Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 16

("Quid coniuratio est?")


THE DREAD WILLIS CARTO??

From the prairienet system, where I log on to the internet, the alt.conspiracy forum is set up so that every time you call it up the number one message, top of the screen, is a FAQ regarding Willis Carto. Willis Carto is the publisher of The Spotlight, a newspaper that I often use for installments of "Conspiracy Nation".

From time to time, posts of mine based on The Spotlight get responded to with such "truisms" as "Willis Carto the anti- Semite," "Willis Carto the Nazi," "Willis Carto the fascist," etc. Yet I have held that I must get my information where I can find it. If I cannot find the info I am looking for in mainstream publications then I must search the "fringe".

So I routinely get chided for using information provided by the "dread" Willis Carto.

Then, recently, a reader was kind enough to transcribe a talk given by Dave Emory regarding the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Mr. Emory's talk gave some good information, but there were areas of his talk that I doubted. For example, he cast doubt on the reputation of attorney Mark Lane, author of Rush To Judgement, Code Name Zorro (?) (with co-author Dick Gregory), and the most recent Plausible Denial. Mr. Emory's doubts as to Mr. Lane relied on theoretical connections much more than on fact. Besides that, I had read Code Name Zorro, co- authored by Mark Lane, and had thought the book to be excellent. If Mr. Lane was such a bad fellow as Dave Emory was hinting, then how could he have written such a good book?

So seemingly, there is the random "dissing" (I love that word) of both Willis Carto in alt.conspiracy and of Mr. Lane, tangentially, in Dave Emory's talk.

Now, a third person enters the picture: my mom. She is always buying books, she never reads them, but then I steal them from her and I read them. So I was visiting the old homestead recently and I saw she had purchased Plausible Denial by Mark Lane. So I stole it.

Now these seemingly random threads come together in the following excerpts from Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (by Mark Lane. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.)

[Excerpts only]

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Haviv Schieber left Israel, moved to the United States, [and] became outraged about the conditions imposed upon Palestinians and Jews.

Until his death in 1988, this Polish Jew, a founder of the state of Israel, became an advocate of another approach for peace in the Middle East.

[In 1980,] I met Haviv Schieber.

[At a subsequent meeting,] without warning or introduction, Haviv exploded, "Too bad about Carter. He's finished."

"Who is Carter?" I asked.

"You don't know Carter, the publisher of Spotlight at Liberty Lobby?" he asked.

I offered that I had heard of Spotlight and Liberty Lobby. "Isn't that an extremist, anti-Semitic group?" I asked.

Haviv sighed heavily and said, "Not you too, Mark. To be against the policies of Israel, to give Arafat a chance to be heard, it is not anti-Semitic. Arafat is a Semite too."

I asked who Carter was and why he was finished.

Correcting my pronunciation, Haviv said, "Not Carter, Carto -- Carto."

[The upshot is that Lane agreed to represent Carto and Liberty Lobby in a case against E. Howard Hunt. The book continues:]

Carto had become particularly interested in [Victor] Marchetti when the former CIA officer's book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, was published. At that time, due to the insistence of the CIA and the complicity of the judicial system, the book was subject to pre-publication censorship and was printed and sold with blank spaces where fact and analysis had been.

Carto, a true believer in the Constitution, was appalled by the censorship of Marchetti's work and intrigued as well. "When they suppressed portions of it," he told me, "it was clear that the CIA was vouching for its accuracy. After all, they could not object to fantasy; they could not swear in court that the nation's security was in jeopardy if a paragraph which was untrue was published."

[Carto published an article by Marchetti in The Spotlight. Hunt sued Carto and won a judgement for three-quarters of a million dollars. Lane took the case on appeal.]

Carto's personal beliefs impact but tangentially upon the substance of this book. Yet, having raised the matter, it seems only fair to comment upon them in a dispositive manner. Since my first interview with Willis Carto half a dozen years ago, I have represented Liberty Lobby in three important political cases.

I have heard the allegation, over and over again, that Carto is anti-Semitic and pro-fascist. I have heard the courts solemnly state that since it has been said so often that either each new allegation has lost its sting, or must be true, based upon the "where there is smoke there must be fire" theory. I have also heard the eloquent response by Judge Scalia:

We are not yet ready to adopt for the law of libel the principle that 10,000 repetitions are as good as the truth. We see nothing to be said for the rule that a conscious, malicious libel is not actionable so long as it has been preceded by earlier assertions of the same untruth.

Setting aside legal consideration and arguments based upon precedent, I can repeat my own observation. Carto challenges the power structure, the right of financial institutions, unelected by the people, to rule the nation, whatever their religious or political affiliation may be. No shrinking violet, he speaks openly and without euphemisms. On more than one occasion we have spent the evening sipping Blanton's, a fine Kentucky bourbon, exploring the vagaries of world politics and exchanging world views. I have never heard an anti-Semitic expression from him in all these years.

Contrast Carto with the more "respectable" William F. Buckley for a moment. At the time of [a case involving Buckley in which Lane was involved], it was revealed that Buckley had been opposed to the right of African-Americans to vote in the United States because they outnumbered white voters in certain areas and because, as he put it, the white voters were the superior or master race. [Lane gives further example of "ex"-CIA agent Buckley's gaffes.]

Had Carto whispered a fraction of what Buckley had shouted we would have read about it in the New York Times. The press, however, has left Buckley's excesses mostly unreported, even his contention that Rev. Adam Clayton Powell was a "jig," and that blacks in South Africa should not be permitted access to the ballot box any more than should African-Americans.


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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt. Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9

Brian Francis Redman bigxc@prairienet.org "The Big C"

"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."