"Conspiracy Theories" are often looked down on as crazy ideas, like the alleged sex ring operated out of a pizza shop by Hillary Clinton in October 2016.  But the spy business, like the CIA and others, often uses the term to cover up their various misdeeds.  Tricks of the trade like "cut-outs" are used to disguise the identity of the real people or agencies behind a given plot.  "Cut-outs" are go-betweens, like when a drug lord gets kids to deliver the actual contraband.  Labeling something a "conspiracy theory" operates kind of like that, it seeks to divert attention away from the actual facts and circumstances of an operation and return people's focus back to the original whitewash story or cover story used to explain what is going on.  Members of the press and academics are then shamed, ridiculed, or coerced to stick to the original cover story, no matter how ludicrous.  This collective pressure to maintain the story is often the price demanded to be accepted by polite society.  There have been so many misdeeds done by our intelligence agencies over the years that:  it is not uncommon when you are hearing someone explain their new book or new research and you ask them a question about another so-called "conspiracy theory" they often demur and refuse to endorse some other proposition they have not personally investigated.  So "conspiracy theory" is the taboo put on any line of investigation that does not meet official mainstream approval.  Considerable evidence exists to confirm the continuing existence of the CIA Operation Mockingbird control of certain parameters of mainstream press stories.  Even the best journalists, like Amy Goodman and Rachel Maddow, who courageously expose many government misdeeds are often persuaded to adhere to certain guidelines.

Destabilizing Governments

The CIA proudly tells how they staved off France and Italy from going communist after World War II.  They also undermined the democratically elected Mosaddeq government in Iran in August 1953 and replaced him with the Shah, who later became famous for his SAVAK cruel police force.  This CIA-British operation lead by the grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt ultimately backfired when the Ayatollah took over in 1979.  So the CIA had plenty of experience with coup de tats when 1963 rolled around.  Anyone who watched the PBS series "I, Claudius" or had seen the Shakespearean plays "Julius Caesar" and "Macbeth" would not be surprised to find skullduggery at the top of an empire, since power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  And anyone who has read the "Path to Power" book by Robert Caro about Lyndon Johnson would realize that nothing would stop him from rising as far as he possible could by any means necessary.  The movie "JFK" is documented extensively in a research footnoted script companion book, including things like keeping the 3000 man Sam Houston Brigade off the streets of Dallas the day of the assassination.  Mob influenced Jack Ruby can silence Oswald, but only the government can change the parade overnight, slow the car down to ten miles per hour, take troops off the streets, and other set-ups.  The CIA needed a spy network in the Soviet Union after 1945 and accepted many former Nazi spies out of necessity.  The CIA has often worked with the mob and drug lords as well:  these kinds of compromises come at a high cost.

Confusion Helps the Whitewash

Many CIA tactics perfected in the 1950s have endured down through the decades, and the prohibition of interfering domestically by the CIA has often been ignored in practice, while being adhered to in lip service.  Setting up Red Herrings to take the fall or responsibility for any given act is a cherished CIA tactic.  Lee Harvey Oswald is a good example.  Someone with a mustache in Mexico City is shown in one photograph outside the Cuban Embassy.  Supposedly that person was Lee Harvey Oswald.  Later, a reluctant Earl Warren is arm twisted to chair the Commission on President Kennedy's death.  Lyndon Johnson cites evidence tracing Lee Harvey Oswald links back to the Soviets and or the Cubans and says to Warren, "do you want a nuclear war?"  So the ruse works with just enough manufactured evidence to suggest that possibility.  Of course this is ludicrous, when you know that Khrushchev cried when he heard Kennedy died because both Kennedy and Khrushchev knew that the world had come too close to oblivion in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  They agreed to the 1963 atmospheric test ban treaty and were preparing to work on mutual disarmament in Kennedy's second term.  Kennedy on September 8^th, 1963 issued an executive order beginning withdrawal from Vietnam that Christmas.  That and dismantling CIA covert operations in a second term were a combination of threats to the CIA and military industrial complex that had to be stopped.  Lyndon and Hoover agreed, and the rest is history.  Conferences of 400 Kennedy Assassination researchers were meeting each year around 1990.  Hundreds of books were being written.  So when I began to find out the truth on the twenty-fifth anniversary, 1988, watching a Geraldo Rivera show, I started to read books.  Except for the pro-CIA books like "Case Closed" by Gerald Posner, or later the Vince Bugliosi book, all the other five or six bookstore available books I purchased and read seemed to fit together, explaining various parts of the story.  The only major confusion came from the Posner book who in the words of a lawyer friend who retraced my journey and more, is nothing but a lot of newspaper articles with no real evidence.  The Bugliosi book is based on various tests that allegedly confirm the Oswald story, despite the numerous and endless contradictions of that narrative.  When Oswald said in the Saturday night new conference that he was a "patsy" that film clip shows how shook-up he was when he was asked if he killed President Kennedy.  Up until that time he was only questioned about Officer Tippett.  How could he be observed in a third floor lunch room 90 seconds after the murder by a policeman and not be out of breath from descending three flights of stairs and running across the sixth floor to the stairs?  How could he casually "escape" by going out the front door and waiting patiently at the nearby bus stop and taking a bus?  Evidence suggests the real shooter escaped out the back way with a get-away car waiting for him.  The photo of Oswald with a gun and newspaper is of a 6'3" man not the 5'8" Oswald, with Oswald's face put on the other man with obvious shading contradictions.  Then there's the nine one hour episodes of the Arts and Entertainment Network exploding one myth after another, from the Dallas doctors to the phony DC autopsy, the colorized Judy Mormon photo of the muzzle flash shot by a blue uniformed man behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, that 26 eye witnesses saw some part of, that grassy knoll throat and fatal head shot.  Six shots by three shooters from three locations are carefully documented by one of the one hour specials.  The Oswald double is discussed in another.  Hiring from Marseille, Lucien Sate the main shooter behind the picket fence, was known for his dum-dum bullets and crazy risk taking that cost him his life nine years later in 1972.  In Dallas, near the Texas School Book Depository, is located a bookstore with all kinds of crazy conspiracy books, books I have never seen in any ordinary bookstore.  This only serves the purpose of confusing the issue, helping the CIA to perpetuate the whitewash.  But the real story is not how, but why.  When you study why, the combination of Kennedy haters becomes clearly defined, from Hoover to Johnson to CIA to military to the mob.  Gerald Ford served on the Warren Commission reporting back to Hoover the goings on so the cover-up included the FBI.  Hoover had blackmailed Kennedy over sex issues in 1960 to put Johnson on the ticket.  Hoover claimed there was no mafia in America because the mob blackmailed him over his homosexuality including an affair with Roy Cohn.  Bobby going after the mob only united the mob and FBI.

Tony Avirgan

The Christic Institute sent their Jesuit Priest, William J. Davis to Eugene, OR to plead their case against the CIA for bombing an Eden Pastora press conference and wounding Tony Avirgan, the legal case plaintiff.  I asked him afterwards of he thought he could get justice out of a Miami US Court.  He did think so, but I knew better.  In January 1990 I spoke in three workshops on a Peace Economy conference in St. Thomas University in Miami.  The pro military bias is so strong in the South that the local newspaper, the Miami Herald, refused to even put a small notice out on this conference even though the promoters sent fifteen press releases on the matter.  I once used the Peace Resource Handbook (5000 national peace groups circa 1980s) to show that peace groups per capita in various states was about 90% correlated with a state's military spending per capita.  The one clear exception was the 11 former confederate states of the South, where peace groups per capita was far below the national average, just a few per state, about a hundred for the whole region.  So it was no surprise to me to later hear the judge fined the Christic Institute $1,000,000 just for filing the entirely legitimate lawsuit.  Don't tell me the CIA can't influence the courts. CIA stories are so crazy even judges tend not to believe them, as I witnessed in one case where even the defense attorney seemed not to believe the former CIA client on trial.  The secret society can seemingly get away with anything, except in the third world where they are "on" to the Company.  Tony Avirgan's mother picked me up at the airport in Costa Rica for two conferences there, and at the peace center created by Quakers, I learned how Oliver North was considered a war criminal subject to arrest if he entered Costa Rica.  Fifteen congressman were threatening the Costa Rica government for upholding their laws against the likes of North and Hull.  John Hull's ranch was where planes landed after dropping weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua.  On the back shipment crack cocaine went to South Central Los Angeles according to books by journalists Leslie Cockburn of CBS and Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News, among others.      

Jesse Ventura

Jesse Ventura tells the story in one of his books that one month after he became governor of Minnesota in a surprise defeat of both the Democrat and the Republican, he was asked to come down to the basement of the state capital.  There he met 25 CIA people who wanted to know how he got himself elected.  He asked them as many questions as they asked him.  Later he discovered that every state cabinet in the nation has at least one CIA person.  So much for the CIA staying out of domestic affairs.

Amy Goodman

"Democracy Now" is a wonderful show, but when I asked her about the CIA and the media and Operation Mockingbird in a Madison, WI appearance, she said she had a whole chapter in her book about it.  Wrong, that chapter is all about corporate media, nothing about the CIA.  This socialist belief on the left that all things evil are capitalist rooted and separate consideration of the military industrial intelligence complex is not necessary, leads to mistakes.  Noam Chomsky still believes Vietnam would have occurred had Kennedy lived, for instance, clearly not true as the real record is intensively examined by more and more scholars.  Institutions can override, but individuals still matter.

Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow, Oxford Doctorate knows enough not to even suggest any legitimacy to the "9-11 Truth" movement.  Yet she dutifully reported a landing gear from an airliner stuck in the side of a building about 500 feet away from the trade towers and thirty some floors up in the air.  Samples of the rubble showed traces of a powerful CIA explosive in a peer reviewed article.  When oil pipeline talks collapsed in July 2001 with the Taliban in Afghanistan, British newspapers predicted an October US invasion. San Francisco mayor Willy Brown and Attorney General John Ashcroft were warned in advance not to fly on 9-11.  Dan Rather announced the building 7 collapse as a controlled demolition in his original live broadcast, and was gone a few years later.  Donald Trump hinted at the truth, as someone in the real estate business would know a demolition when one saw one, but so far hasn't played that card yet.  The building 7 collapse was announced on the BBC minutes before it happened, with the actual building showing as still standing in the window over the shoulder of the woman making the announcement.

Bill Clinton

Even with 1974-75 Church congressional hearings concluding the assassination must have been a conspiracy because there were too many bullets to account for, and 85% of the public believing the Warren Commission was wrong, President Bill Clinton claimed he believed the Warren Commission.  Why?  No one wants to end up dead like the Kennedy brothers.  Sometimes you have to go along to get along.

9-11 World Reactions

Someone in my accounting office took a vacation to Brazil after 9-11, and discovered people there hated Americans.  Did she not know about the 186 US military incursions into Latin America in the twentieth century?  Yet world opinion was so sympathetic (about 85%) to the US after 9-11 that even Iran supported the Afghanistan invasion at least until they were included in the axis of evil, with Iraq and North Korea.  Funny how all three countries had switched to buying oil in Euros instead of dollars, including Iran plans for an exchange located in Tehran.  The Korea inclusion in the axis of evil killed the nuclear peace process started by Carter and Clinton in 1994.  9-11 gets complicated quickly, favoring a CIA cover-up of the real story.

These War Decision Mechanisms often parallel CIA thinking:

https://www.academia.edu/28245203/WAR_Decision_Mechanisms_7_Papers_2013-2016_8p

Please cite this work as follows:

Reuschlein, Robert. (2018, June 14), "Conspiracy Theory Diversions", Madison, WI:  Real Economy Institute.  Retrieved from: https://www.expertclick.com/NewsRelease/Conspiracy-Theory-Diversion,2018158596.aspx

Dr. Peace, Professor Robert Reuschlein, Real Economy Institute

Nominated Vetted for 2016, Given Odds for 2017 Nobel Peace Prize

Possible Favorite in 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Announced October 5th.

Contact: bobreuschlein@gmail.com, Info: www.realeconomy.com