The Warren Commission had problems right out-of-the-gate, and the biggest became known as the single bullet theory. Even though the wounds were tampered with and notes of the autopsy immediately burned, the official report had considerable difficulty explaining how one pristine bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital caused seven wounds in two men. The solution was invented by a young Philadelphia DA, who would soon rise to great heights in American politics. His name was Arlen Specter.
In 1964, Vince Salandria was a history teacher at Bartram High School with a law degree who did legal work on the side when Specter was invited by the local bar association to give a talk concerning his work for the Commission. Specter spoke in front of an audience of 150, and then asked if anyone had a question. Salandria stood up. “Your single bullet theory is a fraud, a magic bullet theory,” he began. “How could anyone support such a blatant absurdity?”
“Have you read the report?” smirked Specter.
“Yes, I have,” replied Salandria, “all eight hundred and eighty-eight pages.”
Specter was visibly taken aback. He’d not been expecting opposition on this dog-and-pony show, much less from someone so well-armed with facts. After JFK was assassinated Salandria told himself if Lee Harvey Oswald was killed before any trial took place, it would mean the CIA was behind the coup. When that happened, he drove to Dallas to investigate and interview witnesses. He met with Oswald’s mother, who told him her son was in the CIA, and she was very proud of that fact. In the Warren Commission Report, Specter had successfully painted Oswald’s mom as a lunatic. He tried sparring with Salandria but after losing every parry, Specter asked for a new question and moved on, his credibility somewhat shaken. It was a scary moment when the entire facade threatened to come down, and Specter would never forget it.
Salandria went home in an inspirational fever created by the audience’s reaction to his comments and composed the first critique of Specter’s theory, and soon had it published it in Philadelphia’s Legal Intelligencer, becoming an instant star inside a growing band of citizen researchers disputing the official story of JFK’s murder. These debunkers were virtually shunned because so few believed the CIA would kill its own President.
A few years ago a professor in Florida did his own digging around, and uncovered this document through the FOIA that revealed the CIA invented the term “conspiracy theorist” as a derogatory term to be deployed while dismissing critics of the Warren Commission Report. The document outlined a variety of strategies for debunking the debunkers.
In order to cement the fallacy of the conspiracy theorists they needed to invent some really nutty conspiracy theories, so what happened next is a string of whistle-blowers introduced mind-blowing new evidence in JFK’s assassination, and then began pursuing completely different conspiracy theories, often involving aliens, theories that could easily be swatted away, thus tainting and negating any JFK revelations.
Two of the original memes they introduced were “dead people are alive” and “living people are dead.” I don’t know which came first, Elvis or Paul, but both were extensively mined for this counterintelligence propaganda operation.
Here’s the photo that launched the Elvis meme and this story was also accompanied with the release of documents from Elvis’ DEA and FBI files. Not only had Elvis traveled to Washington DC seeking credentials as a Special Agent in the war on drugs, one of his airplanes had been investigated during a drug investigation. Elvis had zero to do with illegal drug-running, but he was a heavy user of legally prescribed narcotics.
Both the “Elvis is alive” and “Paul is dead” memes were promoted extensively by the Weekly World News, which I strongly suspect was deployed as a counterintelligence propaganda tool for dumbing down America, a role the entire media complex seems to be embracing these days.
More recently people inside the Air Force have confessed to planting fake evidence of alien visitations in the UFO community. And wouldn’t you know a lot of early JFK researchers ended up promoting the “aliens are here” meme. Most of this disinfo came in the form of forged “top secret” documents that never existed in the real world, and since intel deals with these sorts of memos every day, they know how to forge them and make them look really good.
The growth and spread of phony intel propaganda memes over the decades dwarfs the efforts of real citizen researchers, the noise to signal ratio is immense, and the landscape now includes “we never landed on the moon,” chemtrails, “no one got killed at Sandy Hook,” “no planes were used in 9/11,” and many, many more. As Goebbels noted, “tell a big lie, and stick to it.” Only I believe he was talking about the British MI6 propaganda and not his own.
Strangely, at the end of his long career, Specter invited Salandria to lunch at the Oyster Bar in Philadelphia. Salandria was surprised by this invitation and ended up doing most of the talking. He’d ended up losing his teaching job for promoting conspiracy theory among his students. Perhaps Specter was pumping him for the state-of-the-art in JFK research, or maybe he was trying to improve his karma. Specter’s last words were along the lines of perhaps he hadn’t been fraudulent after all, but merely incompetent. “You’re not that incompetent,” replied Salandria.