CONSPIRACY THEORIES, PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
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BUSHWHACKED:
Author: Uri Dowbenko
Uri Dowbenko is a clever journalist, and here he has compiled many of the most interesting conspiracy topics of the present era. From Bush family frauds, MK-ULTRA/Monarch mind control, and the bogus war on drugs, to the reptilian revelations of UK author David Icke & Zulu Historian Credo Mutwa, Uri provides an introduction to the materials of several other notable researchers/journalists. This book is somewhat lacking in a coherent sequence or organization, but it does provide a lot of interesting information and is a useful text to examine before reading materials of some of the author's sources, which are more lengthy and in-depth than Dowbenko's articles and chapters.
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TRIANGLE OF DEATH:
Author: Bradley S. O'Leary
Here are the facts: a) President John F. Kennedy supported the coup d'etat that resulted in the assassination of Diem; b) twenty-one days later, Kennedy was assassinated; c) forty-eight hours after JFK's murder, the FBI deported a French assassin-a fact that was not reported at the time, even to the Warren Commission; d) this deportation order came from the Office of the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy.Bradley O'Leary and L.E. Seymour present a convincing argument that implicates not Lee Harvey Oswald, but rather a conglomerate of conspirators, in the death of beloved President Kennedy. Using actual CIA documents, interviews, and evidence, Triangle of Death will alter everything you thought you knew about John F. Kennedy's death.
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POLITICAL CORRUPTION:
Author: Arnold Heidenheimer
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PENTAGATE:
Author: Thierry Meyssan
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THE ASSASSINATION BUSINESS:
Author: Richard Belfield
The cost of a bullet can be as little as eight cents. Assassination has long been more common than anyone (particularly anyone in government) likes to admit—it is the great-untold secret at the heart of the nation-state. As President George W. Bush continues to introduce Hollywood cowboy terminology like "dead or alive" and "bring it on" into our international political discourse, we are entering a new era of assassination where the "eight-cent option" has been given a new and disquieting legitimacy.
Belfield’ s darkly fascinating exposé of the business, its hired killers, and their paymasters, includes excerpts from CIA, Al-Qaeda, and Soviet assassination manuals. Placing the most important hits of our time in their proper historical context and examining the business from a remarkably objective yet honest standpoint, Belfield shows how assassinations, while posited by governments and the United Nations as random, isolated acts of violence, are in fact quietly sanctioned examples of ruthlessly strategic statecraft. He offers an eye-opening account of how Kennedy made the Vietnam War inevitable by the elimination of President Diem; and clear evidence of assassinations where the official version simply is not true, including those of Bobby Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, and WPC Yvonne Fletcher.
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ASSAULT ON THE LEFT:
Author: James Kirkpatrick Davis
A sad chronicle of the government's spying on citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. In 1939, writes Davis (Spying on America, 1992) President Roosevelt pressed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate ``sabotage, espionage, and subversive activities.'' With WW II looming, he was right to fear the first two. But, Davis shows, Hoover concerned himself largely with the third sphere, compiling dossiers on millions of Americans who harbored socialist sympathies or protested the governing policies of the era. In 1956, President Eisenhower authorized increased surveillance of suspected radicals, even endorsing Hoover's program of illegal breaking and entering to photograph ``secret communist documents.'' With the rise of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, the antisubversion elements of the FBI embarked on their elaborate, and infamous, COINTELPRO operation, which extended breaking and entering to new heights: infiltrating leftist organizations with paid informants and agents provocateurs who encouraged peaceful groups to engage in terrorism; writing anonymous letters to fellow travelers, parents, and prospective employers charging leftists with illegal activities; targeting prominent dissidents with smear campaigns. The documents Davis offers are sometimes comical, as FBI agents attempt to mimic the language of hippies and Yippies and Black Panthers (``bring your own grass, pot, whatever,'' read one faked flyer announcing a demonstration). Yet, Davis shows, there was nothing at all funny about the government's secret program of violating Americans' civil rights. The COINTELPRO operation ultimately failed--thanks to federal ineptitude--and it did nothing substantial to halt the antiwar movement, which managed to stage some of the ``largest mass demonstrations ever seen in the western hemisphere'' despite the FBI's best efforts. Nelson Blackstock's Cointelpro (not reviewed) and Davis's own earlier book cover much of this ground, but this well-researched study is a welcome investigation of political corruption in the supposed service of Americanism.
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INSIDE THE PENTAGON PAPERS:
Author: John Prados1
"As with Vietnam, the current war on terrorism has a secret backstory far different from the one retailed so earnestly" by the administration, say the authors of this illuminating new look at the Pentagon Papers scandal of the 1970s. Scholar Prados (The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President) and Porter, director of communications and publications for Vietnam Veterans of America, reexamine the secret government papers that blew the whistle on the Vietnam War, led to the federal attempts to restrain the press and ultimately resulted in President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The authors take readers into the meeting in which Times editors debated whether to publish the papers, a decision that presented "all the classic elements of journalistic dilemma." They offer previously unpublished transcripts of White House tapes (Nixon says, "Henry talked to that damn Jew Times executive Max Frankel all the time, he’s bad, you know..."). And in a final chapter, VVA general counsel Michael Gaffney considers the legal issues raised by the Pentagon Papers, and their implications for releasing classified government information today. Volumes about these issues abound, but Prados and Porter offer a concise look at those pivotal events and their long-term effects.
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CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY:
Author: Peter Knight
"Conspiracy theories (and, from time to time, actual conspiracies) have played a vital role in shaping the course of American history." So states the editor of this set, which is the work of more than 123 contributors. It is intended as "a serious and comprehensive summary of all the major events, ideas, and figures of U.S. conspiracy thinking."
The set begins with "Conspiracy Theories in America: A Historical Overview" and "Making Sense of Conspiracy Theories," two excellent articles that provide background and understanding of the subject. This material is followed by more than 300 entries for both actual and imagined conspiracies. Examples of theories include the extremely well known as well as the somewhat obscure. As might be expected, the entry on the John F. Kennedy assassination is the longest, covering 15 pages. Among other entries are AIDS, Cattle mutilations, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl Harbor, Tobacco industry, UFOs, and whitewater. The theories are arranged alphabetically and include see also references and brief bibliographies of related works. Appropriate Web sites are also listed for some.
Section 3 contains approximately 100 extracts from primary source documents, arranged chronologically from Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) to Lawton et al. v. Republic of Iraq (2003). A headnote explains the context of each.
This is a fascinating reference set that presents intriguing (albeit sometimes far-fetched) theories. Examining these theories, one can see how almost any event or idea can be viewed as a conspiracy, actual or imagined. This would be an excellent addition to academic and large public libraries.
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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CONSPIRACIES AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES:
Author: Michael Newton
Conspiracies and conspiracy theories, both documented and undocumented, abound in our world. Many of these, even though documented, are only theoretical and not actual fact, and as author Newton states, "some are absurd, transparently ridiculous, or even physically impossible." However, they certainly make for fascinating reading.
This volume's 500-plus entries are arranged alphabetically and encompass people; conspiratorial organizations and movements; nations involved in conspiracies; specific events; and general essays on social, political, or religious movements. The selection of topics represents what Newton considers "significant" conspiracy and conspiracy theories--that is, those that affect large numbers of people or inspire widespread interest. Entries are typically one-half to three and one-half pages in length. Names or terms in small caps within an entry refer to subjects with their own entries. The volume contains more than 80 black-and-white photographs. The 200 or so listings in the bibliography are limited to sources published or translated in the English language.
Topics include those one would expect to find: Alien abductions, Holocaust and Holocaust denial, Iran-Contra conspiracy, Oklahoma City bombing, and UFOs. Treating less-familiar theories are Barbie dolls, Suppressed inventions, and Undead outlaws. There are also entries on police departments from several major cities, such as Chicago and L.A. In addition to John F. Kennedy, other presidents have entries--for example, both Bushes, Clinton, Johnson, Lincoln, Nixon, and Washington.
Many entries overlap with those in the more scholarly Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2003). However, several subjects in the volume under review are not in the 2003 publication (e.g., Apollo project; Enron; Silkwood, Karen; Simpson, O. J.; USA Patriot Act). With their different scopes, both works would be a great addition to a library's collection. If funds won't allow the purchase of both, however, this recent volume would be a good choice on its own, especially for high-school and public libraries.
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WITHOUT SMOKING GUN:
Author: Kent Heiner
This shocking account of intrigue, lies, and governmental complicity provides dramatic evidence that suggests a larger conspiracy behind JFK's assassination. Three years after Kennedy's assassination, Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer, who was reputed to have in his possession documents and film that refuted the conclusions of JFK's official autopsy, was found dead in his office at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1995, a retired special forces captain claimed that a representative of the CIA recruited him to assassinate Pitzer. This, as well as the mysterious circumstances of Pitzer's death and the official and nonofficial investigations that followed, are outlined. These revelations of a possible conspiracy within a conspiracy raise larger questions of the measures taken to suppress the truth and the potential dangers of a government that operates outside the law.
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THE SENATE WATERGATE REPORT:
Author: Senate Select Committee
At the moment when the long-concealed identity of the Watergate scandal's most famous source, Deep Throat, has finally been revealed as former FBI deputy director Mark Felt, it is only appropriate that the historic Senate Select Committee report that helped trigger the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 should be made available to a new generation. Here it all is: the break-in and cover-up, the wire taps, the dirty campaign tricks, the attempts to improperly influence government agencies, and the ensuing trail of lies and deceptions all laid out in painstaking detail.
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CONSPIRANOIA!:
Author: Devon Jackson
The Truth Is In Here: a dense handbook of contemporary conspiracy theory, obsessively cross-referenced, the ideal millennial index to all the terrors of the fin de sicle. Former Details editor Jackson has an impressively multidimensional understanding of the oft-obscured relationship between archaic, ancient underground bodies like Freemasonry, Cabalists, Illuminati, and the Knights of Malta and such disturbing modern phenomena as the military-industrial complex, Scientology, the Klan, J. Edgar Hoover, neo-Nazis, the Trilateral Commission, and George Bush. He extends this grid along cultural and political vectors, and in the process constructs a Pynchonesque web of conspiracies both familiar (the Kennedy and King assassinations) and obscure (secretive New World Order collectives like the Bohemian Club and Bilderbergers). His choice of a guidebook format (each chapter proposing an evanescent overall conspiracy, in which all relevant paragraphs are cross-referenced by pictogram to the other conspiracy chapters) makes the material easier to grasp than a narrative like Gravitys Rainbow, but strangely numbs the unease that much of it provokes. Jacksons buzz-friendly nature demonstrates how such conspiracy cultureonce personal, therefore unsettlinghas been vitiated by the public mode of entertainment, in which myth becomes inseparable from malfeasance, the vital nature of malign conspiracy arguably reduced to simulacra. Whats missing is any effort to perform a larger, graver task: to figure out which of these malicious netherworlds of corruption might still be brought to account by an increasingly fractious, distracted citizenry. All that said, Jacksons debut remains a page-turner. His entries are concise, detailed, and occasionally hilarious, and they shed necessary light on many shameful episodes of our recent history (such as the CIAs Operation Paperclip, in which top Nazis were smuggled out of Europe to aid in the Cold War). Even readers skeptical of these looming conspiratorial structures may find such material too compelling for comfort. A thoughtful gift for anybody you suspect is considering relocation to rural Montana, or a bomb shelter. (75 photos and line drawings, 21 maps)
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