I didn't expect to be writing a follow-up to my last letter, about the journalist Tom O'Neill's mind-bending book, "Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties," and the many ways it discredits Vincent Bugliosi's 1974...
www.sott.net
Figured I should give it a go and watch it, and in doing so, it provided the visual landscape of the times; photos of the people, video of same, the locations (the crime scene's, streets, court, ranches et cetera). The film seemed a back and forth narrative of O'Neill's understanding, and non-understanding, and the buckets of contradictions, and one of the prosecutor's who falls in with the established narrative.
Of course, an hour and a half documentary like this can never reproduce the pages of a book like O'Neill's However, if one has read the book it can be useful, although like the book, no conclusions can and perhaps will ever be made. In one way, Manson and the girls present a bumbling group that continues to make bad choices, evil choices, with Manson the ring-leader. There is certainly the perception of the group falling apart in trying to cover up Manson's crimes, with an element of truth to it. Yet as said above, there is so much more, which comes back to O'Neill's line of force.
One thing picked up in the book that provided pause, was the short reference to 1967 when Smith (his parole officer) argued for Manson to be able to go to Mexico. Manson has some roots in Mexico, the place that initially landed himself in trouble when he was extradited back to the U.S. and went to Federal prison. When Smith later made the suggestion to travel back, the Parole Board rejected his travel, which later Smith said he was just kidding, trying to show Manson the reality of what they would say, and then there was the suggestion of going to Florida instead. Neither happened, or that is what one is lead to believe, with Atkin's later saying at one point that she spent 5 months that year in Mexico. Whatever the case, Smith lost track of Manson for 5 months (or so he claimed) and O'Neill seems to thinks is was possible he went to Mexico. Nothing else was said.
If it is true that Manson and some of the girls went to Mexico (coming back in late 1967 or early 1968), is it possible that this is where Manson's mind was 'tuned,' if it was done? By 1968 things rapidly became crazy, and O'Neill had said enough times, how was Manson able to assert such control on his followers? It might be speculated, especially as alluded to regarding the mind control interests of the times, that Manson was tuned in some way and also given methods to do the same to others (LSD - which became a staple, mixed with repetitive hypnotic words to help accomplish). So, if even plausible, Manson comes back in 1968 and works his new found controlling essence on his group, while the puppet masters just sit back and watch to see what will happen, to even interfere in cases (plenty of them) where the group is arrested here and there, and then set back on course.
Whatever happened, LSD was very important to open the mind to suggestibility, to implant. So, LSD may have been the key, but there would need to be a detailed method to work in a designed operating program (West's fingerprints). Again, if it was something like this, the speed/amphetamines might have been the final trigger that opened up the program directive to unleash their murderous rampages in 1969.
One will never know.
