Just what the major media think of as news is often mysterious. On 16 May, enormous publicity was given to the release by the Pentagon of the missing frames of the videotape of whatever it was that hit the Pentagon on 9/11. Yet these new frames showed nothing of consequence – they certainly did not show an American Airlines jet – and failed to rebut the conspiracy theories about the crash which variously allege that the building was hit by a missile, a much smaller plane, a drone or even a truck bomb.

	JFK and 9/11 are enormous quagmires of disinformation

The previous day, Douglas Horne, former Chief Analyst for Military Records of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), issued a statement at a press conference in Washington on the Kennedy assassination in which he stated, inter alia, that: “Within our [AARB] deposition transcripts and interview reports is unequivocal evidence that there was a US government cover-up of the medical evidence in the Kennedy assassination…

“(1) The autopsy report in evidence today, Warren Commission Exhibit #387, is the third version prepared of that report; it is not the sole version, as was claimed for years by those who wrote it and signed it…

“(2) The brain photographs in the National Archives that are purported to be photographs of President Kennedy’s brain are not what they are represented to be; they are not pictures of his brain, but rather are photographs of someone else’s brain…

“(3) There is something seriously wrong with the autopsy photographs of the body of President Kennedy. It definitely is President Kennedy in the photographs, but the images showing the damage to the President’s head do not show the pattern of damage observed by either the medical professionals at Parkland hospital in Dallas, or by numerous witnesses at the military autopsy at Bethesda Naval hospital.”

This striking statement by a former official of the US federal government received no attention at all from the major media, at least as far as I can discover. But neither did the comments in Lamar Waldron’s Ultimate Sacrifice (New York, Carroll and Graf, 2005, p.15) by former JFK intimate David Powers, now head of the John F Kennedy Presidential library, that he and fellow JFK insider, Kenneth O’Donnell, riding in the car behind JFK’s, saw the shots fi red from the grassy knoll in Dallas, and were persuaded not to challenge the Warren Commission’s verdict. To my knowledge, Powers is the only person who was part of JFK’s inner circle to have come out against the official verdict; but this, apparently, wasn’t “news” either.

9/11 and JFK, the two great causes célèbres of recent American history, are now enormous quagmires of fact, alleged fact, rumour and disinformation – and both have been used by Gregory Douglas, perhaps the best, or worst (according to taste), living fabricator of the historical record. Best known for his three-volume Gestapo Chief: The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Muller, Douglas, a.k.a. Peter Stahl, was exposed by Gitta Sereny (“Spin time for Hitler”, The Observer, 21 April 1996) after trying to plant some fabricated WWII documents on her. The controversial British historian David Irving devotes a considerable chunk of his Website to uncovering Douglas/ Stahl’s activities (www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/ Peter_Stahl/index.html).

Douglas is also the author of Regicide: The Official Assassination of JFK, apparently based on the papers of a (conveniently dead) CIA offi cer called Robert Crowley. I haven’t read Regicide, but it was good enough to initially fool JFK researcher and author Professor James Fetzer, who gave it five stars in the fi rst of three reviews of it he wrote for Amazon.com. (Fetzer describes the encounter with Douglas on a pdf downloadable at http://www.assassination research.com/arindex.html.)

Four years ago, Douglas distributed a list of CIA sources allegedly found in Crowley’s papers. Daniel Brandt of Namebase checked the list and found that it was almost entirely composed of the publicly available membership list of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (http://cryptome.sabotage.org/cia-namebase.htm). Predictably, Douglas more recently turned his talents to the 9/11 story, circulating a “Background Report on 9/11/2001”, purportedly written by the German equivalent of MI6, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which alleges, among other things, advance knowledge of the plot by the US. The report was distributed in May by the Irish 9/11 Truth Movement – who were, apparently, quite unaware of Douglas’s 30-year career as a historical fabricator.

Douglas’s motives can only be guessed at. Some are probably financial – his account of Gestapo head Muller is said to have sold 70,000 copies. But not all his fabrications are aimed at big targets. Lisa Pease, co-editor of Probe, the now defunct journal about the Kennedy assassination, complains on her blog that Douglas has a letter from her on his website which she didn’t write and which he refuses to remove (www. realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/2005/08/someone-isstealing- my-identity.html).