Richard K. Moore retired from Silicon Valley in 1994 and moved to Ireland, and since then has been trying to understand “how the world works.” That’s quite a task, not unlike trying to understand plate tectonics while standing in a corn field in Iowa. There is only so much the human mind can grasp. By definition all of our understandings of the complicated human affairs around us are reductionist. Still, we must try.

Moore’s piece from late last year, Mind Control: Orwell, Huxley, and Today’s Reality, has sat in my basket for quite a while, Post-It flags sticking out of it like quills on a porcupine. Here are a few insightful passages:

One of the first large-scale deployments of cult technology, informed by this [mind control, aka MKULTRA] research, was the creation of the Jihad movement by the CIA. The immediate purpose was to destabilize the Soviet regime, by tying it down in a quagmire in Afghanistan. This operation was quite successful. Since then, the Jihad cult movement – aka Taliban, Al Qaeda, Kosovo Liberation Army, ISIS, etc. – has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the purpose of destabilizing regimes, in pursuit of US geopolitical objectives. These destabilization operations in turn provide an excuse for direct US intervention, as we’ve seen recently in Libya and Iraq, and as we may soon see in Syria.

It is perhaps best not to hit you, dear reader, which such a far-reaching idea so early on. It would help to read the whole article, a mere 4,000 words or so. But indeed, the CIA after after World War II did embark on mind control experimentation, leading to psychiatric abuses rivaling anything credited to the Nazis, and experimentation with drugs, including introduction of LSD into the mainstream consciousness during the 1960’s.

That is more or less where I left off, and Moore now fills the picture for me. I knew that Jonestown was a cult experiment followed by a mass murder (not suicide). To what end I could not fathom. To begin to broaden my picture, and see the Jihad movements, color revolutions, and now ISIS, as the result of decades of research and experimentation by our spooks … is not comforting. But it does speak to the nature of people, the need to follow, trusting that someone has better and deeper knowledge. We are tribal beasts.

We see this same multi-cult dynamic operating in the US, in the divisiveness between liberals and conservatives. Liberals are kept in the fold by stories of conservative folly, and conservatives are kept in the fold by stories of liberal folly. In a propaganda-only system of control, there would be one party line for everyone. In this multi-cult system, there are two party lines, which we might characterize as CNN vs. FOX.

While the two party lines have many differences, in order to keep the two cults separated, they in fact share basic essentials in common. They both sustain the myth that state policy is a response to public sentiment, and they blame the other cult for providing support for the ‘bad’ policies. In fact US policy is made outside of government, by financial elites, and the state aims to control public sentiment, not respond to it. In this way we can see CNN and FOX as collaborators, sharing the common goal of hiding this fundamental truth from the people. The Democratic and Republican parties collaborate toward this same goal, using Congress as a stage, where they carry on a theater of divisiveness, providing the appearance of a democratic decision-making process.

This part I get. I used to watch the Daily Show religiously every evening, taking delight in the crisp, smart humor. But then I thought … who listens to this stuff but the choir? FOX followers, the object of much of the humor, don’t watch the Daily Show. They are busy talking about liberals, making fun of them in the same manner, though FOX people are not very funny. Still, it is inner-directed group reinforcing behavior, nothing more, solidifying group identification and that of the enemy.

The Barack Obama phenomenon provides an excellent example of cult tactics in action. Obama himself is obviously a natural cult leader, articulate and charismatic. He came onto the scene offering an inspiring core belief in deep reform, “The ground of politics has changed; Yes we Can!”. The dramatic effect was intense, as if we were witnessing the Second Coming. Campaign volunteers became the core of the budding Obama cult, and they were given lots of work to do, binding their identity to Obama and his professed mission. … The success of this mind-control operation was truly amazing. Obama in fact proceeded to carry on and expand everything Bush had been doing; the ground of politics hadn’t changed at all. But the cult binding was so strong that his support continued, by the very people who had hated Bush because of the same policies. Packaged arguments were put forward, to keep people in the cult, blaming Obama’s performance on Republican opposition – the standard divisiveness tactic. Even today there remain legions of Obama loyalists. Once bound to a cult, leaving becomes psychologically difficult.

Well, I have no doubt lost all readers by this point, so I’ll write the rest of this to myself. No worries about offending anyone.

Mormons are a cult. Any religion is, but Mormons are the best example because they openly practice what others do only subtly, indoctrinating their youth, expelling any bad-thinkers, and making sure that the authority of the Elders is never, ever questioned. We all know about that. The thing that strikes me about the Mormons that I know is that they are so goddamned happy. They don’t have to think.

There’s another word that Moore uses that struck me as useful: Immunization. I know about this, having been brought up Catholic. Not only was I indoctrinated, I was immunized. Anyone who spoke against Catholics was doing the work of the devil, and I knew to avoid them.

There is another form of immunization going on in our society, and it is aimed at the likes of me and Moore and any others who have freed their minds, escaped, so to speak. It is the “conspiracy theory meme.” Moore writes quite a few paragraphs about it. Here is his close:

Thus for the majority of the population we have a tightly controlled, two-tier, mind-control regime. The thoughtcrime dynamic governs what the media says, and the conspiracy-theory dynamic immunizes people against other views. For the majority, the party line (either CNN or FOX) is ‘truth’, as in Orwell’s world, but without the need for Big Brother’s extreme methods.

Thus do I marvel at the mountains of important writing and research done by smart people with inquiring minds and scholarly habits, and how people who imagine themselves smart instantly reject and avoid it as a “conspiracy theory.” Thus is our most important information hidden in broad daylight. That is an amazing thought control accomplishment.

It is sheer genius. There’s no winning in our greater Latter Day Saint world. We’re mostly Mormons in the spirit. Consequently, I don’t worry about convincing people, converting people, or doing anything to advance the cause of free thought.

You either get it, or you don’t. If you do, then you understand what I am about to say: Life is beautiful, interesting, and intriguing. It is fun. And we cannot be fixed.

Life is interesting. I don’t know how to get that across to people who are living down below, down in that place where truth is handed you on a platter, where nothing is understood until explained by a two-dimensional talking head possessed of a one-dimensional brain. I wonder what it was like before television.

We reflect our environment. Americans have no reason to wonder why they revere certain facial structures, such as Lincoln or Washington, and abhor others, such as Hitler or Osama bin Laden. They don’t realize that it is merely stimuli used to control their thoughts.

Perhaps two thousand years ago, certain leaders realized the state of the average human, and sought to bring order to chaos by introducing fables and symbols. No one understood the nature of the sun, the giver of life, so it became a god, the big deity alongside other minor ones like the moon (Meres, or Mary), the five wandering planets. Each year in the northern hemisphere, where most of us live, the sun would each day move further away on the horizon, and it got cold and plants withered and died. It kept moving away, but then stopped, and appeared by optical illusion to rest in place for three days. And then journey back. The son rose again.

Without that return journey, humans were doomed. The solstice was a celebration of the son’s return. People imagined it had faces and personality and powers, and that it even cared about us.

Roman leaders realized that if they could place human faces on those symbols that people would bow to people instead of planets, and could thereby be controlled. Thus did the Roman empire adopt Christianity as the one true religion, destroying all the remnants of any other it could find, along with the people who believed otherwise.

It’s a practice that repeats in other parts of life. Concepts that are too large for the average mind to grasp, like security in resources, elimination of underclasses, encirclement of potential enemies, and power for its own sake – no leader will appear on the TV screen and admit these to be the true objectives of wars and conquests. Instead, human faces have to be put on the concepts, making them into deities of a sort. In recent times, the desire to control resources became Osama bin Laden, the need to eliminate lesser beings the hooded “terrorist,” and the encirclement of potential enemies is now called “Putin.” These symbols become our reality, sublimely suggested to us day in and out on our electronic screens. Thus are our minds under control of the state.

We’ve had a bit of a blog kerfuffle these past few days over the attacks in France, whatever substance lie beneath. It’s mere imagery, the use of the “terrorist”, the mindless robot who kills without reason and out of sheer hatred and who therefore must be himself killed. It’s timeliness is undisputed, as it comes at a time when the President of France and those around him were deviating from control, making nice with Russia. That the actors were available, the script written in advance, and that it is all understood from one capital to another – befuddles people. Surely they cannot manufacture events of this magnitude on a dime! Surely it is a random event, unplanned, and unpurposed.

Step back, jump on a cloud, get above it all. Of course they can and do. The leading classes and their armies of technicians, and planners, and hired thugs can put on plays of this type almost at will, as their resources, experience and technical skills are almost unbounded. The politicians whom we imagine to be our elected leaders are just actors, themselves scared of the power that manifests around them. They play along to survive.

It’s a complicated world, but an interesting one too. Think of it this way: If they can make you believe, really believe in virgin births and men who rise from the dead and reside in your brain and need to be conversed with daily, can they not make you believe anything? They do have power over your perceptions, and they do have control of the TV screen. They do own your reality.

Alex Carey, the Australian writer/psychologist, wrote that the greatest achievement of American propaganda is that is has convinced Americans that there is no American propaganda.

That may be. It’s a good insight. But as I look around me and the horrors that American foreign policy has visited on the world in my lifetime, I offer up a second-place candidate:

American propaganda has convinced Americans that Americans are the victims of terrorism, rather than the major perpetrators.

“This man appears to be wholly devoid of any imaginative facilities. His percepts are predominantly the most common. His range of interest and achievements is quite limited, seen in his very narrow associational content. He takes little note of rare and unusual stimuli in his environment. His mental functioning is highly stereotyped. In conformity, he is within the limits of the average in that his thinking corresponds with that of the community at large. However, he proceeds occasionally with alogical reactions.”

The above words were written by a psychiatrist about a police officer who was eventually hired and went on to become famous. They were the result of a Rorschach test. I’ve stripped all of the context from it because it so well describes the typical American sitting in front of his TV watching “news,” and also sums up the content of blog comments too.

The events at Charlie Hebdo have all the markings of a covert operation, far more likely an intelligence operation than a random act of terror. To wit:

• It is insane. It serves no operational purpose, advances no cause. It merely inflames anger. It’s utterly stupid.
• It is solved without investigation. We immediately know the perps. Now it’s just a matter of killing or silencing them, Tsarnaev style.
• The press was prepped in advance with the story, and immediately solved it. The talking heads all speak with barely concealed contempt for the aggressors, instantly known to them.
• We’re learning now that the supposed suspects have been on a “terror watch list” for a decades, that is, they’ve been babysat.

To what end? Some time read about “Operation Gladio,” the US/NATO terror operation in Europe that was exposed in the 1990’s, but is oddly buried in broad daylight. Agents of NATO bombed a train station in Bologna, the Piazza Fontana in Milano, randomly shot shoppers in Belgium, a car bombing … ultimately, the assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Mora in 1978. NATO was behind this. NATO, and the CIA committed random acts of terrorism designed to discredit left-wing groups.

Of course, with the attack in France, we don’t know anything yet. There’s been no investigation. There will be no trial. The accused will never get their day in court. But we live in a time when “instant information” produces a demand for an instant solution to crimes. We can’t wait for the patient, painstaking search for background, clues, evidence, interrogation, and finally the adversarial proceeding where everything is laid bare before a group of skeptical inquirers.

This is the nature of … not news, but agitprop. That is all this is, agitation propaganda, the strategy of tension. And it works so well because it fuels hatred.

Every generation has its focal point for hatred. In the early days of our country, it might have been Native Americans, savages. Later came freed slaves, still a focal point, and later still various immigrant groups, most recently Hispanics. But American foreign policy is set now to dominate the oil fields of the Middle East, and so for decades has been using Muslim extremists as the focal point. Muslims, no more or less violent than anyone else, have become archetypical villains feeding our nightmares, our television sets and computer screens supplying the sublime imagery.

Intelligences agencies, who are linked to each other without regard to country of origin, have stables of post-MKULTRA patsies available for any desired outcome, be they Saudi faux-pilots or Chechen rebels, or in this case two Algerians, Cherif and Said Kouachi.

It is fashionable these days to openly hate Muslims, and these staged events are successful because they feed hatred. Imagine the perpetrators were instead Mossad agents, would American jets be lined to to drop bombs on Tel Aviv? No. It is no longer fashionable to hate Jews in the manner we are allowed to hate Muslims. But if I were looking for the real perpetrators of this small massacre, I’d be looking to Tel Aviv and Langley first, and Paris suburbs last.

That’s how we roll in the Gladio era.
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Some absurdity: From Agence-France Presse, carried on MSN.Com:

Cherif Kouachi was a known jihadist convicted in 2008 for involvement in a network sending fighters to Iraq.

That’s insanely funny, as without our brains so deeply soaked in agitprop and nationalism, we would easily recognize 2003 forward as a time when a certain country was sending tens of thousands of terrorists to Iraq to destroy the place and murder its citizens. The doctrine of “worthy victimhood” stands. Iraqis do not qualify. French citizens do.

And one final absurdity: I watched Bill Maher on the Jimmy Kimmel show the other night. Bill too had solved the crime, but since, as Kimmel mentioned, Bill is so intelligent, his take was a little different. The event, he said, was the result of a religion that espouses open hatred.

Doug Feith, step aside. Bill Maher is the stupidest fucking man alive.

Pulling a Swede here.

Accordingly, the [JFK murder] case has been deliberately and systematically marginalized by the “media industrial complex” and turned over to the province of kooks, crackpots, and “assassination buffs” and “conspiracy theorists,” coded expressions craftily designed to disparage anyone who simply keeps an open mind and wants to look further into the circumstances of the president’s death. Independent thinking about this critical event has been stigmatized as taboo, a stigma enforced through belittlement, mockery, and obfuscation. Many people as a result are too intimidated to express the dissenting opinions about the case.

The effect is a pervasive atmosphere of unreality surrounding postwar American history, a willed decision by most citizens (even some who know better) to live in a fantasy America rather than the far messier place we actually inhabit. The fact that none of the official explanations for all of the major events in modern American history – the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; Watergate; Iran/contra; the Gulf War; 9/11; and the Iraq War – makes sense when the evidence is examined with care should be enough to make even the most trusting American realize he or she is being duped by our own government. (Joseph McBride)

It usually takes a great tragedy, losing a war or perhaps internal rebellion, to force those in power to come clean. In South Africa after years of apartheid the new government deliberately forsook opportunity to hold an inquisition, and instead went the “truth and reconciliation” route. This promotes healing even as I know that the very worst people in society walk free after committing heinous crimes. “Reconciliation” is not possible with such monsters. No doubt the South Africans knew that too, and yet, what was the alternative? To hire a new set of monsters to make revenge?

Nonetheless, if our country is ever to heal, even 51 years after the fact, we need to officially solve JFK’s murder so that we can have some closure. The private kooks, crackpots, assassination buffs and conspiracy theorists can then join all of the regular people of society, no longer grasping on to a slim read of truth under the yoke of a fascist state hidden behind a fake democracy. We could all be equals. We could all know some truth.

The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds. This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was but crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written word sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyph and Chinese ideogram. These cultrually richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the hot and uniform visual medium. (Marshall McLuhan, The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear)

Marshall McLuhan is a man whose words I cherish, as he was so able to communicate complex ideas in an understandable manner. A tribute to his genius is that while reading his words it is as if the sun pokes between the clouds, yet shortly after I lose that light. I have to continually revisit him.

Consequentially, his major essays, collected in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, sits atop my shelves here among pictures of my mother and grandmother and others – I didn’t realize as I placed that and two other books there that I was reserving a place of honor for him. I just wanted his book to be handy.

Love of the written word takes many forms. Some prefer fiction writers, and I tend to agree that fiction in the proper hands conveys important truths in a manner that non-fiction cannot. (See, for example, “The New Testament” by various anonymous authors.) Others prefer poetry, but I’ve never been able to sit and look at a it long enough for it to penetrate this thick cranium. Hearing poetry is another experience entirely.

I read mostly non-fiction. But my most recent experience with fiction, The Stranger by Camus, left me wanting more. It was so deeply moving. In the same manner, On the Road by Kerouac moved me … “That’s not writing. That’s typing!” scorned Truman Capote, but Kerouac had managed to convey to me the emptiness felt by the Beat Generation in the post-war years in a manner that no historian could touch.

So as a reader of non-fiction, I doff my cap tho those who prefer fiction. Their pathway to truth is less littered with lies than my own.

As we head into a new year, I take a moment now to offer tribute to those who read this blog and bring their own ideas and experiences here. There is nothing new or original under the sun, of course, but there is the human mind. We are capable exchanging complex notions of great value.

It is always obvious to me in blog exchanges whether or not I am dealing with someone who reads, and even more, the type of reading done. It takes a lot of reading over time before things can settle in and begin to paint a picture of the world that has some consistency around the edges.

As a young man raising kids and working full time, I managed to read maybe three books a year, and consequently each had disproportionate impact on me. So it was that I read, for example Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, and Dare to Discipline by James Dobson. Without broader experience, the effect of these men was disproportionate.

So too is it with so many of recent generations who have read Atlas Shrugged, and then stopped. It’s good to read Ayn Rand, and then even better to throw her aside with great force later on. It’s a liberating feeling.

Before we settled in the house we now occupy, we looked at maybe thirty others in this area and up around Boulder. I was always curious about the people who lived in those houses, so as we went room-to-room I looked for the book shelves or stacks. What I generally found was no shelves or stacks, maybe a few travel guides or a beach book or two. Dan Brown probably accounted for 60% of book sales in this land a few years back. It’s a desert out there, I realize.

But then I recall that Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission, reminded the other Commission members that even though the final Report would contain gaping holes and contradictions, that they should not worry about it because Americans do not read.

That was 1964 and true then as now.

As McLuhan reminds us, what is more meaningful on a wall? An American flag, or the words “American flag”? While phonetic symbols store a great wealth of information, symbols impart far more and with immediate impact. Consequently, the power of television and movies, and now the images on the screen of our computers, own the American mind.

There is a vast treasure trove of truth and lies out there waiting to be assembled and easily accessible to all of us. But it is hidden away in books, and so will never be found.

@the OliverStone: A dirty story & in the aftermath the West maintains the dominant narrative of “Russia in Crimea” – the true narrative is “USA in Ukraine.”

@shaymultimedia: @TheOliverStone Shame on you Stone! How much is the Kremlim paying you? You are what Lenin used to refer to as a “useful idiot.”

@AlexandrNevskij: @The OliverStone I know my history, and Putin is a thieving murderous war-mongering thug, pure KGB filth!

@mpthct: @shaymultimedia @AlexandreNevskij @TheOliverStone Odd that people who claim to know their history are the ones that don’t know their history.

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I listened to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me podcast over the weekend. It is called the “NPR News Quiz” and I listen because they have some really funny people on their panels. But it can be annoying too. It is, after all, NPR, and so the “news” it quizzes panelists about is mostly lies. Host Peter Sagal made jokes and references to our official and given truth in this last show, that Vladimir Putin is an evil man, that the Russians invaded Crimea, and that the Ukrainian coup d’état earlier this year was a triumph for democracy in which the US played only a small part, if any. That is the official and dominant narrative, and Sagal, of course, is too … NPRish … to know any better.

Oliver Stone is now making a documentary about the Ukrainian coup d’état and Maidan massacre, and it will be out soon enough and opening at a theater anywhere but near you. Here’s a part of his description:

“Details to follow in the documentary, but it seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators,” he said. “Many witnesses, including Yanukovych and police officials, believe these foreign elements were introduced by pro-Western factions – with CIA fingerprints on it.”

My only question, and why I reprinted the Tweets above, is … how can anyone not know this? How?

The massacre during demonstrations is a CIA specialty repeated elsewhere, for instance in Venezuela in 2002, and of course in countless coups d’état wherein any government that demonstrates any left-leaning sympathy or, more importantly, charts a course independent of US dominance, is targeted for regime change. Of course, the @AlexandrNevskij’s of this world who know their history so well don’t know this, and neither do most Americans.
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This may seem a disjointed post, but all of this came full circle this morning for me as I reviewed a murder in Washington DC in 1964, that of Mary Pinchot Meyer, one of JFK’s lovers, but oddly, one with whom he was truly in love and with whom he shared deep secrets. Her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was high up in the CIA and so had to sit in silence as CIA murdered her. The murder took 6-8 people to carry out, not counting those who planned it. It included

• surveillance for weeks to choose the murder spot;
• a planted broken-down car so that a tow truck was called, to make sure witnesses were on hand;
• a patsy selected that very morning, a young black man who was sleeping off a drunk after having had a tryst;
• a wardrobe department at CIA that supplied the clothing for a a man looking like the patsy to be seen near the body by witnesses;
• two people, a man and woman strolling through the park – actually doing surveillance;
• a “witness,” a young army officer who appeared and offered incriminating testimony against the patsy and then disappeared into the shadows;
• and of course, the shooter himself, a mere mechanic, a paid killer, who performed his job with cold calculated efficiency, even eliciting a scream from his victim before dispatching her. (He could have killed her silently but wanted attention drawn to the event so that the man imitating the patsy could be seen walking away from the scene.)

It’s just one more murder. CIA has done thousands of them. But look at the attention to detail in the staging, the thoughtful setup for the sake of investigators. They are professional murderers, and their art is to make murders look like something else – accidents, random acts of inexplicable violence, car accidents, plane crashes large and small, suicides, drownings, lone nuts in windows overlooking motorcades … there is always the act itself, but then something else too, some distraction to draw our attention away from the real murderers and motives.

James Jesus Angleton was one of the early henchmen in the organization as it found its wings in the post-war era. Like most psychopaths, he found little joy in life beyond the game, and spent his closing days drinking himself into oblivion, perhaps even demonstrating elements of a conscience in these words spoken close to the end of his life.

Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. Intelligence were liars. The better you lied, the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it. … Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.

I guess I will see them there soon.

I bring this up because Oliver Stone, in being openly hostile to CIA and having power in his filming skills and reputation, is putting his life in danger. Discussions are likely going on as we speak about the wisdom and possible means of dispatching him. If he knows this, and I assume he does, then he is a man of honor and rare courage. We all gotta go sometime, and his body of work, especially the movie JFK, is an enormous and important contribution to the preservation of truth, that thing that American historians* are so very bad at.
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* As Senator Frank Church discovered during his investigation into CIA activities in the late 1970’s, CIA has paid writers on staff whose job it is to rewrite history in the making so that researchers looking for source material in college libraries and other archives will find only official history, and not the real stuff. Thus are the bookshelves of Barnes and Nobel, history and current events section, littered with bullshit.

I am busy today transcribing a one-hour interview by Len Osamic of William Pepper, currently serving as defense attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, but before that the attorney for James Earl Ray. And I have to chuckle a little bit because commenter Fred has said to me on occasion that the government cannot keep secrets and that secrets get out, and that’s why he doesn’t believe these fantastic stories of conspiracies and cover-ups, Martin Luther King being a big one.

Well, information did get out there. In 1999 the family of Martin Luther King sued Lloyd Jowers and “other unknown conspirators” in the death of Dr. King, forcing a public trial in Memphis. It was the trial of the century, and no one showed up. To this day if you ask any newspaper reporter or journalist in this country about that trial, you’ll get a blank stare. But for a week Three weeks in 1999 seventy witnesses were called and testified about the events surrounding King’s death. The verdict was that Lloyd Jowers, a minor player, was found guilty, as were the FBI, Memphis Police, and U.S. Army.

The trial is public record, and I intend somehow to get hold of the transcript. William Pepper and company have done a remarkable job of uncovering witnesses and evidence. It seems they know everything now except the name of the actual shooter. Lloyd Jowers, who had ulterior motives for approaching the King family to confess his guilt, was not a shooter, but took care of the rifle after King was gunned down from the bushes below the rooming house where the shot “officially” was fired. He knows who fired the killing shot, but refused to give up a name because, as Pepper says, he feared for his life. The actual murderer of King, a hired gun, a mechanic, was a very dangerous man, and was still alive in 1999.

It gets even more interesting. There were levels of organization in the shooting, with the U.S. Army providing backup snipers in case King survived. (Andrew Young was also to be killed that day but was not.) The Army also provided a photographic team, two still photographers who were atop the fire station nearby taking pictures of everything. From them we heard testimony that James Earl Ray was not present at the time of the shooting. But is that not weird, that the Army took the trouble to photograph the event? Would we not want to see those photos now? Were they produced at trial? Subpoenaed?

Here’s part of the Pepper interview, as it relates to Colonel John Downie, who was in charge of the military side of the shooting:

That entire Army unit, those soldiers, the ones from Psychological Operations and the other Special Ops came out of Camp Shelby, Mississippi early that morning, was designated, authorized under the control of Colonel John Downie. John Downie was the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group that was based in the Pentagon reporting directly to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the United States Army. And that’s the only MIG, Military Intelligence Group, that is based in the Pentagon. John Downie controlled it, he was brought back to take it over and run it in June of 1967, and he was given his marching orders to begin to organize the military side of that operation as opposed to the civilian side, which was handled separately.

Downie was organizing the military side in ’67. He’s an interesting character, and was a man, strangely enough, that one had to have some respect for as a patriot who believed what he was doing was right. Because, he was Lyndon Johnson’s briefer. He was also CIA. He was Lyndon Johnson’s briefer on the Vietnam War. And he would come back into Washington on a regular basis and meet with the President to give him a briefing on the war and continually question the president as to what we were doing there, saying this was a ridiculous waste of blood and treasure, and that we had no business being there. And why are we there? And he kept pounding out this fact to Johnson and finally one day Johnson pounded the table and said to him “John, I can’t get out of this war. My friends are making too much money.”

Now that is one of the most outrageous and revealing statements about war and the waging of war that any head of state in the history of this republic has ever made. And he made it to John Downie, and I learned about that subsequently with an interview of John Downie’s daughter, who remembers him coming home that day very upset and saying to his wife “Pack your bags. We’re going to Canada.” And he had himself transferred up to the embassy in Canada and wanted nothing more to do with being a facilitator for the war in Vietnam.

So that taught me something about the character of this man who originally was from Pennsylvania, and in terms of his perceived actions in terms of patriotism. And I believe – this is the quandary one gets into – I believe that he had no doubt that Martin King was an enemy of the state and that what he was doing was correct. Of course, however, it was wrong and illegal and criminal and immoral. With that assessment, one has to put the whole story out there so that it’s clear where this guy was coming from. He ran the military side of things. He ran the military side.

I find that intriguing, that the assassination of Martin Luther King can be traced to within shouting distance of Lyndon Johnson. Of course, we have no evidence that Johnson ordered it or even knew about it. But his military briefer sure did.

Pepper will put out a book that summarizes all of this, to be coordinated with a movie, in the near future. He has written two previous books on this subject, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King (1995), and An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (2003, revised 2008). These will be folded into the final book, which also includes “devastating information that I have been able to acquire in the fifteen years following the civil trial.”

So there ya go, Fred. Information got out, it’s hidden in plain sight, and still no one knows about it! That’s thought control in our democratic society, at its finest.

Veracity: “Not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” (Locke)

U.S. variation: If something is on TV and called “news” it is true. No proof need be offered.

Bertrand Russell:

“[Locke’s] definition is admirable in regard to all those matters as to which proof may reasonably be demanded. But since proofs need premise, it is impossible to prove anything unless some things are accepted without proof. We must therefore ask ourselves: What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof?

I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic – including the inductive logic employed in science. These are things which we can hardly bring ourselves to doubt, and as to which there is a large measure of agreement among mankind.

But in matters as to which men disagree, or as to which our own convictions are wavering, we should look for proofs, or, if proofs cannot be found, we should be content to confess ignorance.” (The Listener, 1947)

The major event of our time for most Americans, 9/11, is surrounded by so-called evidence with little or no science behind it.

• Jet aircraft cannot behave in that manner, cannot fly at 500+ mph in dense atmosphere;
• The odds of 19 supposed hijackers all having success with minimal tools at their disposal are phenomenal …
• … and then to fly the aircraft (which cannot fly at that speed anyway) unerringly to their targets … unlikely.
• Large jet aircraft cannot fly through small holes without meeting resistance and leaving debris.
• Light posts would not have been severed by aircraft wings – quite the opposite, the wings would have been severed by a denser metal.
• Cell phone calls from aircraft were impossible then, as now.
• The notion that an aircraft sunk in an abandoned mine and that no effort was made to recover it is … indescribably ludicrous.
• That a group of people ascertained the plans of supposed hijackers and then voluntarily committed suicide to save others … Disneyesque, vain, patronizing and stupid.
• That national defense responders all at once screwed up is so … highly unlikely …
• … that fighter aircraft needed for national defense conveniently were out of position – highly coincidental.
• The large number of military drills going on, easily ‘flipped live” to avail plotters of vast government resources, was too coincidental to be taken without serious skepticism.
• The presence of an unreported large hurricane off the shore of Long Island that day … hmmmm.

These are the facts of sense experience, but also principles of mathematics and logic. Those of us who look at the events of that day with high skepticism are the ones who employ the skills of reason and logic, and are also the ones not so susceptible to TV truth. We are the sane ones. The rest of you … you seem to have some screws loose.

I do not understand the power in place that causes ordinarily sensible people to believe such monstrous lies. It’s really weird that all of the above, easily seen to be false, even ludicrous, are accepted without proof.

What the hell is wrong with you people?