A Tale of Two Conspiracies: JFK and OBL

Topher Morrison
PurpleSerf.com

What can we learn from our experience with JFK and OBL?
Image Source: Time Magazine

Last Friday the United States suffered the worst attack in Afghanistan in 10 years.  Three months earlier it was enjoying its greatest victory...

"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."

- John F. Kennedy, New York City, April 27th 1961

Conspiracies from Jesus to JFK


          Upon hearing the word conspiracy, most people automatically turn off.  The subsequent information is relegated to the trash heap and the messenger is instantaneously discredited.  Used as a pejorative, conspiracy theorist, is just as powerful.  


          We are a nation based on empiricism, a nation founded on enlightenment principles favoring science over dogma, at least we think of ourselves this way.  If there was a conspiracy afoot in a free society their would be consensus in opposition, therefore when conspiracy theories are proffered and we find them contrary to established belief we scoff, but why?  Conspiracies are as old as time.    


          Looking through a different lens Americans may see conspiracies more clearly.  Once emancipated from temporal, cultural, and religious bias the reality that conspiracies have been effecting human events since our inception is irrefutable.  The most famous of all is arguably Judas Iscariot's nefarious plot to the arrest and crucify Jesus of Nazareth.  Rarely does anyone contest this was in fact a conspiracy.


          Perhaps the Ides of March will proffer up a more formidable example of our modern notion of conspiracy theory or what many prefer to call conspiracy fact.  Julius Caesar was the victim of a massive conspiracy of over 60 men.  After stabbing Caesar 23 times the conspirators justified their actions not as an attempt at a coup d'état, but tyrannicide.   Their "patriotic" endeavor, albeit grounded in just cause, sowed the seeds of Rome's collapse.  


          Fast forward 1600 years and we find the 1605 gunpowder plot of Guy Fawkes, a conspiracy, which has garnered much attention is recent popular culture and one, which was verifiably aimed to kill not only the King of England, but the entire upper house of parliament!


          Modern examples of conspiracy fact are innumerable, but many are well known, heavily corroborated and in hindsight are highly palatable.  For example, it is easy to believe the Reichstag fire was perpetrated by Adolf Hitler due to decades of investigation and dramatization that have painted the Nazi's as warmongering xenophobic occultists bent on world domination.  The initial tragedy, however, was the inebriation of the German people by a potent political cocktail.  Impoverished by the Treaty of Versailles, defenseless due to a lack of countervailing democratic institutions, and under assault by a charismatic cult of personality under Hitler and his Nazi party the Germans were convinced to give up their rights and liberties for a new German millennia.  The burning of the German congress was a superbly successful conspiracy which provided the legal basis for the deaths of tens of millions and it occurred just 60 years ago.


          There are some insane conspiracies throughout history, they effect all nations and the United States is no exception as the the Business Plot (you though Bush Jr. was bad) of 1933, the Tuskegee Experiments (got syphilis?), the CIA's MKULTRA project (super spies anyone?), Watergate (presidential paranoia), and the Iran/Contra affair (selling drugs for freedom is fun!) can attest.  There are, however, no conspiracy theories as famous as the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  


           Yesterday it was reported that his wife, Jackie Onassis, may soon speak from the grave and finally finger Lyndon B. Johnson and southern businessmen as conspirators in her husbands assassination.  Why is this relevant?  As Alex Moore from Death and Taxes notes:

"This is historically important, because it’s the first official tie to an establishment member on the inside admitting to suspicion of conspiracy.

 

The Warren Commission’s report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was really a promise to the American people: “Of course there was no conspiracy—your government would never betray you and kill your leader.” That piece of propaganda, submitted in September 1964, fractured America between those who would put their trust in the state establishment against all logic and those who believed the state had participated in assassinating its own leader and lied to cover it up–an irrevocable stain on democracy."

          In order to function properly conspiracies need only a few willing and influential actors, the right timing, official narrative, and copious amounts of credulity to win decades of influence. 


JFK and 9/11 

          In the pantheon of conspiracy theories there is nothing as well documented as the attacks of September 11th, 2001.  Because the 9/11 attacks came on the heals of the information revolution everything was recorded virtually in high definition and stored for posterity.

          The heavily criticized and revised online movie Loose Change has received tens of millions of views and has been called the first internet blockbuster.  Websites from Alex Jone's Infowars.com (which seemingly predicted 9/11) to whatreallyhappened.com enjoy millions of hits per day and guard massive stores of information debunking the official story of the 9/11 attacks.  In depth investigations like Inside Job by Jim Marrs and Synthetic Terror by Webster Griffen Tarpley provide every alternative angle to the official story.


          The success of these movies, websites, and books have led to movements like 911truth.org and wearechange.org, which are active in not only exposing inconsistencies in the official narrative, but have started to physically confront and record government abuse in every theater.  However, the main driver pushing so many to believe the most atrocious attack in American history may have come from our own government is because JFK is believed to have been the first casualty.  His wife's newly revealed suspicions lend unparalleled credence to this belief. 


Bin Laden was Killed Twice

          Speaking on Operation Neputne's Spear, there was about "25 minutes where we really didn't know what was going on." - CIA Director Leon Panetta

          The raid on the compound in Abottobad, Pakistan in early May is, from any perspective, the exclamation point to this bizarre post Cold War saga.  After trillions of dollars spent on executing the worldwide War on Terror, ostensibly in response to 9/11 and under rollback (a geopolitical stratagem popularized in the Cold War), the US military's elite SEAL Team 6 unit finally took out America's Most Wanted and dumped him into Indian Ocean. 

          Three months later, literally days before 18 SEAL Team 6 members lost their lives in the bloodiest attack in the War on Terror, a moving narrative from the New Yorker was released describing in unprecedented detail every step of the official narrative, which allegedly killed Osama Bin Laden.  The compelling story made no apologies for violating state sovereignty of a foreign ally or for killing an unarmed treasure trove of information (OBL).  Most importantly Nicholas Schmidle stuck to the very uncontroversial series of events already admitted, more or less, by the White House and Department of Defense spokesmen.

           The narrative posed by the New Yorker, however colorful and intricate, is merely an amalgam of public knowledge and the confidence of one "special operations soldier who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid."  The new details avoided ambiguity and previous contradictions.  It admitted false reports in the mainstream media and offered information which integrated surprisingly well with the explosive revelation (video below) that covert agents (whomever they were) assaulting the compound never made it out of Abottobad alive. 


          According to this anonymous government agent, the raid team used Pashto speaking soldiers whom told the local residents "to turn off the lights and stay inside" and whom purposefully blew up the stealth helicopter with C4 explosives and thermite grenades.  The special operations soldier even went as far as to say "...I'm sort of glad we left the helicopter there.  It quiets the conspiracy mongers out there and instantly lends credibility.  You believe everything else instantly because there's a helicopter sitting there."


          There is an extensive list of reports claiming the death of Osama bin Laden over the years from reporters to heads of state, but unfortunately no body has ever been claimed to have been found until the US government dumped it into the sea.  But how did they remove the body if the only helicopter to touch ground never left?  The following testimony has not been mentioned let alone refuted by any western journalist: 

Mohammad Bashir is a confirmed (according to Samaa) resident of Abottabad,
a neighbor of the supposed bin Laden compound.  His cousin Sahab Jamrez Khan
and many other residents are all witnesses to human remains being strewn about
the compound after the helicopter suffered an explosion prior to take off.

          Conspiracy theories and government transparency have an inverse relationship.  This is not to say each theory has a corresponding cover up, the relationship is not necessarily causal, but the more our government creates secret armies, spends four times as much on defense as its closest "adversary", and preemptively attacks foreign nations conspiracies whatever their stripe will find believers.  


          The validity of the OBL conspiracy, as of right now, hinges on Bashir's testimony.  If in fact what he says is true 9/11 and Osama bin Laden are merely chapters in a war that has been waged on the American public since Vietnam.  Who knows, like JFK, it may take 50 years for alternative theories to be taken seriously.   

The Patriot Act Is Not Conservative

Jack Hunter
The American Conservative
5/31/11

If Americans needed another reminder of why the Democratic Party is absolutely worthless, they got it during last week’s Patriot Act extension debate when Senate Majority leader Harry Reid again behaved exactly like the Bush-era Republicans he once vigorously opposed. In 2005, Reid bragged to fellow Democrats, “We killed the Patriot Act.” Today, Reid says that anyone who opposes the Patriot Act might be responsible for the killing of Americans. Dick Cheney now hears an echo and Americans deserve congressional hearings—as to whether Harry Reid is a sociopath, mere liar, or both.

But while Democrats stand pat for Bush Republicanism, the GOP now debates the extent to which it will remain the party of Dubya. Tea Party favorites like Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Congressmen Ron Paul, Justin Amash, Allen West and others, all voted against the Patriot Act. To varying degrees, each of these GOP representatives questioned the act’s effectiveness and legality. But unfortunately, most Republicans still won’t ask any questions.

The “War on Terror” that defined and preoccupied Republicans during the Bush era brought with it not only massive government growth and debt, but an unprecedented expansion of extra-constitutional state power, symbolized most famously by the Patriot Act. In the name of national security, government officials could begin wiretapping phones, hacking into email accounts, prying into business records and spying on citizens—all without a warrant and at government officials’ own discretion. Defenders say the Patriot Act did what needed to be done after 9/11. Critics say it did away with the 4^th amendment.

Let us say both have a point, and that for arguments sake, both Harry Reid and Dick Cheney are correct in arguing that it is sometimes necessary to surrender our liberties for increased security. Is this still true a decade after 9/11? Will it be true two decades after 9/11? How about three? Have the actions of Osama Bin Laden and his fellow terrorists forever altered our Bill of Rights?

Allegedly, the default position for conservatives is to distrust the government and defer to the Constitution. Concerning the Patriot Act, too many conservatives blindly trust the government at the expense of the Constitution. This type of thinking mirrors the logic of the Left, in which the constitutionality of a big government program like Obamacare is considered irrelevant due to the severity of the problem at hand. The liberal healthcare ends justify the unconstitutional means. This characteristic mentality of the Left is exactly how most of the Right approaches the Patriot Act—though it is an outright rejection of what most conservatives of any generation have held most dear.

Think about it. Conservatives get upset about many things on a regular basis—ACORN corruption, NPR funding, demanding that French fries be renamed “Freedom Fries.” At any given time there is always some new and outrageous rightwing distaste of the week.

But most of these controversies are a speck on a gnat’s ass compared to the damage done to the Constitution by the Patriot Act. For genuine constitutional conservatives, something like NPR funding is undoubtedly wrong but ultimately trivial and peripheral—while the protection of the Bill of Rights is crucial and integral. If George Washington or Thomas Jefferson were alive today, are we to believe that they would be more outraged that: A. The federal government helps fund public radio. B. The federal government snoops on citizens without restraint. Those who answered A. truly don’t understand the mindset of the men who founded this country.

A Republican critic of mine once asked me during a radio broadcast “Jack, can you show me where any American has been harmed due to the Patriot Act?” I replied, “Can you show me where any American has been harmed by Wikileaks?” The caller said he couldn’t, but stated that he believed private individuals shouldn’t haven’t access to private government documents. The gentleman was basically saying that whether or not Wikileaks has hurt anyone to date is irrelevant—the whistleblower outfit shouldn’t be trusted with such power to begin with. I argue the same is true of the federal government. So did the Founding Fathers. That’s why they wrote the 4^th amendment.

The entire reason we have a written charter like the Constitution is to specify the enumerated powers that define the hard parameters of our federal government. Among those powers is national defense and security. But much of what we call “defense” is anything but. Similarly, a total police state could undoubtedly provide much better security, though few Americans would desire a country so void of liberty. After all, most Americans can barely tolerate the way the federal government handles air travel these days.

When Ronald Reagan said there was nothing closer to eternal life on this earth than a government program he could have easily been describing the Patriot Act. When Barry Goldwater said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” he could have easily been describing the minority of Republicans who now at least question the Patriot Act. When James Madison wrote, “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other,” he could have easily been describing our current state of perpetual war that now gives seemingly permanent life to the Patriot Act.

If the “War on Terror” is a perpetual war—as so many politicians readily contend—have we now permanently given up our liberties? If terrorists really do “hate us for our freedoms” is the best method of defeating them to permanently surrender our historic freedoms? And if so, who is really winning the War on Terror? Us or the terrorists?

By the very nature of their philosophy, conservatives are supposed to question their government. And given the very nature of our Constitution, this is precisely how the Founders would expect any true patriot to act.

Read more of Jack Hunter's work at The Southern Avenger.

EPIC FAIL: The US Government’s History Of Fake Bin Laden Tapes

With this track record how can anyone trust anything the White House says about Osama?


Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
May 3, 2011

By the time you read this the White House will most likely have produced  a grainy pixelated image of a man in a turban with half his face blown as conclusive proof that the former CIA asset Bin Laden was gunned down by special forces on the orders of the great leader Obama.

However, ask yourself this one question – when has the US government and its corporate mouthpiece  media ever produced anything authentic and credible as far as Bin Laden goes?

Every single notorious Bin Laden tape released since 2001 has contained vague non-specific messages, making it impossible to pinpoint the date of the recording. The occasional tape that has contained specific references to current events has been an audio tape which has never been independently verified as even being the voice of the real Bin Laden.

For the rest of this article visit PrisonPlanet.com.