'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' by Adam Curtis, Kerry Thornley and Lee Harvey Oswald

'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' (2021), Adam Curtis' new documentary suggests our innate flaws are what's holding society back and argues humanity’s worst enemy is itself. A new BBC documentary series from Bafta-winning filmmaker Adam Curtis has been broadly welcomed by critics. Several hailed the six-part series as "dazzling" and "terrifying", but others said it was "incoherent" and left them confused. Curtis has described it as an "emotional history of the modern world". It chronicles growing anxieties in the western world, and to do so, it takes in the scope of centuries, the influential stories of lesser-sung players and the ever-shifting tides of human psychology – and how the world’s power structures have, throughout generations, sought to bend it to their will. Luckily, he gives us a glimmer of a way out. “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make,” reads the keynote quote from American anarchist David Graeber, “and could just as easily make differently.” Our innate pessimism amid such an intricate and immutable world order, however, has us leaving Can’t Get You Out Of My Head fearing the worst. “Again and again,” Curtis says, “we’re getting this knocking at the door, whether it be the Occupy movement or Donald Trump or Brexit or Black Lives Matter, all arguing that there is something wrong and corrupted with the system of power. It’s always shooting out of the ground from different sources and I don’t think that it’s going to go away. But no one seems to have come up with what the alternative would be. What I’m trying to do in these films is explain why we feel so helpless and yet we want change.” The key to understanding today’s human population, it argues, is in recognising its subconscious patterns of behaviour. But the series itself exposes our most self-defeating pattern: that our innate flaws are destined to destroy any dream society we might ever imagine. That rotten systems are never really overthrown, they just mutate, that power breeds corruption, that political and social ideals are incompatible with human failings. As Curtis points out, all major world leaders have run out of ideological ideas, so we’d better get busy formulating something non-catastrophic to come next. In the first part of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain), there are several references to JFK, Jim Garrison and Kerry Thornley. Source: nme.com

Jim DiEugenio: In 1965, Kerry Thornley wrote a manuscript entitled Oswald which would be published as The Idle Warriors in 1991. This book shocks you when Thornely reveals the fact that E. Howard Hunt was stationed at Atsugi Air base at the same time Lee Harvey Oswald was there. Anybody can easily connect the dots of Oswald to the legendary CIA operative Hunt. Thornley also acknowledged there were many coincidences he was personally involved with and he may have been unwittingly manipulated by the conspirators. Some of the claims he makes in The Idle Warriors include numerous meetings in New Orleans with Gary Kirstein and Slim Brooks, who both–like Thornley–disliked Kennedy. Thornley clearly lied about not seeing Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans. And Garrison rightly indicted him for perjury before the grand jury. There is simply no way around this with the declassified evidence. Beyond that, two of the witnesses, Doris Dowell and Bernard Goldsmith, testified that Thornley had told them Oswald was not a communist. Thornley was used by the Warren Commission, perhaps more than any other witness, to paint Oswald as a communist. The new evidence states Thornley was so close to LHO that he actually visited him at his home. (Affidavit of Myrtle La Savia, who lived a block away) Once Thornley became a person of interest to Jim Garrison, he became protected by higher authorities. Thornley left for Florida, and according to records unearthed by Garrison's investigators, he owned two fancy houses, one in Tampa and another in Miami. Not bad for a guy who had worked as a waiter and a doorman. 

Kerry Thornley had moved to New Orleans in February of 1961, which coincided with the preparations in the Crescent City shifting into high gear over the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. David Ferrie and Guy Banister were operating in places like Belle Chase naval air station and Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street. In fact, because of the ARRB, we first found out about the training grounds at Belle Chase from file releases in the nineties about Ferrie. He worked there as a trainer for the CIA, under the auspices of his friend Sergio Archada Smith, who worked for the CIA under State Department cover. With the move to the Crescent City, Thornley was now going to run into a group of people who also knew Oswald and they were associated with this anti-Castro, CIA associated movement. This group was called the Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC). It was a shell company created by the CIA and FBI, “which involved the shipment and transportation of individuals and supplies in and out of Cuba.” The man who was supposed to be the recipient of this merchandise was Sergio Archada Smith. Members of the committee were Grady Durham and Bill Dalzell, the latter was a CIA operative and friend of Clay Shaw. Thornley himself admitted having shown his Oswald manuscript to Guy Banister in his introduction to The Idle Warriors. The Commission wanted Thornley to bring all drafts of his book The Idle Warriors with him. Thornley's main liaison with the Warren Commission was Albert Jenner. To me, in terms of sheer incrimination and character assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, Thornley ranks with Ruth and Michael Paine, George DeMohrenschildt, and Carlos Bringuier. Thornley was very valuable by offering his portrayal of Oswald as a sociopathic Marxist. And he is duly quoted in the Warren Report in three damaging passages. 

In a memorandum Thornley wrote on October 24, 1967, he expresses trepidations about Jim Garrison. By letter, he now begins to dictate terms to Garrison. One of those terms ended up being he would only meet Garrison's assistant DA Andy Sciambra at NASA, which was the place where many of those who worked with Oswald at Reily Coffee Company had been later transferred. Apparently, coffee grinders make good aerospace designers. As he entered the establishment, Sciambra recalled thinking that, if someone like Thornley could command entry into such a place, then Garrison probably didn’t stand a chance in Hades of winning out. Obviously, Thornley did not just call NASA and say: I need a secure room to meet with an opposing attorney; put me next to a rocket silo, so he gets the message. No, not Thornley. Someone did that for him. Someone involved in protecting him.In one of the declassifications revealed by the ARRB, the CIA admitted that it ran something called a Cleared Attorneys Panel in major cities—one of them being New Orleans during the Garrison investigation. The existence of this panel was first exposed in a classified letter by attorney James Quaid to CIA Director Richard Helms on May 13, 1967. In that letter, which was declassified relatively early in the ARRB process, Quaid asked to be placed on the CIA’s preferred list of lawyers in New Orleans. As for his perjury, as shown above, there isn’t much that Thornley was not lying about, or at least equivocating upon. And it’s a shame that we had to wait until the ARRB to get the evidence. But yet, Thornley then admitted to both Doris Dowell and Bernard Goldsmith that he knew Oswald was not a communist. How can one explain such behavior? I believe it’s not explainable, unless we allow that Thornley was playing a role, his motivation being his almost pathological hatred of JFK, which David Lifton cannot bring himself to confront. In 1992 on the syndicated program A Current Affair, Thornley said, “I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance.” (Program of 2/25/92) Source: https://kennedysandking.com