Well, first I think it's important to draw a distinction between conspiring to perpetrate an act and conspiring to cover one up. It's an important distinction to make because the people who carry out an operation are rarely (if ever) parties to the cover-up. Likewise, the people who cover up an event most likely weren't involved and may not even have known it was in the pipeline.

Why would someone not involved in the plot cover it up? I can think of many reasons. For instance, had Lyndon Johnson come clean immediately after Kennedy's murder and followed up where the evidence - at that time - was leading him it's likely America would have been at war with Cuba and/or Russia. Which meant thermo-nuclear war. This is the EXACT argument he presented Earl Warren, the man he tasked with conducting the investigation into Kennedy's murder.

How is it possible to orchestrate a fifty-year cover-up across the entire spectrum of media you ask? Before making a rhetorical statement such as "Someone would have talked" I'd first check to see whether someone hasn't ALREADY talked. In the case of the Kennedy murder many, many people did speak out - or were about to before their lives were ended prematurely (see Sam Giancana, John Roselli, Dorothy Kilgallen etc. etc.). Perhaps the most important voice of all who suffered a similar fate was the alleged killer himself - Lee Harvey Oswald. This is a man who, according to the Warren Commission, chose to shoot Kennedy because he wanted to be remembered as "important" - and yet from the outset vehemently denied any involvement and repeatedly described himself as "a patsy".

The mainstream media would have us believe the only people who have any opinion on cases such as JFK are "cranks" - but if this means the Chief of Special Operations in the Pentagon (a department solely assigned to joint covert actions between the military and the Central Intelligence Agency) is also a crank than I'd say the word has lost all meaning.

While we are at it we might as well lump Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford & J. Edgar Hoover in the same category because all of these at one point or another either doubted that Oswald acted alone or acted at all.

People talk regularly - whether anyone is LISTENING is another question entirely.

As to the question of how it's possible to maintain a cover story in the media - it really isn't as difficult as most people believe.

Almost all media these days has either been assimilated under a handful of trans-national corporations - or is in state hands. Which means content control really isn't all that hard to manage if you have people placed strategically in high positions. It's not that every journalist at the TV station or the newspaper is somehow implicated in some grand conspiracy. Major stories require authorization "from upstairs" and if the order comes down that it "is likely to upset the government or advertisers or the shareholders etc". - the story is deep-sixed.

All journalists learn to internalize the socio-political dynamics of the institution they are working at very quickly because they know that to do otherwise is a surefire route to the exit.

As Noam Chomsky once pointed out to Andrew Marr after the latter indignantly claimed that he's "free to say what he likes" at the Beeb and has never been censored:

"You say what you like because they like what you say".

Is there any evidence that the likes of the CIA and such have high-placed "cutouts" in the media?

The fact that most people don't already KNOW this is proof of the very argument I'm making because the answer is a resounding - YES!.

As I've repeatedly pointed out, in 1978 the then CIA director, Richard Helms, admitted that he had nearly "a thousand" journalists, authors and academics on the CIA payroll. This propaganda mechanism was initially set up under the rubric, "Operation Mockingbird" by former CIA director, Allen Dulles. More information on this can be found in David Talbot's recently published book on Dulles, The Devil's Chessboard

I mean, I really don't know why I'm explaining this because had I instead been talking about Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia or East Germany under the STASI nobody would bat an eyelid at the thought of shadowy state-secrets kept from the public. This notion of "American exceptionalism" - setting it apart from the normal functioning behaviour of nation-states stretching back to the time on antiquity says more about the effectiveness of its propaganda methods than any criticisms I can offer.



Michael J. Wood KNOWS this for CERTAIN? Or is he just tossing about labels infused with pompous psychobabble? For an ostensibly smart guy he sure has some gaping holes in his reasoning because I can think of an equally likely category - a person who believes in conspiracy not out of some "yearning for a simpler universe" or "frustration with complexity" etc. etc. (yawn) - but instead because it's where that little something known as EVIDENCE is pointing. A car mechanic can often fix faults which are completely new to him simply by combining past experience with reason and divining synergies. Do you accuse him of having a "monological belief system", too?

So-called "conspiracy theorists" are forever tarred with insulting pseudo-scientific stereotype labels such as the above - but if anything I'd say it's the CRITICS who are marooned within a "monological belief system" because they are far more likely to resort to one-size-fits-all arguments than the other side.

Here I'll quote the Harvard political scientist, Dr. Michael Parenti:

Investigators who concluded there were conspiracies in the Kennedy and King murders did not fashion "large mysterious causes" but came to their conclusions through painstaking probes of troubling discrepancies, obvious lies, and blatant coverups. They have been impelled not by the need to fashion elaborate theories but by the search for particular explanations about some simple and compelling truths.

To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers, Philip Melanson, Jim Garrison, Cyril Wecht, Jim Marrs, Gaeton Fonzi, Sylvia Meagher, Michael Canfield, James DiEugenio, and many others. These investigators have been described as "assassination buffs." The term "buff" is a diminishing characterization, describing someone who pursues odd hobbies. For the same reason that we would not refer to "Holocaust buffs," so should we not refer to these serious investigators as "assassination buffs." Their efforts reveal a conspiracy to assassinate the president and an even more extensive conspiracy to hide the crime.

While ignoring their revelations, the media have given fulsome publicity to the likes of Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, a grotesque whitewash of the assassination. Posner's book was not a sloppy, confused work but a deliberate contrivance that used outright untruths to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was a disgruntled lone leftist who killed Kennedy. Posner could get away with his misrepresentations because those who have written systematic exposures of his book were either ignored by the corporate owned media or roughed up by unsympathetic reviewers and editors.

An end run around the media blackout was achieved by Oliver Stone's movie JFK, a film that directly reached millions of viewers with an accurate account of the specifics of the assassination. The movie could not simply be ignored because it was reaching a mass audience. So the press savaged it. As far as I know, JFK is the only movie in film history that was attacked, six months before it was released, in just about every major broadcast and print outlet. The Washington Post, for instance, gave George Lardner Jr. the whole front page of its Sunday "Outlook" section (5/19/91) to slam Stone for "chasing fiction." Lardner was an interesting choice to review this particular movie, being the Post reporter who covered the CIA and who never wrote a critical word about that agency.

Well, first I think it's important to draw a distinction between conspiring to perpetrate an act and conspiring to cover one up. It's an important distinction to make because the people who carry out an operation are rarely (if ever) parties to the cover-up. Likewise, the people who cover up an event most likely weren't involved and may not even have known it was in the pipeline.

Why would someone not involved in the plot cover it up? I can think of many reasons. For instance, had Lyndon Johnson come clean immediately after Kennedy's murder and followed up where the evidence - at that time - was leading him it's likely America would have been at war with Cuba and/or Russia. Which meant thermo-nuclear war. This is the EXACT argument he presented Earl Warren, the man he tasked with conducting the investigation into Kennedy's murder.

How is it possible to orchestrate a fifty-year cover-up across the entire spectrum of media you ask? Before making a rhetorical statement such as "Someone would have talked" I'd first check to see whether someone hasn't ALREADY talked. In the case of the Kennedy murder many, many people did speak out - or were about to before their lives were ended prematurely (see Sam Giancana, John Roselli, Dorothy Kilgallen etc. etc.). Perhaps the most important voice of all who suffered a similar fate was the alleged killer himself - Lee Harvey Oswald. This is a man who, according to the Warren Commission, chose to shoot Kennedy because he wanted to be remembered as "important" - and yet from the outset vehemently denied any involvement and repeatedly described himself as "a patsy".

The mainstream media would have us believe the only people who have any opinion on cases such as JFK are "cranks" - but if this means the Chief of Special Operations in the Pentagon (a department solely assigned to joint covert actions between the military and the Central Intelligence Agency) is also a crank than I'd say the word has lost all meaning.

While we are at it we might as well lump Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford & J. Edgar Hoover in the same category because all of these at one point or another either doubted that Oswald acted alone or acted at all.

People talk regularly - whether anyone is LISTENING is another question entirely.

As to the question of how it's possible to maintain a cover story in the media - it really isn't as difficult as most people believe.

Almost all media these days has either been assimilated under a handful of trans-national corporations - or is in state hands. Which means content control really isn't all that hard to manage if you have people placed strategically in high positions. It's not that every journalist at the TV station or the newspaper is somehow implicated in some grand conspiracy. Major stories require authorization "from upstairs" and if the order comes down that it "is likely to upset the government or advertisers or the shareholders etc". - the story is deep-sixed.

All journalists learn to internalize the socio-political dynamics of the institution they are working at very quickly because they know that to do otherwise is a surefire route to the exit.

As Noam Chomsky once pointed out to Andrew Marr after the latter indignantly claimed that he's "free to say what he likes" at the Beeb and has never been censored:

"You say what you like because they like what you say".

Is there any evidence that the likes of the CIA and such have high-placed "cutouts" in the media?

The fact that most people don't already KNOW this is proof of the very argument I'm making because the answer is a resounding - YES!.

As I've repeatedly pointed out, in 1978 the then CIA director, Richard Helms, admitted that he had nearly "a thousand" journalists, authors and academics on the CIA payroll. This propaganda mechanism was initially set up under the rubric, "Operation Mockingbird" by former CIA director, Allen Dulles. More information on this can be found in David Talbot's recently published book on Dulles, The Devil's Chessboard

I mean, I really don't know why I'm explaining this because had I instead been talking about Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia or East Germany under the STASI nobody would bat an eyelid at the thought of shadowy state-secrets kept from the public. This notion of "American exceptionalism" - setting it apart from the normal functioning behaviour of nation-states stretching back to the time on antiquity says more about the effectiveness of its propaganda methods than any criticisms I can offer.



Michael J. Wood KNOWS this for CERTAIN? Or is he just tossing about labels infused with pompous psychobabble? For an ostensibly smart guy he sure has some gaping holes in his reasoning because I can think of an equally likely category - a person who believes in conspiracy not out of some "yearning for a simpler universe" or "frustration with complexity" etc. etc. (yawn) - but instead because it's where that little something known as EVIDENCE is pointing. A car mechanic can often fix faults which are completely new to him simply by combining past experience with reason and divining synergies. Do you accuse him of having a "monological belief system", too?

So-called "conspiracy theorists" are forever tarred with insulting pseudo-scientific stereotype labels such as the above - but if anything I'd say it's the CRITICS who are marooned within a "monological belief system" because they are far more likely to resort to one-size-fits-all arguments than the other side.

Here I'll quote the Harvard political scientist, Dr. Michael Parenti:

Investigators who concluded there were conspiracies in the Kennedy and King murders did not fashion "large mysterious causes" but came to their conclusions through painstaking probes of troubling discrepancies, obvious lies, and blatant coverups. They have been impelled not by the need to fashion elaborate theories but by the search for particular explanations about some simple and compelling truths.

To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers, Philip Melanson, Jim Garrison, Cyril Wecht, Jim Marrs, Gaeton Fonzi, Sylvia Meagher, Michael Canfield, James DiEugenio, and many others. These investigators have been described as "assassination buffs." The term "buff" is a diminishing characterization, describing someone who pursues odd hobbies. For the same reason that we would not refer to "Holocaust buffs," so should we not refer to these serious investigators as "assassination buffs." Their efforts reveal a conspiracy to assassinate the president and an even more extensive conspiracy to hide the crime.

While ignoring their revelations, the media have given fulsome publicity to the likes of Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, a grotesque whitewash of the assassination. Posner's book was not a sloppy, confused work but a deliberate contrivance that used outright untruths to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was a disgruntled lone leftist who killed Kennedy. Posner could get away with his misrepresentations because those who have written systematic exposures of his book were either ignored by the corporate owned media or roughed up by unsympathetic reviewers and editors.

An end run around the media blackout was achieved by Oliver Stone's movie JFK, a film that directly reached millions of viewers with an accurate account of the specifics of the assassination. The movie could not simply be ignored because it was reaching a mass audience. So the press savaged it. As far as I know, JFK is the only movie in film history that was attacked, six months before it was released, in just about every major broadcast and print outlet. The Washington Post, for instance, gave George Lardner Jr. the whole front page of its Sunday "Outlook" section (5/19/91) to slam Stone for "chasing fiction." Lardner was an interesting choice to review this particular movie, being the Post reporter who covered the CIA and who never wrote a critical word about that agency.