’ former officials and figures …thus the Warren commission was born.

*Johnson himself picked Dulles and Dulles was his first pick of all the other members. In fact Johnson (or his advisors) picked most if not all of the members of the commission. What he would do is call someone like Gerry Ford after he picked him and say ”what would you think of so and so” and of course no one would have a objection to the person so he would be brought on.

One thing comes thru loud and clear or as loud and clear as swarmy Texas politics allows …..Johnson wanted the assassination event to be over with …..with no big hullaballoo surrounding it.
Because he knew who did it, suspected who did it or didnt care who did it…..one of those three.
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jdf says:
June 26, 2018 at 7:02 am GMT • 300 Words
@jdf

True enough, , I overstated it. Blush. How about the “backyard photographs” found in the Dallas Police files, which were used to “frame” LHO with the rifle and a copy of Pravda in his hand? Ridiculous. When shown the photos, Oswald said that it wasn’t him in the pictures. It was the simple truth. Or how about the photo of the fake Oswald in Mexico City who unsuccessfully tried to get an “escape” visa that would be used to claim Oswald was fleeing to Cuba after the assassination? There are so many “clinchers.” Some elements of the Dallas Police were deeply involved in the assassination, along with elements of the CIA, and to a lesser degree the FBI. It is not considering these wider involvements that limits the value of Piper’s “Final Judgment.” And yes, , in the early 70′s when I heard Lifton’s lecture, the view was still widely held that the source of the assassination was among right-wing oil men, like Hunt and the Murchisons. Many early researchers, particularly Jewish ones, honestly believed that they were working to uncover a right-wing plot. This was likely true of Norman Mailer, too. But Jack Ruby was the problem. Would he sacrifice his life to protect right-wing oil men or Italian Catholic mafioso? In Mark Lane’s “Plausible Denial,” (which I should have included among my favorite assassination books) he recounts a public debate with A. L. Wirin at Beverly Hills High School, where Wirin said, “Thank God for Earl Warren. He prevented a pogrom in this country.” Interestingly, the largely Jewish audience booed Wirin’s comment. Nevertheless, I think many were well aware, from the outset, of the implications of Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald. As Peter Dale Scott stated in “Deep Politics,” Ruby is the key to unlocking the assassination, because his murder of Oswald is the only time the conspirators had to come out of hiding.
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jdf says:
June 26, 2018 at 10:08 am GMT • 400 Words

I remember where I was when the news of JFK’s assassination occurred: walking across the University of Tulsa campus after class, heading to the Student Union. Old friend Richard Johnson called out the news to me as our paths crossed. It was not until the mid-1970s that I heard Lifton speak at SUNY SB. I had not been asleep for 10 years, but had not looked closely at the assassination. My brother had read Mark Lane’s “Rush to Judgment” when it first came out, but my basic reflex was to trust the government–not yet suspecting that it could be capable of dishonesty on such a scale. Lifton’s presentation was the first lift of the curtain. He wouild later publish “Best Evidence.” My first book after the lecture was “They’ve Killed the President,” by Robert Sam Anson. I plunged into the literature and research that was emerging. There have been many milestones in this “dark enlightenment.” I should have mentioned Jim Marrs’s “Crossfire” in my list of good books on the assassination, and the early photo compilations of Robert J. Groden, and, of course, Jim Fetzer’s work. I should also have mentioned the curious study of “DC Dave,” who was looking into the murder of James Forrestal. Forrestal was being threatened for “dragging his feet on the recognition of Israel,” and was “hospitalized” at Bethesda Naval Hospital–probably as much for his protection as treatment for “paranoia.” The evening before his “suicide,” Forrestal was visited by LBJ–whom Forrestal had absolutely no desire to see. The visit left him agitated and upset. I have little doubt that LBJ had made the proverbial “offer Forrestal couldn’t refuse”–very much in Godfather fashion. That night he fell to his death from his hospital room window. LBJ appears to have been the emissary of dark, shadowy forces, not just then, but throughout his career. If Unz’s analysis of the JFK assassination is an example of his views and methods, he is not a “self-hating Jew,” but an honest man tackling the tough, contentious issues of our time in an earnest, straightforward and unblinking fashion. There is no other way out of the darkness. Hats off!
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Carroll Price says:
June 26, 2018 at 12:57 pm GMT • 100 Words
@Carroll Price

The 2nd autopsy may have occurred at a 3rd location prior to FK’s body arriving at Bethesda, MD. With this being indicated by the fact that JFK’s body was photographed leaving Dallas in a civilian type (wooden) coffin, but arrived at Bethesda in a military style (metal) coffin. Meaning that what doctors at Bethesda observed in regards to bullet wound entrances & exits etc would have agreed with what became the official autopsy report, which was totally at odds with results of the original autopsy performed by doctors at Parkland Memorial.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Evidence-Disguise-Deception-Assassination/dp/0025718703
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jimmyriddle says:
June 26, 2018 at 1:30 pm GMT

“trying to unseat a Guatemalan leader on behalf of supposed American national interests”

It was on behalf of United Fruit, aka Chiquita Brands, in which the Dulles brothers were substantial shareholders.
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Diamond's Insurance files says:
June 26, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMT • 200 Words
@Ron Unz

Be careful not to confuse impunity with omnipotence. Impunity is a social assemblage vitiating rule of law. Omnipotence is a purely notional attribute of deities, which no sensible person attributes to any existing bureaucracy. Absent effective rule of law, you don’t have all-powerful control, you have crime that goes unpunished. And often, criminal gang wars. If Mossad contended with other criminal enterprises for control of the levers of power, that does not undercut CIA’s impunity, it highlights it. Mossad has shown you how to get the USA by the short hairs.

But Piper’s Appendix 6 cracks me up. A power grab for the CIA. But it’s not CIA that wants that, it’s… Israel, Huh huhhuh huh huh huh huh hee hee hoo ha ha ha… That power grab happened to follow hard on the heels of the Oklahoma City bombing. In retrospect it presents itself as a classic example of CIA’s strategy for metastatic growth: an attack on the domestic civilian population (look up Andreas Straßmeir) to justify increased repressive capacity (look up the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.) and c.f. 911/the PATRIOT Act.

As for NSA’s putative power, Snowden’s disclosures, as curated by Suzie Dawson, show that NSA and CIA are in lockstep. Many key NSA employees, from Snowden to Visner, were CIA and NSA both. Whose focal points are they? Who’s interpenetrating whom? [Hint: that's a very rhetorical question.]
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HallParvey says:
June 26, 2018 at 2:31 pm GMT • 100 Words

One of the best ways to cover up a real conspiracy is to promote as many competing theories about conspiracies as possible. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Where there’s enough smoke, nobody can see the fire.
Also, a conspiracy doesn’t have to involve secret meetings in obscure places. It only requires like minds arriving at some conclusion that benefits the group. Then it’s all about the mechanics of the operation. i.e. what’s possible.
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Hu Mi Yu says:
June 26, 2018 at 2:31 pm GMT • 100 Words
@prusmc

    I thought JFK was President when Diem was killed?

He was. Diem was overthrown on Nov 1, 1963, and he was killed a day or two later. JFK came on TV in an unannounced live broadcast to confess complicity saying: “The CIA exceeded my instructions.”

If you sift carefully through newspapers for early November you will surely find some mention of this.
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Sean says:
June 26, 2018 at 2:41 pm GMT • 1,000 Words
@Anonymous

I think Ron Unz needs no lessons from anyone, he has been able to get things done in business and politics because he is a one man army. Possibly Unz he has had bad experiences delegating tasks a la the principle-agent problem:-

I suspect Ron is temperamentally predisposed to do things himself ; he does heavy lifting to get the ball rolling, putting all his energies into a tremendous personal effort, and then it gathers mass and momentum, and people bandwagon on his idea (and platform). That is the way of the men of action whose energetic determination and elan carries the day. To me it seems odd to think of a Kennedy assassination starting, not with one person’s act of will, but rather an amporphous all encompassing elite international zietgiest initially taking in disparate-interest groupings but filtering down to a tiny cutting edge, which after the event would a predictably disposable one.

Israel was founded in the wake of numerous murders, yes Yitzhak Shamir joined an organisation that attempted to collaborate with Nazi Germany, then made attempts on the life of the Palestine police who killed ‘Yair’, like Tom Wilkin, and British and UN officials, but this was before Israel was a country. It was not equivalent to the intelligence service or political auxiliaries of Israel commissioning the assassination of a friendly foreign state’s president. Eisenhower gave Israel a nuclear reactor and JFK continued all of his predecessors policies.

As the one Israel would turn to, America wanted to keep the Arabs from going to the Soviets but they did. That brought about a reversal of policy on. The election of Kennedy with 80% of the Jewish votes president was followed by the first US supply of arms in 1962 Israel (the state of the art HAWK antiaircraft missile) over the objection of the state department He never would have pressured Israel to give up its nukes program the (inspections were running interference internationally, and when they came proved to be perfunctory) any more than he would have would have withdrawn from Vietnam without victory . He couldn’t if he wanted to be reelected.
In 1967 the Israelis were counting on their tactic of coming in from the sea getting past Egyptian radar, I expect the order to destroy the Liberty was taken thinking it was an enemy ship under a false flag.

Going back in time to before the founding of the Jewish state, there is one aspect of Shamir’s conspiratorial activity that has great relevance; he became leader of the Stern gang by killing the old boss (the reasons are a matter of dispute, some say it was partially because the victim was gay).
In the light of this, lets examine the putative wide ranging JFK conspiracy and what its ranking members might reasonably expect to accrue to them afterwards with a quote from Bostrom’s Superintelligence

    Another major factor that can inhibit groups from exploiting a potentially decisive strategic advantage is the problem of internal coordination. Members of a conspiracy that is in a position to seize power must wonder not only about being infiltrated from outside but also about being overthrown by some smaller coalition of insiders. If a group consists of a hundred people and a majority of sixty can take power and disenfranchise the non-conspirators, what is then to stop a thirty-five-strong subset of these sixty from disenfranchising the other twenty-five ? And then maybe a subset of twenty from disenfranchising the other fifteen. Each of the original hundred might have good reason to uphold certain established norms to prevent the general unraveling that could result to change the social contract by means of a naked power grab

Trust is key.

    http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2018/06/doing-better-in-promised-land.html
    Why do Ashkenazi Jews do worse in Israel than in the United States? [...] Just as importantly, however, it also offered a high-trust culture. Americans could generally be counted on to do what they said they would do and charge only what they said they would charge. When two Soviet journalists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, visited the U.S. in 1935, they were struck by the integrity of the average American:

        [...]] Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, “I’ll do that,” it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word—this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people. (Ilf and Petrov 1937)

Hence Sam Zell (and Arnon Milchan). As John Wayne’s character says in The Comancheroes, “Words are what men live by, words they say and mean”. An oath is sworn by US government officials of course.

If anyone could have done it, Bill Harvey could. He headed the CIA assassination of leaders resources and had trained teams http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKzrrifle.htm
Might have found out about Oswald’s location and proclivities and used him as a patsy? Most certainly.
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lysias says:
June 26, 2018 at 3:24 pm GMT • 100 Words

Since there has been repeated mention of the medical handling of JFK’ s body and the one or more autopsies, I should mention that the work to read, although it is very long, is Douglas Horne’ s five-volume “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board”. That board, established by Act of Congress with power of subpoena as a reaction to Oliver Stone’s movie, operated in the 1990s and caused the release of a lot of new evidence. Horne, a retired naval officer, was the board’s chief analyst of military records. He took part in interviews of a lot of survivors of the handling of JFK’ s body at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
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Si1ver1ock says:
June 26, 2018 at 5:00 pm GMT • 100 Words

We have a confession from James Files and a lot of other evidence that gives us a picture of what really happened. The exact details will be ambiguous simply because it is a conspiracy. You will get conflicting testimony from different participants. The ambiguity is intentional. It was engineered into the plot, designed to be ambiguous.

The main point is that the government still denies what most people find to be an obvious truth. This make them incompetent at best or, more likely, accessories to treason.

Why do we continue to tolerate clear lies and deceits by our government? Pretty much every column by Paul Craig Roberts these days is detailing blatant deception and crimes by our government and media.

As an aside, if the Israelis were involved, they were likely just another faction.
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jilles dykstra says:
June 26, 2018 at 5:23 pm GMT • 200 Words
@Wizard of Oz

The man in Spandau indeed was not Hess.
The USA prison doctor wrote a book about it.
The real Hess in all probability died in a flying boat crash in Scotland in 1943 that has never been explained, there was a body to many, probably Hess picked up there from a lake.
Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior, ‘Double standards, The Rudolf Hess cover-up’, London 2002
A brother of the British king died in the accident, what the destination of the flying boat was has officially never been explained.
The theory was that the flying boat was on its way to Stockholm to declare peace between GB and Germany, both Hitler and Churchill stepping down.
Of course Churchill not voluntarily.
As the crash could not be admitted a phoney Hess had to be introduced at the Neurenberg show.
This Hess had memory problems.
Had he been able to speak freely, official WWII history would have to be rewritten.
The great thing about truth is consistency, our prince Bernard dined with the mentioned brother the evening before the crash.
The above is consistent with the letter that Bernard is said to have written to Hitler at the time, asking to be made regent or so of the Netherlands.
Who the Spandau man was, and why he played the game, nobody knows.
The USA doctor writes ‘when I said to him ‘you’re not Hess’ he shitted’.
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Ron Unz says:
June 26, 2018 at 5:38 pm GMT • 300 Words
@David In TN

    Since you broached the subject, why didn’t those alleged deep-state operatives who wanted JFK out of office hit him with a sex scandal? Why make him a martyr (and risk being executed) when you can destroy JFK politically and make him a laughing stock?

That’s a perfectly valid argument, but I actually think it generally supports my own analysis.

There were certainly lots of powerful factions that hated JFK and wanted him out of office. Anti-Communist Cold War hardliners, CIA people, the mafia, Hoover, right-wing Texas oilmen, and a very long list of others. But I don’t think any of these groups were particularly time-sensitive, so they could have just waited until shortly before the 1964 election and began dumping a huge amount of scandalous material into the media to try to ensure JFK’s defeat. I really think that’s what someone like Dulles would have normally have done.

However, there were two major exceptions. At the time of the assassination, LBJ was just weeks or even days away from being destroyed politically as the media with Kennedy encouragement was about to expose all of his gigantic corruption scandals, and not long afterward he might have been on trial, facing a long prison sentence. Also, once his political power was broken, maybe some of the fearful witnesses to his alleged several past Texas murders would have come forward, placing him at even greater legal risk. Johnson couldn’t wait.

Meanwhile, Israel was under enormous pressure by JFK to abandon its nuclear weapons program or risk a full cut-off of aid. And the nascent Israel Lobby in the U.S. was also close to being forced to register as foreign agents and effectively shut down. Israel couldn’t wait a year either.

All the various anti-JFK groups that are the overwhelming focus of conspiracy people didn’t really have much reason to take such an immediate risk, but Johnson and Israel did.
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Anon[414] • Disclaimer says:
June 26, 2018 at 5:53 pm GMT • 100 Words
@gsjackson

I honestly wonder why the Jews objected so much to AIPAC registering as agents of a foreign government.

It is an agent of a foreign government.
Why pretend it isn’t?

AIPAC got rid of one of our most prestigious foreign policy Senators, Fulbright because he wanted AIPAC to register as a foreign power.
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Sean says:
June 26, 2018 at 6:04 pm GMT • 300 Words

Henry VIII’s personality, not divine right, was the decisive factor in his ability to impose his authority over all institutions of the country and remake them most fundamentally . The leader of a country always has the real power if he chooses to use it. Trump does, and the CIA can do nothing.

Nixon’s greatest mistake was resonding to Hoover’s failure to come up with evidence that anti Vietnam war sentiment was a communist plot by getting CIA incompetents like Hunt to work on gathering evidence on the leaks. Hunt was experienced at writing spy novels, not burglary ( Hell’s Angels would have been more professional) How anyone could think Hunt would be left alive, and used on a covert operation after participating in an assassination is beyond me. The CIA were and are full of liberals like Angleton’s henchman Cord Meyer the world government enthusiast. With the possible exception of Bill Harvey, they didn’t have the guts* for assassinating the president then, and they still don’t.

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home

    In October, 2016, one of Skinner’s closest friends in the C.I.A. was killed by isis forces in Afghanistan. Skinner was despondent. A few months later, he left the Soufan Group and joined his local police force, taking a pay cut of more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. For the Savannah police, the biggest obstacle in gaining the community’s trust is the city’s history. Savannah is around fifty-five per cent black, and Georgia practiced segregation well into the second half of the twentieth century; after Skinner completed his training, he was startled to find that many interactions he had with older black men began with them reflexively putting up their hands.[ect ect]

Torrey is a proponent of the bug theory of schizophrenia. The gene most implicated in schizophrenia is one that amps up the inflammatory response, so he is at least half right.
*Your gut bacteria own and manipulate you, altering your behaviour for their own benefit. That is even more true of your immune system.
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