Washington Decoded

In Defense of Skeptics and Conspiracy Theorists (Sort Of)

 

JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy

By John McAdams

Potomac Books. 308 pp. $27.50

 

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By Kenneth Scearce

    For nearly half a century, JFK conspiracy theorists and their lone-gunman adversaries have thrust and parried in an unending duel of words, piling up a Mt. Everest of analysis alternating with invective. Dozens of television programs, thousands of articles, pamphlets, and books, and (more recently) terabytes of online debates have painstakingly reconstructed, and just as quickly deconstructed, all imaginable aspects, from the tiniest details up to unified field theories that attempt to explain everything about the assassination.

    As a result, each successive opus, essay, rant—indeed, each additional word on this subject— confronts an increasingly heavy burden of justifying its utility (or ought to). Marquette University professor John McAdams’s book, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy proposes that a larger meaning can yet be derived from study of the assassination; that is, it can serve as a template for exposing the illogic, self-delusion, and charlatanry of Truthers, Birthers, or whatever the conspiracy theory de jour is.

    McAdams begins by rounding up the usual suspects behind JFK conspiracy theory-thinking: beguilement with eyewitnesses who seemingly contradict the forensic and photographic evidence; selective and misleading quotations; narrow-mindedness and ineptitude in attempting to interpret evidence; abandonment of common sense for grandiosity; reflexive prejudice against “hard” evidence that points to a non-conspiratorial explanation; kitchen sink “theories of everything” that require a conspiratorial cast of thousands; mistaking bureaucratic clueless-ness for unwitting revelation of the “secret” truth. With careful reasoning and more than a dose of sass, McAdams picks apart the leading conspiracy explanations, generalizing to show common threads of illogic and mendacity. To rescue oneself from the conspiracy theorists’ thicket of misinterpretation and paranoia, suggests McAdams, one need merely think through the implications of conspiratorial “factoids” with cool-headed reason. Time and again the implausibility of the theory at issue becomes apparent.

    It is not unhelpful to have a Cliff’s Notes-style synopsis of the main currents of conspiratorial thought. And McAdams’ engaging and sometimes mocking style breathes a measure of life into an otherwise worn subject. We certainly come to understand why this topic fascinates McAdams as a kind of Rosetta stone for historical-political analysis and criticism.

Kill or Capture, Torture or Deceive

Two books on interrogation by Matthew Alexander are reviewed in the context of Osama bin Laden’s execution, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s waterboarding, and the US debate on torture.

 

 

How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality

To Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq

By Matthew Alexander with John R. Bruning

Free Press. 289 pp. $26

Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force

Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist

By Matthew Alexander

St. Martin’s Press. 292 pp. $25.99

 

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By Gary Kern

 

 OBL & KSM

    When President Barack Obama announced the assassination of Osama bin Laden (OBL) on Sunday night of May 1 this year, nearly a decade after the al-Qaeda “planes operation” against New York city and Washington DC succeeded with devastating effect, members of the George W. Bush administration, which had failed to locate the leader of al-Qaeda anywhere in the world for seven years, felt obliged to explain their spectacular failure.

    In the days immediately following the surprise announcement, former administration officials―Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, senior advisor Karl Rove, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and afterwards Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Michael Hayden, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, legal counsel to the Department of Justice John Yoo and press secretary Dana Perino―all appeared on television talk shows and presented a united defense. The apparent failure, they said, was actually a success, or contained the seed of success, because the policies instituted by President Bush to prosecute the Global War on Terror had produced the name of bin Laden’s courier, and the unabated effort to locate and track him was what eventually led to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the head of al-Qaeda was found in a room on the third floor and shot down.[1]

    In particular, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Mukasey, Hayden and Yoo cited the program of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT) as the primary tool that turned up the crucial clue. Mukasey claimed that al-Qaeda terrorist Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) “broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding.” In the flood of information he released, said Mukasey, was the nickname of bin Laden’s trusted courier. Since KSM was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on 1 March 2003, and since his multiple waterboardings occurred that same month, it would follow from Mukasey’s account that the nickname of the courier was obtained at that time, eight years ago.[2]

    Also appearing on the talk shows, most of which were broadcast the following Sunday, May 8, was President Obama’s national security advisor, Tom Donilon. On Meet the Press, he graciously conceded that the killing of OBL was the result of “an effort across two administrations.” Some of the same intelligence men, he said, had worked on the problem across the political divide. Here, too, the implication, however unintended, was that the EIT program, based on methods of torture used by Communist China, North Korea and the Soviet Union, all enemies of the United States in the Cold War and condemned as torturers by the US throughout that period, had paid off.[3]

The DeRonja-Holland Report

 

 

FORENSIC METALLURGY ASSOCIATES

Springfield, Virginia

 

 

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Technical Investigation Pertaining to the

First Shot Fired in the Kennedy Assassination

22 November 1963

 

 By
              
Frank S. DeRonja

Forensic Metallurgy, M.S. Metallurgical Engineering

and

Max Holland

Special Consultant

20 November 2011

Introduction

    In May of 2010, producers at the National Geographic cable channel, NatGeoTV, requested Forensic Metallurgy Associates to participate in an inspection of a traffic signal assembly in Dealey Plaza at the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets in Dallas, Texas.

    On 22 November 1963, this assembly consisted of a transformer base situated on the northwest corner of the intersection; a vertical steel pole, 18.5 feet in height, affixed to the base; a curved horizontal mast arm with an effective length of 15 feet, attached to the pole and supported by two brace rods; and a traffic signal that was attached onto the end of the mast arm.[1]

    President Kennedy’s limousine passed underneath this signal assembly prior to his fatal shooting and just before Abraham Zapruder began filming the assassination (see figure 1, below). The purpose of the inspection was to determine if the signal assembly displayed any bullet metal damage. If so, that would corroborate that Lee Harvey Oswald fired his first shot from a sixth floor window in the Texas School Book Depository just before the Zapruder film began, and that the bullet missed the presidential limousine and its occupants because it struck the signal assembly overhanging Elm Street.[2]

   

Figure 1: Still photo taken during a re-staging of the assassination by the Secret Service on 27 November 1963. The ghost image, which is inserted, approximates the position of the presidential limousine on November 22 at the moment Abraham Zapruder re-started his camera.

 

  Although the Warren Commission (1964) and House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979) considered various explanations for why the first shot missed, the signal assembly had never been subjected to any forensic examination. This oversight occurred because the obstruction presented by the signal assembly to the line of sight from the sixth floor window occurred before the Zapruder film started, and the film was always presumed to have captured the entire shooting sequence (see figure 1, above).[3]

    This report summarizes the results of inspections of various portions of the traffic signal assembly; corresponding forensic metallurgy observations; limited laboratory testing of exemplars; and the relationship of the technical findings to known factual information. All of the photos accompanying the report can be enlarged by clicking on them.

A Most Unlikely Agent: Robert S. Allen

 

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By Samuel Nicholson

    He is almost totally forgotten now. But for more than 30 years, Robert Sharon Allen was among the most influential columnists of his time, as celebrated as I. F. Stone, Walter Lippmann, or Drew Pearson. Allen rose to prominence in the 1930s as a political liberal, yet by the 1960s, he was one of the more conservative mainstream columnists in America, an unabashed nationalist who consistently emphasized the need for a stout defense during the Cold War. He counted among his good friends J. Edgar Hoover, the highly controversial director of the FBI.

    Robert S. Allen also worked for Soviet intelligence.

    In 1933, Allen was a fully recruited and undoubtedly witting Soviet agent. Under the assigned cover name of “George Parker,” he covertly exchanged privileged information for money. He provided the Soviets with intelligence about Japanese military fortifications; news about potential appointments in the incoming Roosevelt administration; and information about the US government’s plans for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.

    If Allen’s FBI file is a reliable guide, the Bureau never suspected he worked for Soviet intelligence, or what was generally known in the ‘30s as the NKVD. Nor did such an allegation ever surface publicly or during Congressional hearings in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the hunt for suspected Soviet agents was at its zenith. Allen took the secret of his brief collaboration with Soviet intelligence to his grave. Still, the recent revelation of that work complicates the portrait of an already paradoxical man. And although his contemporaries like Stone, Pearson, Joe Alsop, and Walter Lippmann have attracted the lion’s share of historical interest, the story of Robert S. Allen offers an unusual perspective on the drama of those times—precisely because he did not fit any of the usual molds.