Berlet: Conspiracies, Demonization & Scapegoating

[§ê¢rꆧ]

c2w, I don't blame you for needing some rest. I've been sick as hell the last week or so and I think I've spent more time sleeping than awake. It is very disorientating but I'm coming around. Sometimes rest is just what the doctor would order, if one could afford a doctor...

FWIW, I too did not really understand your reply about not posting on a public bulletin board, not using the phone, etc. I mean as advice that makes a load of sense and is good, but it didn't, too me, follow from the discussion at hand, so much.

I can imagine debating with HMW to be exhausting, as in the past I have seen him tenaciously defend in all manner of ways the wildest conjectures. In this case, however, I think he has some solid arguments. I'm just on the sidelines, though, and I could very well be mistaken, not having a comprehensive understanding of the topic and its tangents.

Your back-and-forth with HMW benefits us all, like two sides of the brain hashing out a complicated problem. It is my hope that you will return to the topic and help clear up this mess, once you have rested adequately.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Come back after a break, c2w. I (almost) always welcome your comments.

Anyone interested in examining Chip CIA Berlet's tactics of misdirection should read the links I've already provided and look at his website. Of course, you have to know more than Chip Berlet tells you to know when he's lying.

If you want to know about Mark Lane and L. Fletcher Prouty, read their books and online articles.

The Education Forum is a pretty reliable online source for assessing who is who to get a quick handle on things even though 'lone gunman' trolls do show up.

A silver platter starter:

(Attorney Mark Lane)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKlaneM.htm

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... topic=5318

-------------------------------

(Lt. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKprouty.htm

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... wtopic=916

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... linearplus

[compared2what?]

No, we're not. First of all, only one of us is thoroughly acquainted with a very wide range of information about the historical and present-day operations and entites of (let's call it) "the intelligence community," which only one of us has culled and continues to cull from a large number of diverse sources that sometimes cause only one of us to revise a previously held view. Only one of us is open to being proved wrong, and in fact welcomes it, out of a genuine desire not to be wrong. And only one of is capable of admitting to a mistake, evidently. Since only one of us has a track record of admitting to them.

So stay in your safe, self-reinforcing bubble of info if you're happy there. I like you. And even if I didn't, I wouldn't want you to be anything but happy.

I reserve the right to point out your errors when I can't manage, much to my regret, to convince myself that they're not so far off base on a subject that potentially puts vulnerable people, including you, at risk to give them a pass. And I sincerely hope that never happens.

FYI, I have a security tip for you. When you're dealing with information that's dangerous enough that your personal security depends on secure communications, there are a few traditional practices you might like to try:

Don't talk about that information on the telephone. Ever. It's dangerous.

And if, for some reason, you've been reckless enough to disregard that tradition, and therefore have some reason to believe that your security has thus been compromised:

Don't post the details on a publicly accessible message board. Because you might as well just be writing up your itinerary and faxing it to Langley.

Your personal security is too precious and the stakes are too high to just jump in the pool and start swimming with sharks. So I'd be much obliged to you if you respected yourself enough to lead by example.

However, since I don't expect or want you to oblige anyone other than yourself, and am in no position to say what obliges you, it's purely up to you whether you decide to take that advice or leave it alone.

I think I'm done here for a while. Though I may be wrong. Which I'll admit, if it's the case. But if I'm not wrong, hey: Go nuts to hell and back, Hugh. Rock that boat. Or float it. Whatever gets you there is fine by me. Just have a care for yourself and other people, as much as you can manage to do. You won't regret it, I guarantee. It pays dividends like you would not believe. It's kind of amazing, really.

I was wrong.

[chiggerbit]

I kind of get the feeling that Mae Brussell didn't like Mark Lane. It's pretty nuanced, so I could be misreading her.

Mae on Mark Lane and Jonestown:

http://www.maebrussell.com/Transcriptions/365.html

"...I'm particularly quoting Mark Lane to start my series on this because I'm very proud to say that I've hated his guts and tried to expose him for years.....:.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

I kind of get the feeling that Mae Brussell didn't like Mark Lane. It's pretty nuanced, so I could be misreading her.

Mae on Mark Lane and Jonestown:

http://www.maebrussell.com/Transcriptions/365.html

"...I'm particularly quoting Mark Lane to start my series on this because I'm very proud to say that I've hated his guts and tried to expose him for years.....:.

Interesting transcript. I think I see what the rift was between Mae Brussell and Mark Lane. And there's enough to get a sense of why the hell Lane was associated briefly with Jonestown, something I've long wondered.

The transcript is from just two weeks after the deaths at Jonestown in late 1978.

Mae says that Mark Lane was brought in as attorney just one month before the massacre. This would be when Jim Jones was realizing more and more that his little kingdom was coming under scrutiny and he needed PR cover.
Jones was trying to get Debora Layton to do PR cover for him when she left for the US but she instead went whistleblower and eventually aroused Congressman Leo Ryan's interest and his fatal visit.

Mae quotes Lane as saying adulatory things about Jonestown in a press conference and some news letters. Why would he do that? Here's why.

Consider that when Congressman Ryan went down to Jonestown with an ABC film crew, the people acted as if they were the happiest they'd ever been. The group psychology regarding outsiders was a big smiley face of self-justification and self-validation, precisely what Jones had conditioned them to embrace. Even Ryan was nearly fooled until someone almost knifed him and then someone else slipped a note into his hand requesting to leave with him.

So if Lane was brought in as PR cover, I'm sure he got the same 'we are so happy'-show from the people and he conveyed what he saw colored by his own experience of real CIA suppression tactics, something Jones was claiming as his own victim identity and tool for creating defensive solidarity in the group.

Mae cites Lane telling her in 1975 that she shouldn't bring up mind control and that 'she's crazy.' This sounds to me like his attorney mindset reinforced by having taken on the JFK cover-up as a lawyer for Marguerite Oswald and other professionally focused approaches to the topic. Lane's approach was mostly to interview witnesses, a standard court room strategy.

Mae Brussell's strength was connecting huge seas of previously disjointed dots into a coherent framework but one which probably wouldn't hold up in a court of law. There's a real value to this mode of research which can uncover a system instead of a single crime.

Lane, being an attorney, was very conservative about his criminal allegations, mostly about the murder of JFK.

I think he didn't want to be associated with someone like Mae Brussell who covered much wider areas of supposition and allegation without the limits of legal standards of evidence. After all, one way he got CIA over a barrel with his 1966 and 1991 books was by scrutinizing their statements and spotlighting inconsistencies and claims that couldn't be substantiated or corroborated.

So I'm not surprised that Lane got taken in by Jim Jones and the Jonestown PR show just before the bloodbath, just like Ryan, or that he and Mae Brussell were totally incompatible around that time.

[chiggerbit]

And I'm sure that Lane didn't whet the paranoia of Jim Jones and the rest with any blathering about harrassment and conspiracies.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

And I'm sure that Lane didn't whet the paranoia of Jim Jones and the rest with any blathering about harrassment and conspiracies.

I'm sure that Jim CIA Jones knew exactly how to hit Lane's anti-spook buttons.

Jones was a professional manipulator with years of experience and reams of evidence of CIA crimes (and FBI-COINTELPRO) had been spilling out since 1974.

[chiggerbit]

So if Lane was brought in as PR cover, I'm sure he got the same 'we are so happy'-show from the people and he conveyed what he saw colored by his own experience of real CIA suppression tactics, something Jones was claiming as his own victim identity and tool for creating defensive solidarity in the group.

Wiki:

"....Jones' health significantly declined in Jonestown, and a doctor who examined Jones in 1978 told him that he might have a lung infection.[88] Jones was said to be abusing injectable Valium, Quaaludes, stimulants, and barbiturates.[89] His once sharp voice later sounded slurred, words ran together and Jones would not finish sentences even when reading.[89]

Journalist Tim Reiterman was surprised by the severe deterioration of Jones' health when Reiterman first saw Jones in Jonestown on November 17, 1978.[55] After covering Jones for 18 months for the San Francisco Examiner, Reiterman thought it was "shocking to see his glazed eyes and festering paranoia face to face, to realize that nearly a thousand lives, ours included, were in his hands......"'

[chiggerbit]

"Discussion" around the topics raised often took the form of Jones interrogating individual followers about the implications and subtexts of a given item, or delivering lengthy and often confused monologues on how his people should 'read' the events. In addition to Soviet documentaries, conspiracy theory movies such as Executive Action, written by Temple attorneys Mark Lane and Donald Freed, and The Parallax View (incorrectly attributed by Jones to Lane and Freed) were screened and minutely dissected by Jones as primers on the 'true nature' of the Temple's capitalist enemies.[

[chiggerbit]

At $6,000 a month (1978 dollars), I imagine Lane was inclined not to see what was likely in front of his face.

I don't know, maybe I'm getting jaded, but it seems like every time I jump on some conspiracy bandwagon, I end up becoming skeptical of some of the self-serving sensationalism.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

At $6,000 a month (1978 dollars), I imagine Lane was inclined not to see what was likely in front of his face.

I don't know, maybe I'm getting jaded, but it seems like every time I jump on some conspiracy bandwagon, I end up becoming skeptical of some of the self-serving sensationalism.

Have you seen the film footage of the temple people during Leo Ryan's visit?

I think this is what I saw, what the ABC camera crew filmed that survived the airport attack.

The film shows the people in high spirits, singing, hugging, whooping it up like Spring Break teenagers but without alcohol, etc.
You'd have to see it to believe it.

That's what is really both creepy and informative of what humans are capable of. Those people had been totally conditioned to suppress doubts and distrust of the situation, to 'privatize their negative feelings' so that nobody dared to break the illusion of contentment.

And when outsiders came, the show performance meant to prove their contentment and thus their right to be left alone from alleged oppressors that Jones said were out to get them...was ramped up to nearly manic joy. No kidding.

So I'm pretty certain this is probably more representative of what Mark Lane saw, nothing tragic and foreboding.

[compared2what?]

Hugh --

Any person who's made the dark doings of professional spooks his area of expertise for fifteen years who didn't find out within one day of hearing about it that Jonestown was anything but a vile abomination, assuming that for some reason that person was having enough of an off-day not to know it instantly is either corrupt or too naive to be very well informed about the dark doings of spooks.

There really aren't any other plausible options. The mob, the CIA, the corrupt members of the media, both Mockingbird and non-, the cults, etc., all use the exact same playbook. Anyone who spent a few years watching shit go down from as up close as Mark Lane did who understood what he saw couldn't conceivably fail to notice that that Jonestown met every hinky criterion on the checklist of hink. He might have had some noble long-term objective that made him think that lying down with dogs was not too high a price to pay for it. And if so, assuming that he is a sharp cookie, you wouldn't be seeing him make that mistake twice.

But there's just no way he couldn't have known that all was not sunshine and lollipops there. If he knew what time of day it was, he either knew what Jonestown was or something was so very, very wrong with him that he was effectively incapable of sound judgment and appropriate action, at least transiently. That's as generous a view of the matter as it's possible to take without departing from the terrestrial plane. Anything else is pure fantasy.

[chiggerbit]

Look, Hugh, I hate to be one who tells you that your hero has feet of clay. Sure, let's say for argument's sake that he "didn't realize" how fucking near the edge Jones and all the rest of these poor zombie cult members were. He at least must have wondered after-the-fact how much he played a part in finally tipping them over the edge and had to deal with the guilt of that. Wouldn't you? But no, now we have him pushing the old "it was the CIA" meme. Talk about the most colossal opportunism.

BTW, did he ever give us a blow-by-blow account of how it all went down, his impressions, how he managed to get away? I'd like to see it, if you have it. Not that I'd necessarily believe it.

It's ironic, but it looks to me as if Lane and Berlet are two sides of the same coin.

[chiggerbit]

Lane later wrote a book about the tragedy, The Strongest Poison. [29] Lane reported hearing automatic weapon fire, and presumes that U.S. forces killed Jonestown survivors.[30] While Lane blames Jones and Peoples Temple leadership for the deaths at Jonestown, he also claims that U.S. officials exacerbated the possibility of violence by employing agents provocateur.[30] For example, Lane claimed that Temple attorney (and later defector) Timothy Stoen, who Lane alleged had repeatedly prompted the Temple to take radical action before defecting, "had evidently led three lives", with one being a government informant or agent.[31] Lane's allegations joined those of other conspiracy theorists after the tragedy, including those of the Church of Scientology, John Judge, Jim Hougan[30], Jack Anderson [32] and a trio of Soviet authors.[33]

[chiggerbit]

Quite frankly, I'm beginning to wonder how deep Scientology is into pushing the bigger conspiracies.