As usual, Dave Martin sees the truth in Earhart story

The brilliant news analyst David Martin (www.DCDave.com) has been a friend of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last since the early days after the first edition was published in June 2012.  We first met about 2005, when I found his work on the James V. Forrestal case (“Who Killed James Forrestal?“) in an online search and was immediately hooked on the quality and quantity of the truth that Martin discerns and presents in his work. 

Far more than this writer, the better-known Martin has a long history with the Washington establishment and is despised as a persistent pest by the herd journalists in the nation’s capitol, nearly all of whom have made their own little arrangements with evil and sold their souls for the coin of the realm, whether it be fame, status, money or influence.  Martin is clearly his own man, a beast rarely encountered in this upside-down PC world, and his friendship and support are highly appreciated and never taken for granted.

Without further ado,  here’s the start of Martin’s column of today, July 13, “Earhart Photo Story Collapses as Expected,“ which he later changed to “Earhart Photo Story Apparently Debunked.”  (Boldface emphasis mine throughout.)

 “Earhart Photo Story Collapses as Expected”

Well, that didn’t take long.  Two days before the History Channel aired its two-hour special, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” clued in by the saturation promotion our propaganda was giving it, I smelled a rat.  What I concluded in “Press Touts Dubious Earhart Photo” was that it was likely that these scoundrels were now steering us away from the truth through the use of #4 and #9 of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.  These are, respectively, “Knock down straw men” and “Come half clean.”

I might have gone further and noted that these two techniques were being wheeled up to the front to supplement the propaganda workhorse #1, which is “Dummy up” and a subcategory of #13, which is creating and publicizing distractions.

Up to the airing of this program, our press had virtually blacked out any news of the mountain of evidence that points to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, having been captured by the Japanese.  As author Mike Campbell points out in his review, which we shall get to later, the History Channel did present some quite solid evidence, never before aired by the national news media, that the unfortunate flyers did become prisoners of the Japanese and died at their hands.  In effect, they came half clean. But they needed to fill up two hours, and like the “double agent” Christopher Ruddy in the Vince Foster death case, they had to supply a bit more than one questionable photograph to buy credibility with their viewers.

World-traveler David Martin, best known on this blog as the most perceptive news analyst extant, from a recent visit to the Parthenon. (Courtesy David Martin.)

What good new information they offered, however, was overwhelmed by the phony photo straw man that got knocked down a lot faster than I thought that it would.  And to show you how closely the press propagandists have conformed to the fourth truth-suppression technique, we repeat it here in full:

Knock down straw men.  Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges.  Even better, create your own straw men.  Make up wild rumors (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.

What we have here is almost a textbook example of a planted false story.  A photograph had been “discovered” in the U.S. National Archives, apparently misfiled, standing alone without any context, which one might interpret as showing Noonan and Earhart lolling around on a dock in Jaluit Harbor in the Marshall Islands.  Within a couple of days, though, a mainstream left-wing publication in Britain, The Guardian, reported that a Japanese history enthusiast had discovered the identical photograph in an old Japanese travel book.  One must wonder how such a travel-book photo came to be there all by its lonesome in the National Archives.  The book was published in Palau, considerably to the west of the Marshall Islands, in 1935, two years before Earhart’s disappearance.

For more of David Martin’s fine analysis of the current Earhart flap, please click here.