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Brian LeCloux

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  1. In this scholarly article by Professor David R. Wrone (UW-Stevens Point), the story of the confrontation between Belin and the dean of the assassination critics, Harold Weisberg is told, and Wrone recounts Sylvia Meagher's research indicating that Belin, according to Dr. Wrone, suborned perjury for the Warren Commission with witness Charles Givens. http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/the_critics/wrone/Belin.html
  2. See Weisberg's book, Oswald in New Orleans, particularly pp. 296-7. He eventually interviewed Castorr on May 5, 1967. Castorr wondered why the FBI and Commission had not interviewed him, but Weisberg said he denied knowing any of the people in the False Oswald story. Interestingly, Weisberg asserted that the political Cuban employed at Parkland Hospital may have planted CE 399, and left the job after the assassination, unidentified. www.maryferrell.org has the documents Weisberg used for his book, particularly the May 5, 1964 letter from SS Director Rowley to J. Lee Rankin with the Castorr and political Cuban at Parkland references.
  3. Mr. Talbot, Would you care to comment on Professor David R. Wrone's favorable review of your book?
  4. One of the top historians on the JFK case, David R. Wrone, Emeritus Professor of History, UW-Stevens Point, has just weighed in on David Talbot's new book: Great book reveals Kennedys' courage David R. Wrone Special to The Capital Times May 18, 2007 Based on wide-ranging interviews with associates of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, gives us a hitherto hidden picture of the years 1960-1968. His just-released book, "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," is a great work and beautifully written. Talbot reveals that even as JFK took office, he confronted military and CIA forces that moved to control policies and thrust America into nuclear war. This continued throughout his 1,000 days as he, with his brother, fought to block the right wing, CIA and military's drive for a nuclear war and control of national policies. According to Talbot, the military had a covert plan to use the Bay of Pigs invasion to pull JFK into a major war, which he courageously blocked by standing up to the generals and CIA. In Laos and later in Berlin, the military sought nuclear war, but he resisted. JFK learned the military had designs for a sneak attack on Russia and China with nuclear weapons, which he also scuttled. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, according to Talbot, JFK initially stood with only his brother Robert against the clamor of the Joint Chiefs, who wanted an invasion. Unbeknownst to the United States, the Soviet troops had scores of nuclear missiles on the island that, had Kennedy invaded, would have been fired at America and launched the world into a nuclear holocaust. Talbot says that the generals and admirals counted JFK's peaceful solution as the worst defeat in the nation's history and hated him with unbridled passion and that the CIA and FBI constantly surveilled him. In the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Attorney General Robert Kennedy confronted a racist, reactionary institution. Talbot tells how Robert Kennedy had to assemble his own team of agents from other departments' scraps to carry out his and the president's policies. His life was constantly threatened by criminal elements, requiring him at times to bring in trusted personal friends from the marshal's service to guard him and his family. One great unsung accomplishment, Talbot says, was to cripple organized crime's movement to take over government functions, because they had become a growing force threatening the nation itself. By November 1963, as JFK moved to disengage from Vietnam, abate Cuban tensions, restructure the CIA and establish detente, bullets cut him down. Not for a minute, Talbot stresses, did Robert Kennedy believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed his brother; within hours, he came to believe reactionary American forces assassinated him. If Oswald was involved at all, it was as a minor player. Talbot tells how immediately after the funeral Robert Kennedy dispatched a family friend to the Kremlin to inform the Soviets not to believe the story of what happened circulating in federal circles. He informed his closest friends that it would require the power of the presidency to find the culprits, and his search for the murderers never ceased. He went to surprising lengths to seek out information, including a secret meeting with Teamster Jimmy Hoffa. In a frightening point, Talbot convincingly shows how intelligence agencies have, since the death of the Kennedy brothers, insidiously fed untrue information about them to Congress and to happy conduit reporters like Seymour Hersh. What is so striking in this remarkable volume is what is not there. At the national level, Robert Kennedy stood almost alone in his fight to find his brother's killers, while the prominent academicians, the intellectuals, JFK's aides, and the Democratic Party of the nation (and Wisconsin) either stood to the side or clasped the whitewash of the Warren Report. It was left to the remnants of the old progressives and the youth of the '60s, to the housewives and bartenders, to struggle to show that two or more riflemen shot JFK -- and that neither of them was Oswald. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years By David Talbot; Free Press, 478 pages, $28. David R. Wrone, a retired history professor from UW-Stevens Point, has studied, published, lectured and debated about the JFK assassination for the past 40 years. http://www.madison.com/tct/books/135016
  5. Regarding Bugliosi quoting "Harold Weisberg, the author of eight conspiracy-themed books, admitting that after 35 years of research, 'much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody, I have not found a shred of evidence to support it.'": I interviewed Mr. Weisberg on March 10, 1986 and for one of my questions I asked him to give a 1986 perspective on Oswald's intelligence connections. His answer: "That would be complicated. Ah, I think the only way you can address that is to say that, ah, alot of fingers point to the possibility. It was, in fact, never investigated." He then referred me to page 62 of his book Whitewash IV: JFK Assassination Transcript. Allen Dulles is talking to J. Lee Rankin during the January 27, 1964 Warren Commission executive session meeting and he tells Rankin that if someone was asking if an individual was in the CIA he [Dulles] would lie unless the President asked him. If an employee of the CIA was running an agent and was asked about it, Dulles replied, "He ought not to tell it under oath." Never investigated, Mr. Bugliosi. How then, could Weisberg find this in government files----his essential mode of research---if it was never investigated?
  6. I didn't get very far into the introduction before I started finding errors in this book. Be confident folks, this guy doesn't have much. (I would love to see David Wrone or Gerald McKnight debate Bugliosi.) 1. He says Oswald shot Tippit 45 minutes after he shot Kennedy. Fact: T.F. Bowley called in the shooting of Tippit. He looked at his watch it said 1:10 p.m. His affadavit is in Hearings volume 24, page 202 and is reprinted in Weisberg's Post Mortem, page 493. No wonder the Commission never called him as a witness. Fact: Time reconstructions by David Belin showed that LHO couldn't even get to the scene until 1:20. 2. Bugliosi says that those who saw Oswald go to work that morning said he was carrying a large bag. A "large bag"? How do people get this stuff published? Fact: Randle and Frazier described a package that was no more than 28 inches, but the disassemlbed M-C was 36 inches. I don't care how large the bag is, it doesn't fit. Neat little writing trick it is to use the phrase "large bag." Fact: Foreman Dougherty swore that Oswald entered the TSBD empty handed that morning. Really. No kidding. You can look it up. Volume 6 of the Hearings, p. 376-377. David Wrone cites this in his book The Zapruder Film, but it has noted by other critics as well (particularly Weisberg). As far as what kind of soda Oswald preferred who cares?! Dougherty was on the fifth floor by the stairwell and Styles and Adams were on the fourth floor IN the stairwell. They all stated that no one came down from the sixth floor. See David Wrones's The Zapruder Film for details, page 170. I like how he criticizes Howard Roffman. I can't wait to read how he challenges Roffman's superb alibi reconstruction in Presumed Guilty. Roffman takes every piece of official evidence and shows how Oswald cannot have been the sixth floor shooter. Especially revealing is how Baker and Truly described how they first encountered Oswald on the second floor. The only way they could have seen him in the vestible leading to the lunchroom with that door already closed is if Oswald was coming up from the first floor as he said, and not down from the third (the vestible door would still have been open). Read this chapter from Roffman's book. This book is so easy to knock down. Someone will have to set up a website with all the of the factual errors.
  7. But I doubt Willis' views are based on a careful study of the official evidence. (Don't forget: the best evidence against the official Warren Commision theory is their own documentary record and files.) And, note that he says "the guy". The guy? There were shots from more than one direction and that alone, equals two shooters. Not one. When the public sees a celebrity talk off the cuff about such a complex historical event, it is easy to then couple our research based understanding with the Bruce Willises of the world and therefore dismiss the topic.
  8. From The Assassinations, edited by DiEugenio and Pease (pp. 235-37): According to Sam Newman, Quiroga was Sergio Archacha Smith's right hand man and when he went to visit LHO, DiEugenio asserts he was delivering FPCC leaflets Oswald passed out. When Garrison gave Q a polygraph, DiEugenio found three answers significant: 1. When Q said he didn't know LHO's FPCC activities were a cover, he was deceptive. 2. When he said he didn't know if Arcacha Smith knew Oswald, he was deceptive. 3. When he was asked if he saw the guns used on 11/22/63 and said no, he was deceptive. And when Richard Case Nagell told a Garrison interviewer he had a tape with four people discussing the assasination, mostly in Spanish, he said one of them was "Arcacha" and another he identified as "Q". Where is that tape?
  9. yeah, it seems from Weisberg's analysis of Phil Willis that the first shot was around or before Z 190, as I recall reading. So, this Holland theory is pretty off the mark. Why does The Nation, a magazine usually critical of official government theories, let him write for them? It seems like the last time they had a decent analysis in their pages was Fred J. Cook's attack on the Warren Report in the late 1960s.
  10. It's hard to limit this list to three. But here are several pieces of evidence from the government: 1. Commission Counsel Melvin Eisenberg's 22 April 1964 memo recording the views of Warren Commission consultant, Dr. Joseph Dolce on the wounds of John Connally. Dolce, chairman of the U.S. Army Wounds Ballistic Board, was to be called in when any VIP was shot. The Commission wanted Dolce to tell them how CE 399 emerged undamaged after passing through JFK and JBC. But Dolce concluded that two bullets hit Connally. Harold Weisberg was the primary critic to highlight the significance of Dolce's expertise and the opinion he gave the WC staff. From Eisenberg's memo: "In a discussion after the conference Drs. Light and Dolce expressed themselves as being very strongly of the opinion that Connally had been hit by two different bullets,..." Later, Dolce told interviewer Chip Selby, he was given Oswald's M-C and 6.5 mm ammo and tested the theory. In every instance the bullets were "markedly deformed." Naturally, Dolce wasn't called to testify in front of the Warren Commission. 2. The many dust like fragments in the x rays of JFK's skull cannot be from jacketed bullets such as alleged to have been used by LHO. 3. The Marines report of Oswald's shooting capability, signed by Lt. Col. A. G. Folsum, Jr. by the direction of the Marine Commandant which indicated that as of May 6, 1959, Oswald's 191 score on the test indicated that he was "a rather poor 'shot'." Bonus: 4. FBI report filed by Richard E. Harrison on 26 Nov. 1963, of an interview with Carolyn Arnold together with the follow up done by Agents Robertson and Trettis on March 18, 1964. The gist: Arnold saw Oswald on the first floor of the TSBD "standing in the hallway between the front door and the double doors leading to the warehouse" as she was leaving the building at 12:25 p.m. Another words, just before the shooting, LHO wasn't up on the sixth floor setting up his assassin's lair. Rather he was milling about five floors below at a time by the way AFTER the scheduled appearance of the motorcade through the area.
  11. One of my "tests" for the credibility of this book will be to open up the index and look for the name of Dr. Joseph Dolce. He was the wounds ballistics expert who took Oswald's rifle and 100 rounds of ammo and showed that the single bullet theory was false. He pointed this out to Specter as the absurd Single Bullet Theory was being created. Naturally, since he destroyed their cockamamie idea he wasn't called to testify in front of the Warren Commission since he would have blown apart the scheme. Later he tried to tell this to the House Select Commission but they ignored him. His views were recorded for the superb documentary Reasonable Doubt and he pointed out there that even at low velocity the bullets he tested were severely deformed. As he pointed out SBT is not credible and he proved it with experiments. So this is a government official often ignored by many writers on this case. If Bugliosi doesn't deal seriously with Dolce and the WC memorandum from April 64 recording his views, I need not read further. And that would be disappointing. Bugliosi seems to have some decent work trying to break open the RFK cover up in the civil trial with that strange man of the cloth hanging around with Sirhan Sirhan prior to the shooting of Kennedy.
  12. Well, Harold Weisberg, the dean of the assassination critics, was assisting Garrison, he testified in front of the Grand Jury (you can read his testimony on the net), and Garrison wrote the intro to Weisberg's Oswald in New Orleans, but he broke with Garrison when he saw that he had no case against Clay Shaw. He praised his assistants, particularly Al Oser for cross examining Dr. Finck and bringing out the control the military exercised over JFK's autopsy. (Never Again, 1995, p. 322) But historian David R. Wrone, in commenting on his book, On The Trail of The Assassins, has been severely critical of Garrison's effort because of his "penchant for bizarre plots involving rogue CIA, errant military officers, and right wingers..." (The Zapruder Film, 2003, p. 205) Commenting on the movie JFK some 14 years ago for Wisconsin Public Radio, Professor Wrone asserted that Garrison ought to have been disbarred for his actions during those several years of investigation and trial of Clay Shaw. Both of these experts were concerned that in the public mind there was confusion sown because of all the theories and controversies. The public never attained a good grasp of the fact that official evidence disproves the official report. The mainstream media went with the sensationalism and framed the challenge to the official story on those terms. When some of the more bogus assertions were easily knocked down by more official investigations, it served to discredit the effort as a whole. Further, the not guilty verdict in the Shaw case served to set back momentum and discourage some key prominent critics from continuing with the investigation, Wrone asserts in his book analyzing the Zapruder film.
  13. I would just add to what J. Raymond Carroll said in reference to the first generation of critics' opinion of Garrison's methods. Two assessments of Garrison from the period following the release of Oliver Stone's JFK are instructive. Assassination historian Dr. David R. Wrone asserted that Garrison ought to have been disbarred because of his methods. Harold Weisberg commented that Garrison couldn't find a pubic hair in a whorehouse.
  14. What these critics failed to recognize was that there wasn't going to be a real investigation by the time of this conference. Harold Weisberg had told the first director, Richard Sprague that if he had actually tried to investigate the case---as he did with Robert K. Tanenbaum assisting---he'd be "cut off at the knees", which of course, he was by the corporate mainstream media, Congress and the CIA. That's why Tanenbaum wouldn't carry on after Sprague was terminated. There wasn't going to be a real murder investigation and there never has been an official one in all these years. And that's maybe why some of the "A Team" of critics: Weisberg, David R. Wrone, Howard Roffman, etc. wouldn't have anything to do with this committee and this meeting.
  15. Yeah, I was glad to see that Wrone took on Hersh when this review came out. To his credit, Hersh has said recently on Air America that he doesn't always get it right. This was in relation to his recent story that the U.S. has secret teams in Iran now. Many on the left go overboard, I think, in praising Hersh too much for his investigative reporting. He doesn't seem to be the kind of reporter who painstaking pores over thousands of pages of documents like an I.F. Stone would do. My sense, and I may be wrong, is that some of his positioning on some stories is driven by "leakers" and they may or may not be accurate in what they are giving Hersh. I thought Hersh did a fine job in exposing the criminality of the Kissinger and Nixon gang, but his treatment of JFK lacked a solid grounding in the evidentiary base regarding the assassination and Oswald. Unfortunately, the media publicity system, not being democratic, but rather corporate, doesn't give prominence to the scholarly treatment of this subject done by the fine historian David Wrone. Instead, the sensationalistic treatment by a Hersh gets more play. We should oppose this.
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