Evolution of a truther: JFK and 9/11 bear the same CIA fingerprints

Shelton F. Lankford is a retired Lt. Col. with the United States Marine Corps. He is a prominent figure in the 9/11 Truth movement (as a member of Pilots for 9/11 Truth) as well as with the JFK research community. Knowing of Shelton’s long-time involvement in JFK research, I asked him if he would be willing to contribute a piece to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the assassination. I’m delighted that he accepted my invitation. In the days ahead there will be other articles dealing with the Kennedy anniversary.-Craig McKee
By Shelton F. Lankford (Special to Truth and Shadows)

As I stepped off the bus, the first words I heard from our welcoming group were “President Kennedy has been shot.”
I was arriving in Raleigh, N.C. with a group of students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill along with our counterparts from the University of Toronto in Canada. It was my first introduction to an event of such worldwide significance. And it was the first event for which the term “truther” would take on personal meaning. It would not be the last.
The next several days were a period of mourning for someone who had little experience of much of anything, much less grief for a fallen President. At twenty-one years old, how does a farm boy put the death of a President in any kind of context?
John F. Kennedy was the first President I considered MY President.  Young, vigorous, passionate, he had visited the campus October 12, 1961, and passed within a few yards of me as I stood in my NROTC drill team uniform holding my ceremonial Enfield rifle, of roughly the same vintage, operational capability, and lethality as the Mannlicher-Carcano said to have been his murder weapon a year later.
I soaked up everything the media had to say about the crime, the discussions, the endless panels, and when they thought nobody but their own kind was listening, the thoughtless and ignorant wisecracks of those who expressed no regrets, only satisfaction that a hated liberal was no more.  I was, after all, in a Southern town, and Chapel Hill, despite the liberal university so reviled by Jesse Helms, had its share of crackers and wing-nuts. Helms used the target of the Daily Tar Heel, the very liberal campus newspaper, to inspire his torrents of invective, and I figured that one could do a lot worse than having Jesse Helms as a political enemy.
I followed Jim Garrison and his exposure of the Magic Bullet Theory, which, despite the ridicule and invective that was flung at him, captured my imagination, stimulated my skepticism, and led to my conviction that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent of shooting anyone – not J.D. Tippitt, and not President Kennedy.
I have reflected often on why my first experience with trutherism did not retain my attention. For one thing, there was no Internet, there were no personal computers, and the magazine stories and books were too sporadic to feed my interest.
But 9/11 brought it all into focus. Where had I seen all this before? Who else had I heard described as a “conspiracy theorist”? Why is that term trotted out so handily in connection with someone who does not believe what the mainstream press has just said and who asks questions?  And why does that term so effectively close out further discussion?
Who are the prime suspects in the 9/11 case? Were they the 19 “lone gunmen,” caught, convicted, and executed in the act? What was the term Oswald used in his brief exposure to a microphone as he passed a TV camera? I am just a patsy?  Can each of the 19 conveniently dead Muslims be “a patsy”? Even if some turn up alive? Cui Bono?
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution resulted in my going to Vietnam to rain destruction down on the heads of people I didn’t know. It turns out that I was lied to (along with the rest of the country).
John F. Kennedy knew he had enemies.  JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James Douglass taught me more about JFK the man. Why did I assume that he was surrounded by supporters and friends when he was, in fact, almost alone in a multitude of political enemies?
His Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, was apparently a few steps ahead of an effort to remove him from the ticket and indict him for racketeering in Texas. When it came to a list of those who had most to gain and little to lose with JFK dead, Lyndon Johnson had to be near the top of the list. Becoming President had to look pretty good when compared to a Texas jail cell.
The events in Dallas had the look and timing of a scripted series of events.  L. Fletcher Prouty, the coordinator of military support to the CIA recalls reading the details of the case against Oswald in Christchurch, New Zealand when identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin was barely public in Texas, raising questions of timing.
Prouty had been picked to escort a VIP group to Antarctica for no apparent reason and no connection to his duties at the Pentagon. Contrary to policy, while the President was in Dallas, the VP was with him and the JFK cabinet was in Hawaii, then airborne on the way to Japan when news of the death of JFK was received, at which point they reversed course back to the U. S.
The timing issue reminds one of the BBC correspondent who, late in the day on 9/11, reported that the Solomon Brothers Building, aka World Trade Center Building 7, had collapsed, with, in one of the glorious moments of live TV, Building 7 still standing, smoking, over her left shoulder 20 minutes prior to its final plunge.
There are myriad parallels between 9/11 and Dallas 11/22/63. They have the stink of the CIA on both, and they have in common the managed fingerprints of a controlled cover-up that cannot happen without the unaccountable power of the CIA or something similar with a sovereign behind it.  I am convinced that the same forces are behind these two signature events.
The message in 1963, as in 2001, is plain: “We are in control – don’t interfere.”
 

62 comments

  1. Shelton,
    Happy to see your article about two of the most terrible days in American history. I agree that the JFK assassination and 9/11 bear many of the same hallmarks which point to a false flag operation. I have written a piece called the ten characteristics of false flag attacks and so I will list the ten characteristics below and let the readers decide how many apply to 9/11 and how many apply to the JFK assassination.
    1. Evidence of foreknowledge.
    2. Smearing/Sheep dipping of suspect(s).
    3. Cover drills or exercises.
    4. Orgy of evidence.
    5. Rapid blame fixing.
    6. Scrubbing of crime scene.
    7. Controlled media narrative.
    8. Agenda driven by event/Qui Bono.
    9. Planted witnesses/actors.
    10. Cointelpro operation post event.
    I elaborate in the article on each characteristic and found myself relating each characteristic to these events.

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      1. I thought this was an excellent video and just shows you what evil there is in the world.Have always known from the beginning the truth of JFK and then 9/11 Can’t understand how anyone could think differently.

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  2. so true. Here we are. 50 years in the matrix.The Orwellian Rats cage. Boy, didn’t HE know what he was talking about. the scope of this so HUGE it laughs at us from the infinite reaches. It begins to not matter in this blank dead stare of modern thinking…unless to argue with your partner..but, not to matter ?! How TF is THAT ? 911 is an inside job!! JFK is an inside job ! Oswald most likely at street level or at least close to the cafeteria when JFK got his. No nitrate on LEE. No rifle, just a giant conspiracy set up on him like a great dog.
    But, ‘they’ print the money. ‘They’ print the magazines and the commission reports and building assessment reports on the SAME press they print the newspapers….Prouty read his in Christchurch NZ before Oswald was charged in Dallas. Nobody in RadioNZ hears him say that .. Oh, they joke about the ludicrous magic bullet, now, but not really to TALK about it. About what it MEANS to present that great steaming pile as states evidence..of actually establishing it in the literature….no radio host with enough personal interest to do their own thinking or research…..Tonkin..USS Liberty…Oklahoma, RFK, GLADIO… just happy to flip off a grassy knoll reference here and there while doing the wine taste. None on radioNZ able to figure, that 12 years ago on 911 that ol black magic was done again….
    the magic bolt bringing down 7 World Trade.
    this fckn wurlitzer.
    can’t play anything but misery.

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  3. FI – There is a new timeline facility on Wikispooks here. It is notable because, unlike most graphically displayed timelines, the events it contains can be both edited and added to in exactly the same fashion as one would create and edit any ordinary wiki page and is thus a potentially valuable crowd-sourced collaboration tool. New contributors welcome.
    The facility also has obvious potential in relation to other deep events

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    1. Thanks for that link Peter,
      I have the book, ‘The Day Kennedy Was Shot’ by Jim Bishop, which is an exhaustive account – with admittedly too much trivia. But still if one has the fortitude to go through the book there are jewels to be had.
      As to my experience Fletcher Prouty is the best source for really understanding the who, what, and how of the Dallas event.
      \\][//

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  4. Thank you for sharing those thoughts Mr. Lankford,
    I was just 16 the day of the coup in Dallas. I was sitting in high school French class when an announcement came over the intercom for all of the teachers to prepare to meet a messenger at the door of their classroom in the next moments. The teacher went to the door and stepped out. it was just a couple moments and she came back in. She was sobbing. She had everyone’s undivided attention. She gathered her composure as best she could and said simply; “the president has been shot in Dallas.” There was an audible gasp from the whole room. She continued to tell us school was out for the day, and the rest of the week.
    Like Shelton, I felt a deep connection to John Kennedy. Almost as if he were a personal friend. Then I admired the man as a juvenile would. I have come to admire him more as I matured and came to understand the vicious system that killed him.
    It was in a class in high school the next year that I came to understand that there were adults that had other views of what had happened in Dallas than the mainstream story from TV. In my humanities class we started our lessons with reading Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’. Without saying anything directly about the JFK assassination, the teacher made it subtly clear why the subject matter of the play had a direct bearing on the “issues of the day”, as he put it.
    By the time I graduated from high school I was on the trail of the assassins, and have been ever since.
    I own personally at least 20 books on the subject of the assassination/coup d’etat, and have read countless more. Of course this issue leads into the whole concept of deep political events, and eventually the revelation of the false paradigm that we live within.
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  5. Dear Mr. Lankford,
    Nice article.
    Being only eleven days old on JFK’s last day, I can’t really say that I have such personal memories of his golden era, just the residue that lingered on in the decades that passed in my education. Due to the timing of my arrival and his departure, I was curious and open-minded about things JFK related, and the alternative versions proved deceit and manipulation in my mind a decade letter when I could grok such things. At two and three decades later, the dishonesty of those in power relating to JFK’s assassination was plain to see for all who objectively studied it and had nothing to gain.
    Yet, the clock had been run out, and we were more than just several Constitutional crisis down the road.
    Owing to the eleven, 9/11 was like a klaxon call for me to be engaged, if as little as talking calmly to friends, co-workers, and anyone who’d listen (without me becoming obnoxious) about the event not being what it was seen as. Why the rush to war… I mean, wars? Clearly we were being played when the media couldn’t even discuss what was observed and recorded in a rational, physics-based manner, when it took many years for even the WTC-7 to get a few minutes of re-play airtime in a quasi-objective setting.
    I got involved in the political process, as did many others who knew that this was the time for our voices to be heard and change the tide. Blatant criminals were running the country. Disillusionment is what resulted. I saw the best local candidate for Senator get brushed aside by a political machine for a wishy-washy who could have been from either party and did serve both parties. We saw voting manipulations, yet only weak protests from the losing Senator Kerry.
    My only hope is that we can cut the suppression of truth in 9/11 in half or more than what they accomplished with JFK.
    //

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  6. Coincidentally it was “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” by James Douglass that led me to take another look at 911. Previously I had rejected the whole “truth” movement because I couldn’t imagine “them” doing that to “us”. After reading that book I realized that these “people” would do anything to further their purposes.

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  7. [sarcasm mode]
    Craig,
    Why are you promoting Shelton Lankford? He promotes the “no plane at the Pentagon” disinformation that has been thoroughly debunked by Frank Legge, and also, as Kevin Ryan pointed out in his excellent book:
    At the time of the 9/11 attack, a dozen PNAC signatories worked in leadership positions at the Pentagon, including members of the Defense Policy Board like Fred Ikle and Richard Perle. It was known that Rumsfeld deferred to Perle on many issues in 2001, sometimes in an obsequious manner. Coincidentally, Shelton Lankford, a leading voice in the call for truth about the Pentagon attack, worked for Ikle and a “who’s who” of Perle associates at Telos Corporation from 1990 to 2002. (p. 158)
    He has a direct connection to PNAC! Why are you promoting such an obvious intentional disruptor?
    [/sarcasm mode]
    Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.
    Seriously, nice article, Shelton. I admire your steadfast dedication to the truth.
    Looking forward to the next JFK articles here at Truth and Shadows.

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  8. So many conspiracies, so little time. The comparison between 9/11 and JFK also shows essential differences.
    The 9/11 conspirators made the strategic decision to televise live to a worldwide audience their key event: the terrorist controlled demolition of the twin towers under evacuation. This makes the event much easier to teach.
    The 9/11 conspirators let Building 7’s criminal controlled demolition be televised live.
    The 9/11 cover-up is transparent, complete with an admission in the twin towers’ catastrophic structural failure’s official technical report’s introduction that no attempt has been made to provide a technically credible analysis.
    The 9/11 censors, who include all principal nominally anti-neoconservative leaders (liberal, Muslim, union, “enemy,” anti-Zionist, pacifist, etc.) have been hammering 9/11 as a calamity on their gullible followers, sending them on wild goose chases that 9/11 Truth would nullify.
    Consequently, 9/11 compares favorably to JFK and just about any other conspiracy as a tool to teach the manifestation of Plato’s cave at a worldwide scale, starting with introductions as simple as the elementary http://www.911babystep.com.
    As a side-point, this may explain why many alternative scholars will delve into JFK while avoiding 9/11 like the plague. The conspiracy theory that they are actually playing a support role in Plato’s cave has merits.
    Love,

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  9. Excellent stuff Shelton.
    Jack Ruby (or his brother) was an alleged informer for George White, head of the narcs at that time and a participant in the MKUltra mass blackmail racket. And LSD experiments.
    Jack Ruby refers to the assassination of Oswald as “the incident” and that he didn’t remember it. He claimed that he remembered making a “wrong turn”, ended up there early (before 10am) and the next thing was him being on the ground.
    Then Sirhan Sirhan and RFK.
    Whatever the truth in any of it, George White is the name that stood out to me.

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  10. For myself, the assassinations of the 60s –70s was the revelation that set me on the path of researching deep politics. I was already in a state of wonder at Amerika…the attitudes of most grown-ups around me when I was maturing…from say, around eleven years old…
    I had watched all those WWII movies on TV. What struck me was, the older folks around me didn’t seem all that different than the Nazis in their prejudices, their uncritical support of militarism and ‘law and order’. All the teachers and counselors in school seemed ‘wannabe cops’ to me. So I was in a state of wonder about all of this sort of thing and by the time I was out of high school I was already standing on the outside of society looking in.
    I was in the garage of the Dallas Police building in 1967 being escorted back to our car after my friend and I were detained to make sure we had permission to be driving the vehicle. As we passed out of that door that Oswald was brought out of in that famous clip, I flashed back on that and mentioned it to the cops with us. The older one said he was there that day, we paused and he pointed right to the spot where Oswald had fallen. It was kinda eerie, being only four years after the event had taken place. I didn’t say anything about my opinion of the assassination. I’ve been extra-careful in what I say to policemen since I was a kid.
    \\][//

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  11. The JFK Assassination
    Disputing the Official Theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the “Lone Assassin”
    By Dr. Gary G. Kohls – Global Research, November 20, 2013
    http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-jfk-assasination-disputing-the-official-theory-that-lee-harvey-oswald-was-the-lone-assassin/5358874
    This is a timely recent article on the topic:
    “Once the neo-fascists became bold enough to slay the President on the street, they showed their hand. They showed how arrogant they had become.
    (America) has to hang on through a period of the military and the CIA who have a blank check trying to sell fascism. If she can hang on long enough, Americans may yet live in the country in which they were born. And that is the country structured by Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson.” ~Mort Sahl – 1968
    \\][//

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  13. Some may be interested in a live streaming of the conference in Dallas starting today sponsored by the non-profit Coalition on Political Assassinations:
    http://politicalassassinations.com/2013/10/dallas-conference-2013/
    The schedule is included and don’t forget to account for Central Standard time zone. I anticipate the streaming to begin this evening and go to Sunday morning.
    There is a second, but for-profit, conference also in Dallas by Lancer, http://www.jfklancer.com/Dallas2013/index.html. I don’t believe it is live streamed but it is also a research conference on the JFK execution.
    Paul Zarembka

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  14. Thank you, Mr. Lankford for your insightful article/reminiscence of the JFK assassination and how it relates to the later events of September 11, 2001.
    I find it useful to look at these events through a geostrategic lens and feel they are profitable seen as extremely important “deep political” projects that accomplished important objectives of the most ruthless segments of our ruling classes and that also mark major transformations in the evolution of imperialism and great power relationships. In the period from the end of WW 2 in 1945, until some point during the Vietnam War (defined variously from 1967 – 1974) (as it became increasingly apparent that the U.S. effort there would not succeed), the U.S. exercised what is defined as “Strong Hegemony” (there is a very useful discussion of different theoretical views of this in LONG CYCLES: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, JOSHUA S. GOLDSTEIN, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1988, pp. 7, 8, 16, 17, and chpt. 6, pp 123-147 passim; Dr. Goldstein has kindly made this important book available for free at ). Kennedy, a fine man and one of our best presidents (no angel of course, like anybody who assumes high office he was fully capable of playing political hardball), was trying to revive the New Deal domestically and find a less dangerous path in the world by reducing tensions with the Soviet Union and even cooperating in space exploration. Both he, and RFK, were originally dedicated Cold Warriors, and believed in the efficacy of counterinsurgency warfare in the developing countries to combat “communist” influence. But as pragmatists they became disenchanted with the advice they received from the high command of the U.S. military and the machinations of the CIA. Whatever his faults, JFK was the last president to seriously oppose the most egregious aspects of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. The dark forces of U.S. reactionaries and militarists, having learned from the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal, decided to end any chance of a Kennedy presidential dynasty and the possibilities it offered for social democracy at home and less warfare overseas and killed JFK. Lest we ascribe omnipotence and brilliance to these people, let’s remember that they tried to fight a prolonged colonial war with a conscript military in SE Asia, and were decisively defeated. The U.S. changed, largely due to Vietnam, and skepticism and suspicion of the country’s institutions reached previously unknown levels. While this level of distrust has inherent dangers, it did, in fact, end the ability of the U.S. ruling class to use massive military force to enforce its will. The removal of Kennedy was necessary to ensure that massive military spending and war, along with more draconian measures internally, would occur, but it also set into play the forces that ended, probably prematurely, the period of Strong U.S. Hegemony (1945 – 1974 at the latest).
    The second coup d’etat, a two part operation, that began with the (s)election of George W. Bush (in an election so corrupt and compromised that the U.S. was exposed worldwide as a banana republic) and his coterie of PNAC chickenhawk warriors and Zionist neo-cons (a large proportion of whom hold dual citizenship U.S. / Israel with primary allegiance to Israel). This put into place a regime that was compliant at the least and certainly at least partly complicit in the actual attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the second and decisive part of the coup. The much less powerful global geostrategic position of the U.S. by 2001, a good 35 or more years into a period of “Weak Hegemony”, ensured that a much more profound level of treachery, than the single assassination of a beloved leader, was necessary to achieve reactionary aims. This time significant direct damage was done to the economy and population of the country, followed by increased war and military spending and this time a truly draconian attack on the economic well-being and civil rights of the domestic U.S. populace. The drawback to this operation is that now that the initial shock of the operation has worn off the level of skepticism and distrust among the politically aware segment of the population is much higher than it was after the assassination, all this despite the serious degradation of the mainstream media in the intervening 50 years. Quality news and investigative journalism has disappeared from most newspapers and TV and radio and is carried out by shoestring operations on the web. The mainstream media have become pretty blatant propaganda operations that serve to keep the bulk of the populace in the dark and sated with infotainment.
    Giovanni Arrighi suggested that Vietnam represented the “Signal Crisis” of U.S. imperialism and hegemony (the transition from strong to weak hegemony noted above) while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the 9/11 events represented the “Terminal Crisis” of U.S. imperialism and hegemony (the events that will lead to the end of U.S. hegemony and its replacement presumably by China) (see “HEGEMONY UNRAVELLING—1”, New Left Review 32, March-April 2005, and “ HEGEMONY UNRAVELLING—2”, New Left Review 33, May-June 2005, both by Giovanni Arrighi). Again the U.S. ruling shot themselves in the feet. The real reason for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq was to try to gain military and political control over the oil and natural gas heartlands of the planet, to be able to control the flow of resources to the rival power centers in Asia and Europe and to ensure that U.S. oil companies would get privileged access to develop those resources and profit by it. These goals were utterly defeated and the disastrous wars launched to achieve these goals have left the U.S. an even more hollowed out shell than it was before the attacks.

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    1. Desmond Morista,
      Left and Right? US hegemony?
      This is very 19th century thinking – in my humble opinion. This is the view that nation states are in actual conflict, that those who rule the planet have a stake in “commerce”, the “welfare of people”, or any other interest but Raw Power.
      It may be most disheartening to grasp, but this whole thing is theater, just a game of political power.
      The Vietnam war was never meant to be won. The conflict achieved exactly what it was meant to–a long murderous stalemate. The longer a war can be engineered to go on the better for the power-mongers at the top. They have no goal but stasis of position.
      This is not to say that your analysis isn’t impressive, well considered and stated; it is just that you are taking burlesque seriously.
      \\][//

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      1. I do partially agree with you, in that capitalists have always aspired to operate without any fetters. However, they have never completely achieved it, though they have gotten pretty close these days (this is certainly not the first time, around the turn of the 19th – 20th century with the telegraph allowing for nearly instantaneous communication there was a period of internationalized markets and politics that was broken up by WW 1, the depression and the return to regional trading blocs) . Still nation state structures are both useful and vital to even our transnationalized ruling classes. It is very desirable to tax the general populace to run any given state structure for whatever level of public/privatized services are advantageous to extracting as much profit as possible, and in a key aspect, staff and fund military and police forces that are then used to coerce whatever populace is targeted for expropriation or discipline. We have not yet reached a level where corporate armies are used directly and exclusively, though we have nearly direct corporate rule certainly here in the U.S. with a pretty thin veneer of democracy. The British East India Company Army fought against the Nawab of Bengal and the allied French East India Company Army at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 in India in a sort of a 2/3 private army war. Of course during the Vietnam War the U.S. Air Force thoroughly and intentionally bombed the French owned Michelin rubber plantations and left the U.S. Rubber plantations untouched, a situation that certainly would have been reversed if France had been the military hegemon.
        Yes there is a lot of Kabuki going on here, but still different ruling classes play different roles. In the early to mid 1800s the British led in manufacturing and built the infrastructure of less developed nations, always designed to extract the colonial products. As their engineering and industrial prowess was eclipsed by the second wave of industrial nations they guarded the sea lanes and handled the bulk of the “gunboat” diplomacy and concentrated on financial manipulations, while the U.S. and Germany took over the manufacturing and building the engineering infrastructure. Now the U.S. guards the sea lanes and takes care of the bulk of the thuggery and swindles while East Asian countries do the engineering work and manufacture the bulk of industrial goods. These distinctions are not ironclad but do hold pretty well. Most corporations now are very transnationalized and many upper income people move very deftly from one posting to another in whatever country. Some Latin American upper classes, particularly the Mexicans are seamlessly integrated into the U.S., they have houses in their home country and the U.S., speak perfect English, have investments wherever serves their purposes best (Brazilian elites from Sao Paulo are now snapping up condos in Miami because they are so cheap compared to beach apartments in Brazil).
        The real elites are indifferent to our well being for sure, in fact, they are not a particularly bright group seeing as the damage being inflicted on the Earth is increasingly threatening continued life on this planet, and that is for everybody. Of course large segments of the elites never cared about anybody but themselves and they have been gouging and killing the Earth for a long time. The difference now is that we are approaching some sort of general crisis, as the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded and we are burning through our “environmental
        capital “. Anyhow, as I said, there is significant truth in your critique and I acknowledge it freely (I read L. Sklair’s “The Transnational Capitalist Class” a couple of years ago and am reading W. I. Robinson’s “A Theory of Global Capitalism” now, they both espouse something close to your comments) .

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      2. Dear hybridrogue1
        You made an important statement that I forgot to address in my reply, where you said “The Vietnam war was never meant to be won. The conflict achieved exactly what it was meant to–a long murderous stalemate.” Well again I partially agree with that, one of the real reasons for wars, certainly in the modern era and probably throughout history, is to fatten the armaments makers. In a colonial war, like Vietnam, the actual continued physical and institutional existence of the armaments companies and their wealthy owners, is not threatened (this contrasts to the situation in large “hegemonic wars” where in the WW1/WW2 war {a war(s) that many Asian historians call “The Great European Civil War” } that destroyed some, though certainly not all, of the munitions makers and their wealthy owners in the losing countries).
        However, it does make a difference which side wins wars, even colonial wars far away. Just to say that the corporate elites, be they national, international, or transnational land on their feet and make the best of a less than glowing success is not to say that there are no consequences to long drawn out defeats, despite whatever enormous profits the corporations make in that process. The U.S. political elites in the early 2000s period wanted take political / military control of Central Asia. The desire was to be in control of the oil and gas heartlands of the planet; they were aware that the major growth in energy use was going to be in S and E Asia and they wanted to control the ramifications of that and to directly profit from providing oil and gas to those areas. Instead, with their two major gambits in Afghanistan and Iraq utterly defeated, other companies primarily those from China, and to a lesser extent India emerge as the major players. They build the pipelines and refineries, their companies win the drilling contracts and supply all the inputs (including most of the labor). U.S. elites fall back and frack, and deep drill, and mountaintop remove resources closer to home.
        I heard an interesting talk on the BBC by George Ayittey, a Ghanaian economist the other day. He pointed out that the Chinese were negotiating a deal to renovate and improve the Nigerian railway system. The estimated cost was about $5 billion dollars and, of course, Nigeria doesn’t have the money (the elites there having stolen all the local revenues from the oil extracted in the last 50 – 60 years). So the Chinese proposed that they will do it for 1/6 of Nigeria’s remaining oil reserves, estimated at 36 billion barrels total so that is for 6 billion barrels of oil. That means, of course, that the price they will pay (I don’t know but expect that is for oil in the ground with at least some of extraction, refining, and transport still to be provided for, undoubtedly by Chinese companies at a tidy profit for those companies in any event) for this oil is about $0.84 per barrel. Now that is one hell of a deal in today’s world, and it only goes to the companies based in a country that has the engineering and manufacturing muscle to do this kind of work; not to those corporations associated with a country whose main activities are providing thugs and running swindles.
        History is full of elites who thought they would win a short decisive war, who then got bogged down in drawn out, expensive, indecisive conflicts. Making the best of a defeat is not the same as stepping into the vacuum created when a declining great power loses an expensive war. Clearly, the real losers are the poor people who live in the buffer and resource states where these conflicts are fought, and to a lesser extent the inhabitants of the declining great power who don’t have the option of moving their assets to greener pastures. The real winners of wars are those who don’t fight them, but provide the means and profit by it, and who are poised to move in and take advantage of the consequences.

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      3. Thank you for your well considered reply Mr Morista,
        I do see you as a well read and intelligent student of history. However there is a deeper level yet, one that might take a very long conversation for me to explain.
        As this thread is actually more specific in topic, and we range wide here, let me ask that you join me at my blog, that is if you would like to go into this in greater detail.
        http://hybridrogue1.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/harvest-2013/
        Perhaps you might leave what you have written here – just copy it over to the thread above; so I can consider it, and find a response I think might fit for you in what I see in what you see that I see differently. Perhaps I can explain why.
        [NOTE: The blog is on automatic moderation hold, and once a approve your first comment you will be on as soon as you post from then on.]
        BTW, my name is Willy Whitten
        \\][//

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  16. by James Corbett — corbettreport.com — November 22, 2013
    Corbet does it again__similar to his quick rundown on 9/11, this spoof outlining Lee Harvey Oswald as your typical America-hating communist from Louisiana, and like every Russkie-loving pinko from the South he grew up watching American spy dramas, volunteered for a Civilian Air Patrol run by a CIA contract agent and joined the US Marines.
    http://www.corbettreport.com/jfk-a-conspiracy-theory/
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  17. I rented and watched a DVD of a new film called ‘PARKLAND’ today…
    If I had known it was based on a Vincent Bugliosi book “Four Days in November”, and that Tom Hanks was a producer, I certainly would not have even considered seeing it.
    To say that the film is awful is an understatement, I would classify it as utter trash, something trite hoping to take advantage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination.
    The use of footage from that day was lame. The attempt to blend it in with the movie footage just didn’t come off. If they had stuck to showing things on TV, which they did do a few times, it would have worked okay.
    Besides being so compromised technically it was a lame telling from the official story POV.
    The James Hosty thing was played as “incompetence”…something researchers know better than to buy.
    The story centered around Abraham Zapruder and his famous film. What was especially wanky is that they kept hiding the head shot…seeing it at a glance in the reflection of someone’s glasses, or just a flash as someone steps in front of the screen…really dumb.
    Oswald’s mother was played as a crazy woman for saying her son was a government agent.
    They shot the whole Parkland attempt to save the presidents life…but wouldn’t touch the press conference of the doctors pointing to their temples as where the head-shot hit.
    Yea, another attempt to reinforce the ‘Oswald as lone shooter’ meme, just like all the TV specials for the big 50th.
    All in all just a piece of propaganda junk.
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    1. I unfortunately saw Parkland as well and I have to agree with you HR1 that it is a piece of trash propaganda. I just have to wonder why they even bother to put out this kind of thing anymore? It isn’t working except perhaps to get people to start looking at the media’s complicity in the cover up. All Parkland did for me was confirm that the MSM is pure state run propaganda and nothing more.

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  18. I have a musical colleague who thinks that the JFK “conspiracy theories” must be without foundation because he finds it impossible to believe that the MSM could not just cover it up back then, but even now, half a century later.
    I told him that with JFK, there have been bright spots; for example, Oliver Stone had a prominent op-ed in USA Today on the anniversary, in which he spelled out why the “lone nut” advocates are the ones in denial.
    Way back in his 2000 book “Do I Stand Alone?”, Jesse Ventura made the insightful point about how the media should be “balanced” like a nutritious diet, not “balanced” like a seesaw.
    If, for every favorable piece similar to the USAT Stone piece, there is another piece in the MSM that declares Oswald did it all alone, this “balance” serves to muddy the waters, and psychologically convince people who have little knowledge of the subject (like my friend) that the official version is “most likely” correct.
    At any rate, I started telling him about Operation Mockingbird, and he listened with interest. I could detect a bit of cognitive dissonance going on.
    PS This colleague is not even familiar with the Zapruder footage.

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    1. Speaking of the media covering up the truth, our favorite Left Gatekeepers are at it again in the HuffPo, promoting Chomsky’s “non-opinion” on Building 7.
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/noam-chomsky-911-truther_n_4345829.html
      Here is a screen shot of the comment I submitted to the HuffPo. I fully expect that it might get deleted.
      http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/4758/veuz.jpg
      Notice at the bottom it says:
      Due to the potentially sensitive nature of this article, your comment may take longer to appear publicly.
      This is getting covered at HuffPo Lite, i.e. 911blogger. A user says:
      My experience suggests that the Huffington Post actively manages its comments deleting some, promoting others, actively deleting links to other sites, and (in this case) seeing that the primary message truthers-are-demented is maintained.
      Pretty ironic to see that comment there, as that was EXACTLY the modus operandi that was used to censor, purge and vilify the Pilots and CIT supporters at 911blogger.
      Talk about a balloon inside a balloon…

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      4. I don’t believe it ever got published at all, so I should have worded my above comment more accurately and said “I fully expect it to get deleted if it gets approved at all.”
        There are over 5,000 comments on that thread, and most of the comments came in real time. As I was composing my comment, I would get that little notification bar at the top: “Show x new comments” and the number in the place of “x” would keep going up the more time passed.
        Yet, from the very first moment I hit the “submit comment” button, was greeted with: “Due to the potentially sensitive nature of this article, your comment may take longer to appear publicly.” This indicates to me that my account was already on comment moderation, perhaps because of a pro 9/11 truth comment I made in a previous thread. I forget the article, but I remember that there was a very specific article that angered me enough to register an account just to leave a particular comment on the side of truth. An editor probably decided to silence me before I could have any further influence on the community against HP’s bankrupt editorial position.

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      6. Here below is the comment I posted yesterday at Huffpoop and so far it hasn’t shown up. I expected censorship from them because that is what they are, dirty, filthy, censors. For what it is worth here is what I said:
        “Huffpost is controlled opposition and refuses to honestly address 9/11 issues. Chomsky is a left gatekeeper and is making a fool of himself. 9/11 was so clearly and overwhelmingly an inside job that only those with their heads deep in the sand (such as Huffpo regulars who have all the relevant 9/11 info censored by Huffpo) do not know it by now. Any time any one of you wants to see in a real debate how well the official lies stack up to the evidence just come on over to a real blog that does not censor topics such as 9/11. Truth and Shadows is the name of the blog and I will see any one of you there any time. Your limp arguments in favor of the laughable official story will be shredded very rapidly so bring all your best stuff Duhbunkers you will need it. Unlike Huffpo you will not have your comments censored there. The very fact that Huffpo censors 9/11 discussion tells you all you need to know about what Huffpo is worth, which is less than nothing.”

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      7. Adam Ruff,
        I have found it quite telling and remarkable, the similarities between HuffPoop and 911Booger. In both instances, the controllers (Ariana Huffington, Justin Keogh) use the same rationalization for censoring some things: “We need to appear to be responsible progressives/truthers, so we can’t open the door to ridicule by the public by way of entertaining certain topics.”
        Like I said, it appears that my comment at HuffPoop WAS approved, but probably at least 10 hours later. Comments appear in the chronological (or reverse chron) order in which they were submitted, not when they are approved. As such, my comment, when it did finally “appear,” was buried hundreds of comments down in what is (as of yesterday) a 5000+ comment thread. This way they can have it both ways. They can effectively censor you while still approving your comment, so that they feel they have an “out” if too many people were to complain: “Oh, we DID approve all those peoples’ comments, but because we have a limited staff who is in charge of moderating thousands of comments, things sometimes pile up, etc…” and they can pretend to chalk up any site imperfections to the fact that the moderators are “fallible human beings who make mistakes just like the rest of us,” to paraphrase LeftWright’s defense of the moderators at Booger.
        And I’m sure that many fellow “progressives” would defend Huffington’s decision to censor 9/11 truth: “Ariana has a wide audience, and she doesn’t want to turn off her base by going too taboo; the right wing propaganda machine already has enough genuine and BS ammo which which to attack the progressive movement; Ariana deeply cares about the credibility of her cause and only wants to see it succeed…” Exactly the same bullshit given to me by John “I’m proud to be a 911booger moderator” Wright. He told me in an email years ago that he did have “somewhat” of a problem with Victronix’ rigid, dogmatic stance that a plane hit the Pentagon, since John felt a reasonable case could be made for the opposite. But then he defended her: “She is doing what she is doing, NOT because of nefarious intentions, but because she’s being what she perceives as a responsible activist, and she only wants to see the movement succeed just like the rest of us do, and she feels very strongly that the no-plane-at-pentagon is a setup for movement discrediting…”

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  20. OSS,
    Yes, I’ve been going through your rebuttal of Deets. An excellent one that is worth reading for the real information. Regardless of the spurious claims being the impetus – the addition of these details are important for a fuller understanding of the event.
    \\][//

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    1. Thanks Willy
      I think that it will gather dust along with the Honegger thread and many other threads (also at CIT’s site) debunking other 9/11 windowdressers. What I will say is that if it weren’t for the windowdressers, I wouldn’t have gone into so much detail in research.
      Every cloud…. 😉

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  21. Regarding Noam Chomsky: Kevin Ryan has written a rebuttal to Chomsky’s recent interaction with Bob Tuskin down at University of Florida. In this instance, Kevin Ryan is right on the money. However, I just couldn’t help but notice some ironic similarities between Chomsky and Ryan.
    I highly doubt that he’ll approve this comment, but here is what I just submitted at his Dig Within blog:
    http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/5645/suu3.jpg
    If anyone else wants to have a stab at getting through to him, here’s the link:
    http://digwithin.net/2013/11/29/chomsky/

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    1. I just discovered A Wright is putting on his comedy act over on Ryan’s thread on Chomsky.
      Same old slapstick humor he uses here.
      \\][//

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      2. Yea Mr Syed,
        I noticed your gravitar in the “Likes” .. but he nixed your comment.
        Bad doodoo plastic person he… synthetic gonads.
        \\][//

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    2. I posted the following comment on Ryans blog:
      “I wonder if you have the courage to NOT censor me Kevin. I notice you did censor Adam Syed so I expect you will censor me too. Funny that you allow such an obvious shill as A.Wright to post garbage all over your blog but you block genuine truthers such as Adam Syed and myself from posting here. It is a shame that you do not have the personal courage or integrity to face up to your critics. At Truth and Shadows we have an article and discussion all about you and your book called the Kevin Ryan paradox. I will pretend for the moment that you are willfully blind about it. Perhaps you should consider responding to it or at least not censoring your critics here? A real truther is not afraid to face critics and that Kevin is how I know you are not a real truther. Anyway I don’t expect anything but continued censorship and silence from you but if you do decide to become a real truther and face up to your errors such as ignoring the truth about the Pentagon and actually working against that truth I can be found at Truth and Shadows blog.”

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      1. Well Adam, your comment doesn’t seem to be on the Chomsky thread at Ryan’s blog.
        Are you surprised by this? Seems to me an MO that we were previously aware of.
        Cliques…that’s the thing of it. He has a vested interest in his position on the Pentagon now — and associates to consider. If he were to look into the issue here, and change his mind — all hell would break out for him with his associates.
        Frankly I can deal with that more than I can deal with the wishywashy such as John Burns, who has posted a lot there…and seems to be one of those who feels anyone who argues against the official story is a legit ‘truther’. Even Judy Wood, or Fetzer. Why? Because John doesn’t feel qualified to assess the science. But it ISN’T the science with either of the two I mention — it is simple reason and logic. And if you really get into John’s commentary there, you will note that it is simple reason and logic that is his failing. His whole thing is verbosity … baffling with bullshit. He is big on imagination, but not much else.
        \\][//

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  23. Chomsky quotes (in light of his “spent an hour on the internet and think they know a lot of physics” comments):

    Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
    Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
    Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
    The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
    Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
    There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.
    As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

    Another windowdresser. F*** off Chomsky.

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  29. I’m sorry fellow truthers, but I’m not making any connection between the premature announcement of the destruction of WTC7 with any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. Someone please show me any comparable premature reveal in the JFK situation.

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