[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I may stand corrected, but has it not been shown that all people (animals included, which we are) want to receive praise and reward? Going back to Pavlov, one might think that if someone was conditioned to believe that they were to be rewarded by doing something that inhibition (otherwise suppressed) could be manipulated to do some pretty strange things?
I wonder if we all don't have every emotion and that only through education and social pressure may or may not suppress those that do not conform to our current perception of correct action. That would mean we are all capable of all action under the correct stimuli.
I find Ludlum's basic premise about CIA sponsored mind control believable, and it was certainly studied by the CIA (that is in public records) but the author was not a psychiatrist nor did he have actual CIA experience. Matter of fact, despite selling a quarter billion novels - his previous C.V. included being "The Ty-D-Bowl Man" in early television commercials. Go figure.
But there is a huge difference between being able to craftily influence an assassination using "hypnosis +" and suggestions made to otherwise moral people. This is especially true when the subject himself has volunteered for the assignment, been paid secretly for an extended period, and perhaps has been forced into psychedelic drugs and other violent behavior modification techniques going far beyond hypnosis....
...and just like the crushing realization by Jason at the end of the recent movie: at some point the subject must see that he is not "innocent" even if the crimes committed seem heinous in retrospect. So they go into deep denial. Sirhan and/or Oswald may have been taken advantage-of by rogue elements in government, sure... but they are not innocent victims and we will never know the true extent of what happened. However, it is naive to think that this kind of thing did not go on routinely during the cold war, on both sides.
You want an expert opinion: read Howard Hunt's fabulous death-bed insider retelling of Watergate and Lyndon Johnson's involvement in the Kennedy coup d'etat using rogue CIA. This is not fiction. They did murder an innocent women (one of Kennedy's lovers) and that is the tip of the iceberg.
As to conspiracies, there is one that I am absolutely clear on - and perhaps the Colonel will add his professional opinion to this one.
IMHO - no thinking person - who has ever fired a bolt-action rifle (and I was rated 'sharpshooter' in basic training under abysmal conditions) can reasonably believe that a man with low marksmanship ratings in his military service, and with zero range training prior, and having never even once fired the (mail-order, second-rate) weapon in question, can place three rounds accurately into a moving target from a significant distance in a few seconds. Utterly incomprehensible to me. It is that simple. There was at least one other gunman besides Oswald in Dallas.
Jones
