Saint Fletcher the Obscure

[Jack White]

The CIA had ASSETS at all major publishers. Why should
you believe Simon and Shuster saying in a later edition
that the book is satire, when IF SO, it should have been
said in the original printing. Naive = gullible.

Hey! Is this thing on?!?

In his book, Prouty goes in more detail, writing that the Group's existence "was so highly classified that there is no record, to this day, of who the men in the group were or with what sectors of the government or private life they were connected." Still, he claimed to have managed an exclusive interview with a "purported member of the Iron Mountain Special Study Group", who told Prouty he "believes that the group's mission was delineated by McNamara, William Bundy, and Dean Rusk." In 1996, Simon & Schuster reprinted the Report, with a new introduction, underlining that the book was a political satire.

Link

This refers to Prouty's claims to have interviewed an unnamed member of a group that didn't exist.

I'm not trying to be an ass about it. I just want to know WTF?

[Dawn Meredith]

I think I am a good judge of a person's character. I can spot the BS of
a phony instantly, having conducted job interviews of hundreds of job
applicants at a large ad agency for more than 20 years.

Prouty was one of the most sincere people I ever met. He exuded high
character. He honored truth and called a spade a spade. He was a true
patriot, bemoaning what America had become. If he was a mole, he
was the best ever.

His hobby was the history of railroads and he had a model railroad set.
Often when we talked we would talk history, not just JFK. When we
talked JFK, it was very matter-of-factly, without any sensationalism.

When asked about some of the questionable media which printed his
essays (men's mags), he said "you have to take what you can get since
mainstream media won't touch it."

Jack

How well I remember those days Jack. I have a few men's mags around here for that very reason. Not much has changed. MSM still won't touch this stuff.

Dawn

[Seamus Coogan]

Seamus,

Refuting false claims can become a distraction and can be a waste of time. For instance, even after I corrected the false claims you made about me on Lancer last year you made them again here. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that this was a simple oversight or innocent error on your part, it is still a major waste of time and a distraction. I was tempted to ignore them, but it was easy to correct them at Lancer, so I did. Now, I had to do it again here. It was not as easy to do the second time because motive and intent begins to come into question.

There will always be Prouty detractors who will lie deliberately, as you've indicated. There will never be an end to them. "Taking their bait" is about the most worthless expenditure of my time that I can conceive.

You'd know about wastes of time Greg. Been looking down any storm drains or reading anything by Jim Fetzer recently?

All I am saying is that there just needs to be a quick little 'stop in' where people can look at something and go 'oh' okay. Some place nice and secure that can't be interrupted. Don't make up excuses for your lack of vision here, its not that complex Greg it's painfully obvious. What's interesting is that you replied as if this was a personal attack on you. Lol it was actually mean't for a whole bunch of people here and elsewhere.

Must have hit a nerve!

[Seamus Coogan]

Prouty said that the report though fake mirrored in many ways what he had encountered. This has been grossly twisted around.

Hi Seamus - I'm still lost. I also don't have JFK, The CIA, Vietnam, and The Plot To Assassinate John F. Kennedy, so I'm at a disadvantage. But if I'm understanding the Coppens article, Prouty claims that he interviewed a member of the IM group.

edited for aesthetics!

Prouty thought it was interesting but BS. If Prouty intimated he thought it was real he was probably badly misquoted as per usual to try and make him look like a crank or to sell a doco or a book. Nope Prouty did not believe the report to be authentic in any way. Interesting yes.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Re: Iron Mountain.

I've just dug out my copy of JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy.
On pages 4-5, Prouty writes:

From this point of view, warfare, and the preparation for war, is an absolute necessity for the welfare of the state and for control of population masses, as has been so ably documented in that remarkable novel by Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, and attributed by Lewin to 'the Special Study Group in 1966', an organization whose existence was so highly classified that there is no record of them to this day, of who the men in the group were or with what sectors of the government or private life they were connected.

This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty, a view that has existed for millenia.

So, Prouty twice in this one passage describes "Iron Mountain" as a novel, but is clearly interested in the arguments articulated in the report contained within the novel and attributed by Lewin to "the Special Study Group in 1966".

It is possible that he viewed some of the arguments put forward in that "report" as similar to those he believed his "High Cabal" to hold.

[Greg Burnham]

Seamus,

Refuting false claims can become a distraction and can be a waste of time. For instance, even after I corrected the false claims you made about me on Lancer last year you made them again here. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that this was a simple oversight or innocent error on your part, it is still a major waste of time and a distraction. I was tempted to ignore them, but it was easy to correct them at Lancer, so I did. Now, I had to do it again here. It was not as easy to do the second time because motive and intent begins to come into question.

There will always be Prouty detractors who will lie deliberately, as you've indicated. There will never be an end to them. "Taking their bait" is about the most worthless expenditure of my time that I can conceive.

You'd know about wastes of time Greg. Been looking down any storm drains or reading anything by Jim Fetzer recently?

All I am saying is that there just needs to be a quick little 'stop in' where people can look at something and go 'oh' okay. Some place nice and secure that can't be interrupted. Don't make up excuses for your lack of vision here, its not that complex Greg it's painfully obvious. What's interesting is that you replied as if this was a personal attack on you. Lol it was actually mean't for a whole bunch of people here and elsewhere.

Must have hit a nerve!

Seamus,

I simply utilized a convenient example of the point I was making.

[Adrian Mack]

Thanks Jan.

Is this statement by Coppens not true?

Still, he claimed to have managed an exclusive interview with a "purported member of the Iron Mountain Special Study Group", who told Prouty he "believes that the group's mission was delineated by McNamara, William Bundy, and Dean Rusk."

[Jan Klimkowski]

"Iron Mountain" is mentioned on around a dozen pages in the index to Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy. I haven't yet reread them all.

On pages 150-1, Prouty writes:

At the beginning of this book, reference was made to a novel by Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. It happened that the book concerned a reputed top level study that was officially commissioned in August 1963 but in fact dated back to early 1961. In other words, the study process started, according to Lewin, right after the inauguration, with the arrival of John F Kennedy and his new administration.

A purported member of the Iron Mountain Special Study Group believes that the group's mission was delineated by McNamara, William Bundy, and Dean Rusk. The members of the Kennedy circle were concerned that no real work had been done by any government instrumentality in planning for peace. The report contains a most portentous line: "The idea of the Special Study... was worked out early in 1963... What helped most to get it moving were the big changes in military spending that were being planned..."

The chronology of these developments, which are very cleverly woven into this novel by Lewin, is important. It begins with the inauguration. The first big-money item was the TFX. That orchestrated solution was stretched from the inauguration to November 1962. The reaction of the military, of the aeronautical industry, and of Congress was predictable. Then, in April 1963, McNamara announced that things had changed. A few days later, Gilpatric made his important speech, and the Special Study Group was selected in August 1963. The Kennedys were on their way. They were going to ride on the TFX $6.5 billion into a second term, and then they were going to prepare America for peace. The Vietnam War and its hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures were nowhere in their plans.

Could America afford the Kennedys?

The Kennedy agenda began to surface with the TFX decision and was confirmed by the existence - known to very few - of the Special Study Group for "the possibility and desirability of peace". Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have had a greater impact on the enormous military machine of this nation than the specter of peace. This Kennedy plan jeopardized not hundreds of milions, not even billions, but trillions of dollars. (The Cold War has cost no less than $6 trillion.) It shook the very foundation upon which our society has been built over the past two thouand years.

As the Report From Iron Mountain says:

"War itself is the basic social system. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today... The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise: war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social control... War-readiness is the dominant force in our societies... It accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's total economy."

NB any typos are mine, as I'm transcribing this from the book.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy, p187:

In several earlier chapters, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace was cited as a novel of crucial importance. It stated that a nation state could not survive without warfare, and this work about a top-level study commissioned in August 1963 described an attitude that had begun to surface right after the inauguration of John F Kennedy.

The members of Kennedy's inner circle were concerned that no serious work had been done to plan for peace in the world, and such discussions were heard in the Pentagon. The commissioning of the study in Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace illustrates this concern.

The reader will understand that the author, Leonard Lewin, has a perfect right to characterize his work as "a novel". I have spoken with Lewin at length. He is a well-informed man who was well aware of the situation in Washington as pictured in the Lansdale/Stilwell report in 1959 and its progression into the Kennedy era, with its Pentagon offices filled by Phi Beta Kappas and other men of experience and learning. The most important part of both "reports" is the many ways in which they overlap and agree with each other, and, even more important, how they have survived the contrivances of the Cold War and have become thoroughly modern military doctrine.

Chairman Mao predicted all this. Many good strategists in the US miltary also foresaw it, so they designed the parameters of the new type of military doctrine and a new type of constant warfare that would, for the most part, take place in the territory of relatively powerless Third World nations.

Thus, in the process of stamping out "Communist-inspired subversive insurgency" or other bogeymen foes, millions of defenseless little people were murdered, as though some monstrous Malthusian bulldozer had been mindlessly set in motion to depopulate Earth. Classic examples of this was the massive slaughter in Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war, and subsequently "Desert Storm" and other related hostilities in the Middle East.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy, p219:

In his novel, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, Leonard Lewin writes: "War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society," and adds, "War is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state."

Lewin has told me his book is a novel and that he had a serious message to deliver to the public. I was assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1961, at the time Thomas Gates left the office and Robert McNamara arrived. Along with McNamara came a group of dedicated and intelligent men who, for the most part, were not highly experienced in the military and such things as Grand Strategy and the utilization of modern military forces and modern weaponry. Despite this, as I got to know them better - men like Ed Katzenbach, who had been dean at Princeton - we would take part in luncheon discussions that sounded much like Lewin's writing. This is what was said in the halls of the Pentagon. What Lewin wrote is true to life, and we all would do well to heed his words.

Novel or not, these were serious words that weighed heavily on the causes of the escalation of warfare in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s. They represent the classic views of a cabal of leaders in our society who fail to see any reason other than war for the existence of man. The very fact that certain select individuals of the Kennedy and Johnson adminstrations were said, by Lewin, to be thinking such thoughts in the face of the reality of the hydrogen bomb shows that this temporal worlds of ours has been changing faster than its leaders and the public can accomodate.