New COPA project

[Peter Presland]

Crikey Ed!

As a mere well-wishing lay bystander on this, that looks to be an impressive collection of references, suggestions and advice. :top:

[Dawn Meredith]

All of the above. And..

* Insider foreknowledge and the unusual share market trading in steel.
* Arrangement and planning of the Texas trip
* The Miami plot
* What JFK plans and legislation did not proceed because of his death and what happened instead.

And for the LHO aspect I would like to see covered

*Texas driving license
*Missing school reports from various schools
*Maybe a visual 'Harvey and Lee' time and place line.
*This so called loner's many friends and contacts in the intelligence field.

Just for starters tupido:

JFK as Cold warrior (from debates perhaps) to peacemaker. AM U speech, lots of other great stuff along these lines in Douglas' book, his great anti-secret societies speech (on fb and utube), the impossibility of the cover story, witnesses who talked and then died, (Lee Bowers, Dorthy Killgallen, that list is long so you'd have to be selective) prior knowledge witnesses who died (Gary Underhill, Rose Cheramie), the Ruby confession to WC ("A whole new form of government"), government cover-ups WC, HSCA...
Why this assassination is important today--connecting the dots from Ford, appointing Bush head of CIA, president, pardoning Nixon, etc..(connecting the dots to today is a documentary in itself)

Cover stories designed to blame Cuba: the setting up of LHO.

I think the hardest thing will be narrrowing your focus as this case is so huge that you could have a 20 hour documentary and still only scratch the surface.

John, this is a huge undertaking on your part and we can't thank you enough.
Our generation-the generation who lived this- is dying off, many lost interest years ago, so the torch has been passed to your generation.

With endless appreciation for all you do,
Dawn

[Mark Stapleton]

Mark, gather your facts and information and write it up for John and present it in depth and detail for him and others, and don't be too quick to prejudge the product in its early phases.

Already did Ed, well the bones of it anyway in post #10. The info is pretty widely available on the net anyway. John already said he doesn't buy it in post #7, although his reasoning for dismissing it is a tad hazy. There's a chance (very small in my view, but that's only my opinion) Mossad and Israel was not involved in DP. There's an even smaller chance (none in my view) that the change in US policy toward Israel is irrelevant, especially in light of what has happened in the subsequent 46 odd years. If someone can nominate a more profound foreign policy change coming out of DP, then I'm all ears. We all know about Vietnam and the strong possibility that the MIC played a role in DP. I can't see why this is incompatible with the sudden capture of US foreign policy by Israel which emerged out of DP. The fact it occurred beneath the media radar (with good reason as far as LBJ and Israel were concerned) seems to strangely justify its complete omission from historical significance in the minds of some researchers. In my view, they are wrong.

John seems to think the Israel issue is not worth mentioning. That's his call. I think this kind of omission will diminish the final product--that's my call. Í'm not here to tell people how to make docos or lecture them. I'm just expressing my opinion.

I liked your post. Some helpful hints for John there. I hope we can talk plenty more, Ed.

[Jan Klimkowski]

John - whilst being bold and ambitious, it's essential always to remember the strengths and weaknesses of different media.

The material contained in Dick Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much could in and of itself fill a six-part documentary series, if the aim was to communicate all (or most of) the information in the book.

However, if I was making a documentary about Richard Case Nagell, I would limit myself to 50, or at most 90, minutes of screen time.

Before shooting a frame, I'd spend an incredibly long time in crafting the narrative lines, the dramatic twists and turns, the visual and textural metaphoric language, the journey I wanted to take the viewer on.

Then, once the film was made, if the viewer was sufficiently intrigued and engaged by the film to want to know the evidence in all its minute detail, I would humbly suggest that they buy Dick Russell's book.

Book and film are complementary, not interchangable.

This is because text and documentary are fundamentally different in what they do, and in how the reader and viewer, the member of the public, engages with them.

A great example is the documentary filmmaking of Adam Curtis, and of my good friend and colleague, David Malone. Their work makes arguments through filmic storytelling, through metaphor, through juxtaposition, through the dialectic of ideas. But it does not provide the exhaustive, footnoted, level of evidence that a book would do.

A great film should send the viewer scurrying towards library and bookshop. It cannot replace the library...

[Ed Jewett]

John seems to think the Israel issue is not worth mentioning. That's his call. I think this kind of omission will diminish the final product--that's my call. Í'm not here to tell people how to make docos or lecture them. I'm just expressing my opinion.

I agree that it's his call, and that you're entitled to your opinion. I didn't intend to appear combative with you, nor to try to appear as a 'referee' in the matter; my intent was simply to lightly echo others in thinking that your expressed view is the first I've heard of any such theory or angle. So I didn't mean to be putting it (or you) down, but rather wanting to hear more in detail and suggesting that you develop it in detail.

I think that what we're all about here is airing our viewpoints and arguments and evidence out in the open and letting everyone raise questions, doubts, or support, which can only strengthen our collective ability to bring deep politics, its mechanisms, operations and consequences to the surface so that more and more people can see it all for what it is and act more knowledgeably and effectively for having seen and understood it.

Certainly the more recent and current issues involving the Israeli state and its methods, official and non-official actors, etc. are of concern; if there is a strong link between what is going on today with what went down then, I'd like to see that argument fleshed out, developed and expressed.

Some say, when such thoughts are expressed, that it is anti-Semitic in nature, which is just so much BS. As a US citizen, I respond that I'd be equally concerned if it was the Principality of Andorra ("much of whose defense budget is spent on blank ammunition which is fired off on national holidays") that was so pervasively and perversely involved in the politics and policies of America. The irony of the thing is that Kennedy himself was the target of charges that he would do the bidding of the Pope.

And I hope I'll be around to see your work, John's, more from all who are here, more members here and active in some way, and some meaningful impact as a result of it. And I hope that my one-year old grandson will grow up and say "there were people back then who cared enough to find the slim veins of truth running underneath the swamps".

[Mark Stapleton]

[quote=Mark Stapleton] I think that what we're all about here is airing our viewpoints and arguments and evidence out in the open and letting everyone raise questions, doubts, or support, which can only strengthen our collective ability to bring deep politics, its mechanisms, operations and consequences to the surface so that more and more people can see it all for what it is and act more knowledgeably and effectively for having seen and understood it.

Here here to that, Ed.

The good thing about the DPF is that you can express opinions outside what is considered "acceptable discourse" by the mainstream and its slack jawed disciples and not be harrassed by panicky moderators or overly excitable administrators.

[Dawn Meredith]

Mark:
I too would be most interested in knowing if there is an Isreal connection here. In all the books I have read over these many decades I have not even seen it referred to. I am sure if someone were to pour over all the docs released via the JFK Act there would be evidence of something. However it also might be looking for a needle in a haystack.

John: Another thought I had yesterday was to contrast JFK and later presidents utilizing JFK's WW 11 experience and his personal knowledge of the hell of war, vs the neo cons who never served yet were quick to launch a first strike. Also JFK was wealthy and could not be bought, in fact donated his salary to charity. Just that alone sets him very apart from the totally owned pols we had then and today.

[Adele Edisen]

John and others,

I feel compelled to add my thoughts here because I have spent 46 years and three months at this date thinking and reading about President Kennedy's assassination in trying to figure out WHY. On November 22 this year, the 46th year after his death, it will be 46 years and 7 months for me.

If it would be of any help to you and others on this Forum, I can summarize my thinking on the matter and give a few references which I have found most useful. I have read almost all of the books written on this subject because of my special interest in the matter. You see, I almost died in April of 1963 at the hands of Jose Rivera, one of John Kennedy's murderers, and therefore, I had to understand why and how it happened.

If we can accept that the Past is Prologue, then we can start some thirty years before John Kennedy's assassination. To me, the conspiracy to overthrow our government which occurred then in 1933-1934 was the crucial key to understanding the Kennedy assassination because all the elements necessary, all the means, and all the forces, and the people were essentially the same, but in slightly different garbs and of a different generation.

This was the plot to seize the White House, sweep the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of power and replace him with a dictator patterned very much like Benito Mussolini of Italy who had made the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel, leave his throne and proclaimed himself to be "Il Duce" and leader of Italy in 1922. The American plotters were bankers, industrialists, stockbrokers, newspaper publishers, and even two members of the Democratic Party, Al Smith and John Davis. They were to use a force of 500,000 World War I veterans of the American Legion to march on Washington to demand that Roosevelt step down from his position and accept a Marine General, Smedley Darlington Butler, as his "helper".

The U.S. Army at that time was maybe about the fifth of that size and widely distributed in foreign countries and scarcely within the United States. Fortunately, General Butler played along until he had met the main plotters and then he went to the Secret Service and to President Roosevelt. The MacCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee held hearings and these were recorded in the Congressional records. Their most powerful witness was General Butler, who went on radio later to criticize the ensuing cover-up and lack of thorough prosecution of the conspirators. Nothing was ever referred to of this plot in subsequent history textbooks. Only a few academic historians of the period mentioned it and passed it off as a weird incident without any real significance. However, two newspaper journalists, John Spivak and Paul Comly French, managed to dig up more information than was reported in the mainstream press at the time, and published their findings about the people on Wall Street behind the plot. Spivak's articles may be found on the Internet. In 1973, Jules Archer published his very vivid account of the plot in his book, The Plot to Seize the White House. It quickly went out of print, but has been revised in a new edition in paperback, available from Amazon.com. I urge everyone to read it. It reveals the types of forces in operation against a democratic form of government.

This is my paradigm for the Kennedy assassination. Then, I seriously refer to the following books concerned with the Kennedy assassination. Two of them were written by a sociologist, Dr. Donald Gibson. His first book, Battling Wall Street, discusses the presidency and actions taken by John Kennedy which made enemies for himself amongst the industrialists and oil producers of Wall Street. His second book, the revised version of which is titled The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up Revisited, discusses the aftermath of the assassination and how the Warren Commission was manipulated to ignore evidence contrary to the preconceived conclusion of the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt. Gibson renamed the Warren Commission the McCloy-Dulles Commission because of the blatant actions of these two members of the group in controlling the witnesses and their testimony.

Then if we add James Douglass' wonderful book, JFK and the Unspeakable; John Newman's Oswald and the CIA; and Richard Mahoney's JFK: Ordeal in Africa, we can begin to see who the forces were that were so threatened by John Kennedy's ideas of peace, democratic principles, monetary and international policies that he had to be eliminated, and it had to be done in such a way that every successive president would be afraid to cross the line laid down by these powerful folks.

Adele

[Ed Jewett]

Thank you, Adele, for your post and for your perseverance.

[Adele Edisen]

Thank you, Ed.
Adele