rigorousintuition.ca

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.

Wow, guess what's the next question I'm asking myself?

chiggerbit wrote:Look, Hugh, I hate to be one who tells you that your hero has feet of clay.

I haven't seen anything that supports that contention. Quite the opposite.
Mark Lane took on far more work against alphabeter crimes than almost anyone else.

I strive to know everything I can about major players to detect what they know, possible deception, merely human foibles, or suddenloy changed agendas.
I want to know what cracks can be handles for discrediting. That's me.

Back to MarkLane -
Facts of real life exist in context.

He was working hard on defending the patsy for the USG's murder of Martin Luther King in 1978 just when the Jonestown thing was *briefly* added to his plate.

Here's Lisa Pease-
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com ... uther.html

In mid-August of 1978, while Ray and his then lawyer Mark Lane faced TV cameras in public testimony, Blakey sprang a surprise on Ray and Lane, in the form of MLK Exhibit 92. Lane had asked for and been promised a chance to review the committee’s evidence against Ray prior to its being presented. Yet on this hot midday in Washington, DC, Lane and Ray were ambushed with a transcript of an interview with Alexander Anthony Eist, a former member of a unit within Scotland Yard. Eist made some astonishing claims, notably that Ray had not only confessed to killing King but that he had exhibited an intense hatred of blacks.

Lane was furious. Not only had he not been given advance notice so that he could research these charges, but the statements had not even been made under oath. In Murder in Memphis, Lane wrote:

...The unsworn answers given by Eist could have no legal import although they were designed to seem impressive to a waiting television audience. If Blakey and his staff of attorneys and investigators suspected or believed that Eist was not telling the truth the technique they decided to employ, securing remarks which were not given under oath, would spare them the potential embarrassment of prosecution for subornation of perjury. It also permitted Eist to make false statements with the knowledge that he could not be prosecuted for perjury. Blakey had issued a license to lie to Eist....

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.

You mean like almost everyone else in the world? Ok.

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?

Hunh? You're making the Jonestown massacre partly Lane's fault?
Bizarre. With that logic you could blame Congressman Leo Ryan for sticking his nose in, too.

But no, now we have him pushing the old "it was the CIA" meme. Talk about the most colossal opportunism.

Hunh? "Opportunism?" Remember the 70s when Lane's 1963-66 assertions about CIA assassination and suppression were publicly validated?

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.

I'd like to see that, too. But I don't see Lane as a bad guy just because he doesn't write up every messy thing he's experienced in battling fascism.

See my previous comments about his legal standards for publishing accusations.

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

Absurd. They couldn't be further apart.

CIA Berlet badjackets Lane with deliberate lies because Lane reveals CIA crimes.

Thanks for this below. What's the source?

And you aren't seriously suggesting with your "Scientology" in bold that all those other names are as suspect as Scientology, are you? John Judge and Jim Hougan? C'mon.

Crikey, that's what Chip CIA Berlet does!

Be wary of people who write about "conspiracy theorists" and group entirely unlike entities under the same cloud.

chiggerbit wrote:

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 wrote:http://skepdic.com/cognitivedissonance.html

Ah, Robert T. Carrol. Thought I smelled something.

He's a professional "conspiracy theory" debunker similar to Randi and other power-safe 'skeptics.' He points us at the BBC and other spook media for 'facts'.

His 9/11 nonsense-
http://skepdic.com/911conspiracy.html

His JFK nonsense-
http://www.skepdic.com/kennedycurse.html

What I'm saying, Hugh, is that Lane has dirtied himself at Jonestown, and should be considered with some skepticism, his facts double-checked, even when he's in credible company. But opportunists also often find themselves in company with uncredible sources. Just as with Berlet, some of what Lane writes may be quite lucid and pertinent and insightful. But some of it is also twisted to fit an agenda. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Two sides of the same coin. Check out my multiple pregnacies thread, cause I'm getting ready to post some info on conjoined twins.

What Lane did at Jonestown can in no way be compared to what Ryan was doing, and I'm actually rather surprised that you can compare the two. Not that I'm saying that Ryan wasn't being opportunistic in his own way. For Christ's sake, taking a tv crew with him? Quite opportunistic. But what I'm talking about looks to me like Lane's actions were intentional instigation. This man is an attorney, and should be quite adept at reading people, more so than even the average person, and even the average person should have been able to read the spookiness that was going on there if they had been there more than a day or two. Are you sure he isn't CIA?

Well, if you don't like that definition, try one of these:

Ack, wrong one--this one. Lots to choose from.

http://www.onelook.com/?w=cognitive+dissonance&ls=a

What I'm trying to say, Hugh dear, is that your cognitive dissonance is showing.

And you really have only yourself to blame for my skepticism, Hugh, as it's been people like you, c2w, DE and a number of others who have opened my eyes to the need to dig beneath the surface. Except YOU don't apply the rules across the board.

I usually just troll here, but I think this is one of the more important threads in a long time, and I have a few cents to contribute.

This is interesting, especially for someone of the younger generation (me), who wasn't around for these events, to witness the back-and-forths about Prouty and Mark Lane and Larouche, etc. However, it's a bit frustrated for me to see that HMW seems to be the only one really worked up about, and perhaps understanding the significance of, the original point, which is that Chip Berlet is a CIA agent who has successfully infiltrated left-of-center discourse for the past forty years. There was a big RI kiss about the conclusion that Berlet's article was disengenuous and slanderous, but do we take that any further? Like, use it to understand and illustrate how the guardians of the fascist system we live under operate in terms of neutralizing trends and movements that threaten the "establishment's" existence?

I've paid attention to Berlet since he appeared as the leading anti-9/11-truth hack in 2002, eventually appearing on "Democracy Now!" Now, I don't think your IQ has to be all that high to recognize that what Berlet is doing in articles such as the one posted is meticulous disengenuity. And what is disengenuity but crafty lying? I'm sure Berlet does his best to not outright lie at all, or to minimize it (as does the New York Times), but he juxtaposes concepts, terms, half-truths and facts, to lead the reader to a conclusion and lead a lasting impression ("Those conspiracy people are runing our legitimate movement for peace and justice!")

I certainly dispute c2w's point that Berlet has any less blood on his hands for not having personally murdered any Afghanis. On the contrary, I think he's nearly as important a figure to "the Empire" at large as Henry Kissinger or George H. W. Bush. I think *controlling oppositional social movements* is the agenda item above all others in the so-called intelligence community. It's imperative to understand how they have done it and continue to do it with such success. Thus, a study of Chip Berlet and the myriad other very obvious (imo) infiltrators of the alternative discourse is imperative.

I've actually met Chip Berlet on a few occassions, as my 9/11 propaganda and lit table happened to be right next to his in alphabetical order at an annual social justice conference. Actually, it's a conference called "From Abortion Rights to Social Justice" held every year and heavily funded by the Ford Foundation, another entity worth studying in terms of its modus operandi in neutralizng and dissipating potentially threatening political movement. I've also attended Berlet's workshop at the conference, and I've read many of his articles over the years- not that I seek them out, but Berlet is a stealthily ubiquitous character. Berlet is a... I'm seeking the right adjectives... I would say "flaming," if not for the gay connotation... well, an extremely egotistical individual, surely entertained by the fact that he's existed as a barely covert (he's like one of those quasi-undercover cop cars) CIA agent within the self-described political Left since the sixties. (Btw, hi, Chip!) He talks loudly and garrulously to anyone who will listen, and brags about his collection of business cards and of being a "spy" on the internet. And what does he say to those who listen? Well, mostly the same things, over and over.

His meta agenda is:
A. Attack the stories that would expose the CIA and entrenched national security state for what it is, such as the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 truth movement, while avoiding actual factual discussion as much as possible. Claim that movements that seek to expose these psychological operations are harmful to the humanist left-wing that is trying to, you know, do good things.
B. Prop up non-economic-based "wedge issue" movements such as gay rights and abortion rights, while ignoring revolutionary poor people-led movements, things like drug legalization, or militant unionism.
C. Re-define "the Left" and "the Right" in his own terms, specifically along the social issue divide line. Do not give fodder to the traditional notion of the Left as taxing the rich, providing social services to the poor, etc. Avoid any talk of revolutionary movements in Latin America.

His foundation-funded cover group, "Political Research Associates," does very little research; it functions as a propaganda arm of Berlet. It publishes fancy-looking pamphlets about gay rights and abortion rights and a lot of online material attacking the notion of "conspiracy" in a very broad, psychological sense, always dumbing down the discourse. Like a good advertising company, he identifies terms, "memes," and injects them into the discourse in a very specific, tendentious, manner. Terms like "conspiracy." He's extremely psychologically manipulative in his writing style, and he's blatant about it. Note how the concept of 9/11 being anything-but-what-we're-told is ridiculed in Chip's piece, but in his attack on the Christic Institute note his implication that the essence of the Iran-Contra scandal- illegal money-for-guns funding of a right paramilitary group to fight off a democratic movement- is not implied to be such. It was only the CI's derailing into certain areas going back to the Kenendy assassination, i.e. **conspiracy** that sabatoged its otherwise worthy effort, asserts Chip. As folks have noted, this actually has a lot of truth to it, but look at *how Chip says it.*

His one paragraph narrative of the 9/11 truth movement is truly classic. First, someone came up with the story that 4,000 Israelis escaped from the Twin Towers. Reporters found this story to be false, but not until it had flown around the internet like a game of telephone. A few weeks later a chorus of prominent lefties started saying the government was guilty for 9/11. With absolutely no legitimate evidence, and flying against the common sense of normal people like you and I, this falsity has spread around the globe and done vast, vast harm to the legitimate you and Left, of which you and I, dear reader, are both members.
That's the essence of it; that's Chip for you. He's been extremely effective at turning liberals against the 9/11 truth meme; he's done it as if it's his job.

I read on oilempire that Berlet- real name John Foster Berlet, is the son of a high-level military-intelligence officer. They do like to keep it in the family.

I'd like to talk more about the way that Berlet re-defines "the Left" and "the Christian Right" in his workshops and has helped mold what was once a threatening left-wing movement into a culturally-based useless mess, but the library I'm in is closing. Berlet's false-dialectical decades-long dual with Lyndon Larouche is a trickier topic, and should be the subject of a PhD thesis or some such! Certainly, Berlet loves every minute of it.

Hey, and if we come to a deeper consensus on this topic, we can move on to how Noam Chomsky is a CIA agent, and the even vaster implications of that! Remember, disengenuity equals lying.
Gotta go.

Wordspeak, what an interesting post you made!

I do think of John Judge's axiom, "Spook or asshole- what's the difference?"

I think this applies to Chip Berlet- not sure there is incontrovertible proof he is actually a CIA agent, per se.

The same would hold true for Noam Chomsky in his position on conspiracies- but that certainly deserves a thread of its own...


.

Hi, Wordspeak --

My point wasn't about the comparative evils of engaging in intel work. I apologize for not having been clearer.

I merely meant that some of entities Prouty feels okay about doing business with (and speaking glowing words about the founder of, in the case of Scientology) have something of a history of encountering people when they're lively and in the pink, whisking them away to have a wonderful time, and then -- through some chain of events that no one ever quite seems to know -- losing track of them at some point shortly before their gruesomely neglected/savaged/abused corpses show up.

And that while it may well be that Chip Berlet also issues encomiums for enormous and vicious criminal enterprises under oath -- I have to admit that I didn't go looking for any -- I have no special reason to believe that he did.

Prouty, on the other hand, did. He had close relationships with more than one such group. However, just to stick to Scientology, here, for example, is the scrupulously foot-noted chapter of Russell Miller's Bare-Faced Messiah that covers Hubbard's Navy career. Miller's book was based, in substantial part, on Hubbard's own personal records, a long-thought-to-be-lost box of which were found in an old house of his by a then die-hard Scientologist named Gerry Armstrong, who was clearing it of junk for the church, probably without adequate food, water, rest or pay. He asked for and received permission from the church to archive and preserve these holy documents, after a certain amount of doing which, his disillusionment with their complete contradiction of every single aspect of Hubbard's life as it was told in official org. literature caused him to depart, in a state of very great fear, somehow taking the dox with him. IIRC, he gave them to an attorney. So. Miller used those, as well as many, many other sources. Which he lists, and which you can see for yourself, therefore. The whole book is online at the site for which I provided the link.

And here is a copy of the letter Prouty wrote to Miller's publisher after the church saw the proofs of the forthcoming book. Which is unsupported by anything other than his word. AFAIK, even the CoS never made these claims until Miller wrote a book showing the claims they did make to be pure fantasy.

Hugh, IIRC, maintains that Prouty's explanation is the truth -- ie, that Hubbard was not a malingering insane fuck-up while in the Navy. (although it would be nothing but consistent with his life before and after his WWII service if he had been, btw), but rather that, as Prouty says, the records showing that he was exactly that, which were relied upon by Miller, are just lying around in Navy files as part of the sheep-dip that allowed LRH to carry out his daring Naval Intelligence duties so covertly that there's absolutely no sign of his having carried them out apart from Prouty's well-timed word.

And it's even less conceivable that Prouty wouldn't have known that Scientology has as many suicides, "suicides," unexplained violent deaths, and disappearances as it does than it is that Mark Lane would think Jonestown was a shiny, happy commune. Or that he wouldn't have known that a lot of the physical maintenance of Scientology properties is done by unpaid minors working ten to twelve hour days. Or that Scientology has private gulags in which people have been known to be held against their will and forced to run around a pole in the hot sun of the California desert for eight or ten hours a day for months at a time. Or that he wouldn't have known that they do any of the other, similar stuff they do as a routine part of the enterprise and their doctrines. Or that Hubbard locked a young child in a bilge-water filled....Well. Never mind.

In short, it's pretty close to unthinkable that he wouldn't have known. There have been numerous, independent and credible reports about CoS practices in the public sphere for almost as long as there's been a CoS. Further, the possibilty of innocent cluelessness only gets less*** credible when you factor in how frequent Prouty's dealings with Scientology staffed businesses were back in the day. Such as writing for Freedom, the Scilon magazine in which Prouty's JFK book first appeared as a nineteen-part series. Also, he appears at one point to have been Hubbard's official biographer. And says so himself, according to this, assuming that it's real. Which I haven't yet checked. Though if Arnie Lerma is indeed the person circulating it, it almost certainly is. I just haven't been to his site to see if he himself has it posted yet.

So. What I was trying to say was that it makes little sense to damn Berlet so completely for being an evil disinfoteer writing about right-wing groups that are (verifiably) much what he says they are, while giving Prouty a pass for being one of the very few non-Scientologists in the world who has no problem saying that L. Ron Hubbard had a sterling character. And who evidently has few enough problems with the organization that he's willing to lend his good name to its official publications and get paid for it. Because in that case, only one of them would be actively and directly affiliating himself with killers and getting paid for it. Which to me is a significant difference.

I guess it's roughly analogous to how I felt about Bill Clinton during his first Presidential campaign, when he signed off on the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. Which is more or less: A person who's capable of doing something that evil for self-advancement is capable of doing anything. Because he simply has no conscience at all.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that they will do any very evil thing, of course. However, by my lights, it does mean it's a mistake to trust them not to.

Anyway. That was my point. The one you raise is much more interesting, I'd say.

*** ON EDIT: Added the word "less," which God's little angels must have stolen from the sentence. Or maybe I forgot to type it. One or the other.

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

Deep.

Hugh --

Would you agree with the proposition that your knowledge of the case for CIA involvement in Jonestown is solidly supported by your comprehensive study of and extensive familiarity with the pertinent literature?

I'd appreciate a reply. And I don't think I'm imposing an unreasonably heavy burden on you by asking for one. It's a "Yes/No" question.

In the interests of preserving the simplicity of the above request, I'll put the follow-up questions in a separate post, shortly to follow.

Thanks.

Fascinating conversation. I'd like to know a lot more.
It seems that Berlet has targeted people who have a ton of dirt on their hands; it makes Berlet look good, and gives credibility to his meta-agenda. Larouche and Prouty, esp., possibly Mark Lane...

Putting Mark Lane aside for a second, because it's not clear to me how close he was tied to Jim Jones, or for how long, and HMW points out that he was defending James Earl Ray, and the Company had plenty of reasons to be going after him...

But Prouty's connections to Scientology do appear rather bizarre. Everything touching Scientology is bizarre. c2w, is Russell Miller's "Bare-Faced Messiah" only about Hubbard's navy career? What other books about Hubbard or Scientology's roots do you know of? HMW, it seems hard to write off Prouty's links to Scientology. Do you think he was simply duped? An insider-turned-whistleblower with a relatively myopic view who was conned? c2w, do you think that Prouty, Mr. X, was some sort of ultra-covert agent the whole time, serving multiple purposes?
Chiggerbit, I'm not sure I follow your question, "I'm beginning to wonder how deep Scientology is into pushing the bigger conspiracies." Certainly, CO$ plays a function in completely dirtying everything it touches. Like I have friends who are heavily involved in the psychiatric liberation slash anti-pharmaceutical movement (which has been getting national press attention recently), and CO$ prominence in that meme milieu has of course done great harm to the well-intentioned everyday activists.

I don't know. Prouty's links to CO$ could ultimately discredit what his good works. How did it all go down? I'd love to hear a thesis. It's not impossible to me that the agency went even deeper than any of us intuit, setting up both sides of a false dialectic, going far, far back. It kind oif reminds me of an Alex Constantine article I read some years ago, "Cults and Anti-Cults," about the CIA's control of both in the seventies (and how CO$ eventually took over the "anti-cult" group). Shit, I'm having trouble finding it right now.
Anyway, I'll read everybody's links more thoroughly later....