Was Jonestown a CIA medical experiment?

[Peter Presland]

I found this a very interesting article about Jim Jones. Note the Cuba stuff in 1961.
http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown...obster.htm

Typically excellent piece by Hougan. One reservation, and it concerns footnote 62: It must have been a damn naive/inexperienced journo who didn't know were "Scotty" Reston's loyalties lay!

Agree Houghan's attention to detail is impressive but I think he too is somewhat naive. He gathers and collates pretty much all the available evidence but still seems unable (or unwilling) to draw the conclusion it overwhelmingly supports; namely that Jones was indeed and SIS asset under mind control that became ever more flakey and culminated in the massacre. Events leading up to it and even more so following it, prompted ever more desperate and bungling attempts by the controllers to first contain and then obfuscate and cover up the real genesis of the whole thing.

Referring to the nearby Smith mass suicide 100 years earlier in similar circumstances and to the large sign on the Jonestown Pavillion that read "Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, Hougan opines:

"The coincidence here is so dramatic that is impossible not to wonder if Jim Jones knew of Smith's precedent. Because, if he did know, and if his politics were, as seems very likely, a fraud, then the Jonestown massacre is revealed to have been a ghastly practical joke---the ultimate psychopathic prank.

As though Jim Jones is the usual 'Lone nut'

Also, in another article entitled 'Jim Jones and the Conspiricists' published in Lobster in 2003, Hougan gets bogged down, not to say indignant, at being labelled pejoratively as a 'Conspiracist' by a fellow Jonestown researcher and professor of religious studies one Rebecca Moore.

In the event, Moore defines a professional conspiracist as one 'who see(s) all events through the hermeneutical lenses of conspiracy'. In the context of the Peoples Temple, she summarises the conspiracists' point of view, which holds 'that people in Jonestown were murdered by U.S. government agent agents – either military or intelligence. These agents,' she continues, 'committed the murders to conceal some other, more damaging information...'. (3)
Well, fair enough. The definition certainly describes the point of view of most Jonestown conspiracists. But I still don't understand why I'm included among their number. Because I don't believe that anyone in Jonestown was murdered by a government agent.
What I do believe is that until 1970 Jim Jones was a government informant, working against black religious organisations such as Father Divine's. (The evidence for this is laid out in the article I wrote for Lobster. Whether that argument is convincing or not is for the reader to decide. But the footnotes are there, the sources are respectable and the documents I've cited are easily retrieved.)

He also makes a long-winded distinction between 'investigative journalist' and 'conspiracist' - and pretty spurious one in my view - which illustrates the paranoia that the label engenders in anyone desperate to remain acceptable to the MSM:

For the record, here is the distinction: an investigative reporter mines the public record for news that has not yet broken, revealing circumstances and events that are at once important and concealed. A conspiracist does much the same, but his or her product differs from the investigative reporter's in a very important way. That is to say, it is unverifiable. That is how we know it's conspiracism, rather than reportage. The conspiracist's story can never be verified. His (or her) most important sources are unidentified, unworthy of belief or simply unavailable to the public. (Some examples: 'According to a high-ranking Pentagon official', 'according to Bruce Roberts, author of the Gemstone File', 'according to a secret CIA report', etc.) Citations of this sort are the investigative equivalent of smoke and mirrors.

It seems to me that it is Jim Houghan that refuses to go where the evidence leads in this case.