“Most Americans will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy-theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda program initiated in 1967.” –Professor Lance deHaven Smith in his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America; emphasis in original
“Thus the conspiracy-theory label has become a powerful smear that, in the name of reason, civility, and democracy, preempts public discourse, reinforces rather than resolves disagreements, and undermines popular vigilance against abuses of power. Put in place in 1967 by the CIA, the term continues to be a destructive force in American politics.” – Professor Lance deHaven Smith, 2013
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, coordinated by the CIA and Mossad, is a watershed, not just in U.S. history. It is a watershed in twentieth century history and its evil effects continue with increasing intensification as the first quarter of the twenty-first century nears its end. The assassination was a coup d’état aimed at capturing the White House and ensuring that all future occupants of the White House shall follow the dictates of the wealthiest families on the planet.
The great Eustace Mullins was spot on when he wrote: “Few Americans can grasp the disturbing fact that the governing power in the United States is not a governing agency, or laws or political parties. Rather it is the power of the Assassins, those behind the scene figures who have the power to order the assassination of anyone whom they can no longer control. We have seen two Presidents of the United States, Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated because they ordered the Treasury of the United States to print non-interest-bearing dollar bills, a development which threatened to deprive the international bankers of billions of dollars in unearned interests.”
The CIA is one of the arms of these banking families, which have a share in every major business and industry, including the military industry. The Western mainstream media, “presstitutes”, as Paul Craig Roberts names it, is a propaganda arm of these families. The media serves only to prevent the public from finding out the truth and to stifle discussion on genuine questions that bother the public mind.
The CIA has had a longstanding program of controlling the entire mainstream media. It started as Operation Mocking Bird in the early 1950s, and has now spread its tentacles worldwide, with “leading” journalists and media persons, not just the in the U.S., but in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, on the CIA payroll. This has been established beyond reasonable doubt by the rebel German journalist Udo Ulfkotte in his German book translated in 2019 as Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA. Ulfkotte, who himself was on the CIA payroll, died at age 57. There are question marks surrounding his death.
When John Kennedy was assassinated, the assassins ensured that, in contravention of Texas law, no autopsy would be carried out at the Dallas Parkland Hospital. It was also ensured that no police investigation, as required by law, would be carried out. Instead a Commission, known as the Warren Commission, was set up to investigate the crime! It was studded with those who had either planned the murder or worked for the planners of the murder.
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested within 90 minutes of the assassination and was charged with the murder. This was despite the fact that a nitrate test given to him on that very day showed that Oswald had not fired a gun in the past 24 hours! For ten months this explosive information was kept hidden and never made it to the mainstream media. The media, generally, propagated the theory that Oswald was a lone gunman who had shot Kennedy and there was no conspiracy. The Warren Commission report reiterated this fraudulent thesis. As early as December 1963 the lawyer Mark Lane had written to Chief Justice Earl Warren to allow legal representation for Oswald. Within four weeks of the assassination Mark Lane published an article in the National Guardian with the title “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief”. He challenged the Dallas county District Attorney who held Oswald responsible for the murder.
The Warren Commission Report came out at the end of September 1964. Once the Warren Commission Report had been made public, criticisms of the report began. Soon books challenging the lone gunman theory made their appearance. Mark Lane, the lawyer, was among the very first to question the official narrative. His book Rush to Judgement, a critique of the Warren Commission Report came out in 1966 and became a bestseller. By 1966 at least three books questioning the lone gunman theory had appeared. And as the criticisms gained ground the CIA stepped in quietly.
A memo dated April 1, 1967, entitled: “Countering Criticisms of the Warren Report” was sent to all field offices of the CIA. This document, identified as CIA document number 1035-960, was released in September 1976, as a result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit. The memo opens as follows: “1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy’s assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility of the murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, various writers now have had time to scan the Commission’s published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission’s findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission’s report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled though the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.”
The opening paragraph shows that that CIA was very concerned that the suspicion of a conspiracy in the JFK assassination was gaining ground in the public mind. Why would the CIA be concerned unless it was itself involved in the conspiracy and feared exposure? The document goes on to mention that “This trend of opinion is a matter of concern for the U.S. government and our organization.” The memo also states that President Johnson being the beneficiary is also suspected of “in some way being responsible for the assassination.” It also states “Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us.” It is now established that Oswald worked for the CIA.
The memo then comes to the point. “The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.” Point number 3 of the memo is titled “Action.” It includes a total of seven suggestions (a-g) on how to tackle criticisms of the Warren Commission. It suggests that CIA officers discuss the publicity problem with “friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and tell them that the Warren Commission had done a thorough job, “that the charges of critics are without serious foundation, and further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.”
The CIA memo then injects a damaging suggestion or false innuendo against those who question the official narrative. “Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk are deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.” In the post-McCarthy, post-Bay-of-Pigs era the charge of being linked to Communists was something highly damaging to anyone questioning the Warren Commission report. Questioning the official version has been dubbed “unfounded and irresponsible speculation” and thus dismissed.
The CIA memo goes on: “To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.” The memo suggests: “Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.” One may note that the memo uses the word “ploy”. This clearly shows that the CIA was not interested in the truth but in obfuscating the search for truth by attacking those seeking it!
Dr. Richard Crenshaw, who was present in Trauma Room One at the Dallas Parkland Hospital, and who, through his books since 1992, has exposed the medical cover-up of the JFK assassination, has made important observations on the CIA memo. He writes: “Notice the memo instructs recipients of the memo to ‘provide material’, utilize ‘editors’, employ ‘propaganda assets,’ and use ‘feature articles’ in countering the critics.” Dr. Crenshaw notes further: “Notice also that the attack is to be directed toward the Warren Commission critic and his motive rather than toward the allegations. This agenda has become the most commonly used ploy with respect to critics of the official version of the assassination – always attack the messenger rather than the message – for to do otherwise might cause confrontation with the real issue – and perhaps the truth.”
Professor Jim DeBrosse has carried out an exhaustive study of how the US mainstream media has dealt with the JFK assassination in his 2018 book See No Evil: The US Media and the JFK Assassination. He writes: “America’s mainstream media have choked the parameters of the debate and stifled the search for answers to the Crime of the Century.” This is in accordance with the CIA strategy outlined in the memo. DeBrosse notes: “Mainstream journalists continue to marginalize opponents of the Warren Commission by a variety of fallacious means, including ad hominem attacks, loaded words, and broad-brush criticisms.” Ad hominem attacks, i.e. attacks on a person’s character or motivations rather than a position or argument, are what the CIA memo of 1967 advocated.
Jim DeBrosse quotes a fiftieth anniversary (i.e.2013) article by Executive Editor Jill Abramson in the New York Times: “Conspiracy speculation abounds – involving Johnson, the C.I.A., the mob, Fidel Castro or a baroque combination of all of them. Many of the theories have now found new life on the Internet, in websites febrile with unfiltered and at times unhinged musings.” Please note that without addressing the reasons of the suspicions, the journalist employs words to belittle, disparage and trivialize what she calls “conspiracy speculation”. Also note the sarcasm and contempt in the phrase “febrile with unfiltered and unhinged musings”.
Similarly, DeBrosse cites the example of a 2013 Washington Post review of a book The Kennedy Half Century authored by Larry J. Sabato. After “chiding” the author for devoting several chapters to JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the reviewer, David Greenberg, writes: “While the book’s first section is perfunctory, the second part which deals with the assassination, is somewhat wearying and likely to interest only those hard-core buffs – I realize there are many – who wallow in outraged speculation about who was behind Kennedy’s murder.” Note the choice of words “wearying”, “hard-core buffs”, those who “wallow in outraged speculation” about who was behind JFK assassination. One may notice how the mainstream media discourages people from trying to pursue the question of who was behind the assassination and to keep people away from books that deal with the issue.
In his study of book reviews of JFK assassination books in major newspapers, DeBrosse writes: “Book reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post have overwhelmingly defended the conclusions of the Warren Commission against alternative assassination theories. The reviewers often resorted to broad criticism of conspiracy researchers as paranoid, obsessed, or just plain mercenary.” As an example he quotes from a 1992 Washington Post column “Historians, Buffs and Crackpots” by freelance writer John G. Leyden who, as DeBrosse puts it, “burned through nearly thirty years of assassination books, writing off whole categories of them in a sentence or two.” He quotes Leyden: “Most of the contemporary crop of assassination writers have a more global view and tend to mix and match their conspiracy theories according to the latest fashion. The only consistent element throughout is the alleged involvement of the CIA.” The very title of the article implicitly labels those who question the Warren Commission and suspect the CIA, as “buffs” and “crackpots”, just as the CIA memo advises.
What began as a ploy to counter criticisms of the Warren Commission, and cover the truth about the JFK assassination, has been extended to all similar operations, particularly 9/11. When this author googled the term conspiracy theory on 9/11/21, he got 123 million results in 0.94 seconds; a day later he got 147 million results in 0.72 seconds. And this author knows from experience that, for any search, google search engines give a far larger number of results in the West compared to Pakistan. The google search for conspiracy theory on 9/11/21 also listed two top stories: A BBC report titled: 11 September 2001: The conspiracy theories still spreading after 20 years; and a Washington Post opinion titled: False, toxic Sept. 11 conspiracy theories are still widespread today. One may notice that the concern about conspiracy theories about 9/11 being widespread. One may notice the disparaging tone about 9/11 conspiracy theories, quite similar to the tone about JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
One may also take up a discussion about the name 9/11. Does one remember Pearl Harbor as 12/7 (December 7, 1942)? Or is the JFK assassination called 11/22 (November 22, 1963)? No. These events have a name, not a date by which they are remembered. But that discussion will take us in a somewhat different domain. One may however ask the reader to think as to why is the event, when the twin towers, and a third tower fell, the twin towers said to have been hit by planes, called 9/11 and what kind of implications such a name have? What should be the name given to 9/11?
We may end by quoting two professors of communication at Boise University, G. Husting and M. Orr. In 2007 they published a peer reviewed article entitled “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion.” The opening paragraph of the article states: “If I call you a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have raised an issue that I would rather avoid. As part of the machinery of interaction, the label does conversational work no matter how true, false, or conspiracy related your work is. Specifically, when I call you a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ I can turn the tables on you: instead of responding to a question, concern, or challenge, I twist the machinery of interaction so that you, not I, are now called to account. By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.”
All this civic and social damage is the result of a CIA conspiracy regarding conspiracy-theory that began in 1967. As a counter to the term conspiracy-theory scholars have proposed the phrase State Crimes Against Democracy – SCAD!
