The Death of Ronni Moffitt Options

[John Simkin]

On 18th September, 1976, Orlando Letelier, who served as foreign minister under Salvador Allende, was traveling to work at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington when a bomb was ignited under his car. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a 25 year old American involved in the campaign to bring democracy to Chile, both died of their injuries.

The director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, was quickly told that DINA and several of his contract agents were involved in the assassination. However, he leaked a story to members of Operation Mockingbird that attempted to cover-up the role that the CIA and DINA had played in the killings. Jeremiah O'Leary in the Washington Star (8th October, 1976) wrote: "The right-wing Chilean junta had nothing to gain and everything to lose by the assassination of a peaceful and popular socialist leader." Newsweek added: "The CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police was not involved." (11th October).

William F. Buckley also took part in this disinformation campaign and on 25th October wrote: "U.S. investigators think it unlikely that Chile would risk with an action of this kind the respect it has won with great difficulty during the past year in many Western countries, which before were hostile to its policies." According to Donald Freed Buckley had been providing disinformation for the General Augusto Pinochet government since October 1974. He also unearthed information that William Buckley's brother, James Buckley, met with Michael Townley and Guillermo Novo Sampol in New York City just a week before Orlando Letelier was assassinated.

The FBI eventually became convinced that Michael Townley was organized the assassination of Letelier. In 1978 Chile agreed to extradite him to the United States. Townley, a CIA contract agent, confessed he had hired five anti-Castro Cubans exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. Guillermo Novo Sampol, Ignacio Novo Sampol, Virgilio Paz Romero, Dionisio Suárez, and Alvin Ross Díaz are indicted for the crime.

Townley agreed to provide evidence against these men in exchange for a deal that involved him pleading guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to commit murder and being given a ten-year sentence.

On the 9th January, 1979, the trial of Guillermo Novo Sampol, Ignacio Novo Sampol and Alvin Ross Díaz began in Washington. General Augusto Pinochet refused to allow Virgilio Paz Romero and Dionisio Suárez, two DINA officers, to be extradited. All three were found guilty of murder. Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross were sentenced to life imprisonment. Ignacio Novo received eighty years. Soon after the trial Michael Townley was freed under the Witness Protection Program.

Just another example of the CIA's support of international terrorism.

http://www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/20/20008.html

[John Simkin]

William Turner , Rearview Mirror, 2001 (pages 221-22)

In 1968, as the CIA scaled back its Cuba campaign, Orlando Bosch's MIRR morphed into Cuban Power, a terrorist faction that, like the religious lunatic on the train in "On the Twentieth Century", stuck trademark red, white and blue stickers at the scene of the crime. On May 31, a Japanese freighter docked at Tampa and a British merchantman under way off Key West were racked by explosions. The following day, in Miami, a man calling himself Ernesto staged a press conference condemning countries doing business with Cuba and warned that "other ships are going to explode." Although Ernesto wore a sack over his head in the manner of a Mafia defector before a Senate hearing, he was easily identified as Bosch. That summer Cuban Power terrorism spread to Los Angeles, where an Air France office, the Mexico Tourist Department and the British consulate were bombed, and Manhattan, where the diplomatic and tourist agencies of six countries with normal relations with Cuba were hit, and a time bomb was found in the Air France facility in Rockefeller Center. For good measure, two bars frequented by pro-Castro Cubans were bombed, and the audience attending a play, "The Cuban Thing", at the Henry Miller Theater off Times Square were driven crying into the street by tear gas devices. But on September 16, 1968, Bosch was caught red-handed by FBI agents tipped off by an informant inside Cuban Power as he fired on the Polish motor ship Polancia at dock in Miami. Convicted of terrorism, he was incarcerated at the Marion Federal Penitentiary, where he played gin rummy with Rolando Masferrer, locked up for violating the Neutrality Act.

When Bosch was released from prison in the fall of 1972 through the intercession of Florida politicians eyeing the exile-bloc vote, Republican Governor Claude Kirk rhapsodized, "When I think of free men seeking a homeland, I must necessarily think of Dr. Bosch." As it turned out, the mad bomber was free to resume his old ways, this time promising "an internationalization of the war." By early 1975 he was in Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet, whose junta had bloodily overthrown Allende, put him up in a government guest house while he conferred with Pinochet's secret police, the brutal DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), which was responsible for hundreds of desaparecidos during the dictatorship. "Bosch had a book on the life of Yasir Arafat with him," reported a Miami newsman who interviewed him there, "and an impressive stack of cash on the table." On September 21, 1976, Allende's ambassador, Orlando Letelier, an effective opponent of the Pinochet regime, was driving along Washington's Embassy Row when a radio-triggered bomb under his car exploded, killing him and a companion.

As CIA director, George Bush was in the loop on this one: within a week the Agency knew that DINA and several CIA-connected Cubans were responsible. But it leaked an item to Newsweek reading, "The CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police was not involved." The lie was put to that when DINA agent Michael V. Townley was arrested and convicted. Townley implicated two journeymen in Bosch's network, Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross Diaz, who were tried and convicted, then acquitted at a retrial (when arrested in Miami, the pair was in possession of a pound of cocaine, a terrorist currency). And in 1993, after democracy returned to Chile, Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA at the time, was convicted of masterminding the Letelier murder. In a recent clemency petition, Contreras deposed that Pinochet approved and supervised all major DINA operations.

[Alan Espy]

Kind of interesting coincidence that the CIA inspired coup of Allende occurred on 9/11/73. Our tax dollars at work helping instrument the violent overthrow of a democratically elected leader of a foreign nation ( because he was a Marxist).

This post has been edited by Alan Espy: Sep 11 2006, 10:37 PM

[John Simkin]

Kind of interesting coincidence that the CIA inspired coup of Allende occurred on 9/11/73. Our tax dollars at work helping instrument the violent overthrow of a democratically elected leader of a foreign nation (because he was a Marxist).

Pinochet is still alive and has still to be brought to trial. One of the reasons was that he passed a law before leaving office in 1990 that gave him immunity from prosecution for human rights abuses in Chile.

As well as the killings, thousands were tortured during his period of power. This includes the current president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, and her mother, Angela Jeria.

The Supreme Court of Chile has now stripped Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. However, he is now 90 years old and time is running out. Let he lives long enough to tell the world how he got help from the CIA to create his dictatorship. Hopefully it will also draw attention to the way the US legal system has protected CIA contract agents from the law. For example, Michael Townley confessed to being the person who planted the bomb that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. Whereas his Cuban friends were sent to prison for life, Townley was allowed to go free.

[Dawn Meredith]

[quote name='John Simkin' date='Sep 12 2006, 09:05 AM' post='74659']

Kind of interesting coincidence that the CIA inspired coup of Allende occurred on 9/11/73. Our tax dollars at work helping instrument the violent overthrow of a democratically elected leader of a foreign nation (because he was a Marxist).

It's the norm actually. The US terrorists enjoy repeat acts of terrorism on significant anniversaries.

Dawn

Pinochet will never talk, with or without immunity. He made a deal with the devil. The CIA.

For those anti- CTists on this forum who have never seen the film "Missing" rent it. I know it's just a movie you say, but a very eye opening film of what this government did in Chile. Jack Lemon's character is awesome; his transformation is brilliant.

[James Richards]

The FBI eventually became convinced that Michael Townley was organized the assassination of Letelier. In 1978 Chile agreed to extradite him to the United States. Townley, a CIA contract agent, confessed he had hired five anti-Castro Cubans exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. Guillermo Novo Sampol, Ignacio Novo Sampol, Virgilio Paz Romero, Dionisio Suárez, and Alvin Ross Díaz are indicted for the crime. (John Simkin)

It might be worth noting here that in an Agency contact report on Grayston Lynch, he said that the 'street word' from the Cubans is that the people who killed Letelier were the same people who killed John Roselli. He also said that the front money for both hits had emanated from Santo Traficante.

James

[Peter Lemkin]

This below is from 21 Sept 2006 www.democracynow.org
I'd just add that I had the privilege to meet Francisco Letelier several years ago in CA. This all ties in to many of the criminal and terrorist activities [Op Condor and MANY others] the USA was [and still is] operating. We as a nation say we are against terrorism...but we have practiced it many times as foreign policy and are not only the world superpower, but the world's superhypocracy! Here are two small examples!:
--------------
Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington DC. Letelier was a high-ranking government official in Chile under President Salvador Allende. Following the 1973 US-backed coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet, Letelier was imprisoned and tortured. After his release, he moved to the United States where we worked for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
On September 21st, 1976, Letelier was killed, along with his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, when a bomb planted under his car exploded as they rode into work. The assassination was eventually traced back to Pinochet's regime which was in the midst of a US-backed campaign against Chilean activists.

On this thirtieth anniversary of his killing, we speak with Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier as well as Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at The National Security Archive.

Francisco Letelier, his father, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated with U.S. activist Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington DC's Embassy Row.
Additional information at: Freethefive.org
Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at The National Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center in Washington. He is the author of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability."

JUAN GONZALEZ: Chilean President Michelle Bachelet spoke about Letelier’s killing in her speech to the General Assembly. When President Chavez took the stage not long after her, he also spoke about Letelier.

PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago, the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier. And I would just add one thing: those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event, where an American citizen also died, were Americans themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists. And we must recall in this room that in just a few days, there will be another anniversary. 30 years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana Aviacion airliner.

And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then-government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country protected by the government. And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to. And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence, and we are one of the peoples who are fighting for peace. Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here.

AMY GOODMAN: President Chavez, speaking at the United Nations before the General Assembly. Peter Kornbluh joins us now in our firehouse studio, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

PETER KORNBLUH: It’s great to be here in the studio with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. We usually either talk to you on the phone or have you in Washington.

PETER KORNBLUH: That is true.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about what Chavez referred to. He talked about Luis Carriles --

PETER KORNBLUH: Luis Posada Carriles.

AMY GOODMAN: -- and he talked about Orlando Letelier. Can you talk about the connection?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, there’s a loose connection. Anti-Castro Cubans that were part of an umbrella terrorist group, according to the FBI, were involved working with the Chilean secret police to assassinate the former foreign minister and former ambassador to Washington, Orlando Letelier, and his American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, 30 years ago this morning. And those same anti-Castro Cubans were part of a group that planned a series of terrorist attacks across Latin America in the summer of 1976, culminating in the infamous bombing of the Cubana Flight 455 on October 6. And that's where largely the connection lies. Posada himself was a mastermind of this attack, according to -- the plane attack, according to declassified documents.

AMY GOODMAN: You say “infamous,” but I think in this country most people don't even know what you're talking about. Explain exactly what happened.

PETER KORNBLUH: The Letelier case?

AMY GOODMAN: No, the Cubana bombing. And then we’ll go – and also after break, I’ll let people know that we’re going to be joined by Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier.

PETER KORNBLUH: It is absolutely true that people have forgotten that the most extraordinary act of international terrorism in the western hemisphere, at the time of 1976, was a civilian airliner blown up in midair off the coast of Barbados by bombs planted by anti-Castro Cuban terrorists. This has been largely forgotten, but 73 innocent people were killed, many of them young people -- the Cuban Olympic fencing team, six teenaged Guyanese students who were off to Cuba to study medicine on scholarships. Just a horrific act of international terrorism that in the end, in some ways, has gone fully uninvestigated and without really due process in this country.

One of the masterminds lives freely in Miami, Orlando Bosch. He has all but admitted that he planned this bombing of this plane. And the other one, Luis Posada Carriles, is currently in a detention center in El Paso, but could actually be released this week, because the Bush administration has refused to certify him as the terrorist that he is.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And of course, Venezuela has a direct connection to that bombing.

PETER KORNBLUH: Yes, because it was planned in Venezuela. Luis Posada Carriles was a former CIA kind of transfer to the Venezuelan secret police, and he was working out of Caracas with a group of other anti-Castro Cubans who were also part of the Venezuelan secret police planning attacks against Cuba in the 1970s. So Venezuela -- he was imprisoned in Venezuela. He escaped in 1985, went to work for Oliver North in Central America in the Contra War and has been in a detention center for a number of months now, but could be freed, because the Bush administration refuses to release the evidence and certify his terrorist past.

AMY GOODMAN: And he would be allowed to walk in the United States?

PETER KORNBLUH: He would join Orlando Bosch freely in Miami. And we’d be faced -- the country that purportedly is the leader in the fight against international terrorism would have the two -- would be essentially harboring two people who our own intelligence records say are the principal suspects in the bombing of this plane on October 6, 1976.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, we're going to go to break. And when we come back, we ask you to stay with us, and we'll be joined by Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier. 30 years ago today, his father, the Chilean diplomat, was killed in the streets of Washington, D.C., along with the American researcher, Ronni Moffitt. We’ll talk about it. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh is our guest here in our New York studio, author of The Pinochet File. We're also joined in Washington, D.C. by Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier. Orlando Letelier was assassinated with U.S. activist and researcher, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing September 21, 1976 in Washington, D.C.'s Embassy Row. Letelier was Chile's foreign ambassador in Salvador Allende's government. Salvador Allende, who died in the palace September 11, 1973, as the Pinochet forces rose to power. We welcome you, as well, Francisco Letelier, to this broadcast.

FRANCISCO LETELIER: Thanks, Amy. It's great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this day in 1976? Where were you?

FRANCISCO LETELIER: I had gone that morning to school. I was 17 years old. I was in high school in Bethesda, Maryland. And into my first period class, somebody ran to the classroom I was in, and I was asked to come down to the office, down in the high school office, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. I found my brother, Juan Pablo, and my Aunt Cecilia. My aunt told us that there had been an accident, and she had been instructed to take us to George Washington Hospital, close by here to the studio we're in.

As we drove downtown from Bethesda, we encountered a lot of traffic and a traffic jam as we approached the section of Massachusetts Avenue that's known as Embassy Row. We kind of detoured, but in the distance I was able to see that at Sheridan Circle there had been an accident. There were emergency vehicles, and there were firemen hosing down the street.

When we arrived at the hospital, my mother was there to greet us. And it was then that we understood that the accident had been a bombing that had taken my father's life, and what I had seen in Sheridan Circle were the police and the firemen cleaning up the human and automobile wreckage from the bomb blast that took the life of my father, as well as a heroic colleague of my father, a young American woman, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Can you tell us a little bit about your father, his involvement in the Chilean democracy movement, the man that you knew, because there’s been very little about -- certainly for American viewers -- about who was this diplomat who was assassinated on the streets of Washington, D.C.?

FRANCISCO LETELIER: Yeah. My father is remembered for the events that occurred in the last years of his life before he was killed. However, my father was not a politician, and he became a diplomat for the Allende government in the last years of his life. My father actually worked almost across the street from here for ten years, from 1960 to 1970, at the Inter-American Development Bank.

We left Chile shortly after I was born in 1959, the root cause being that my father had supported Salvador Allende’s first bid for the presidency in 1958. In that election in Chile, a conservative candidate, Alessandri, won the election. My father was an expert in copper, and he worked for the National Copper Corporation. When Alessandri came into power, my father was informed that he had lost his job and he would not find work in Chile. So we started our exile. A couple of months after I was born, we moved to Venezuela, where the idea of the Inter-American Development Bank, an international money lending organization that would help in the supposed development of Latin America, was born, with Felipe Herrera, a Chilean economist, and we transferred here to Washington, D.C., which is one of my hometowns where I grew up.

My father, as we grew up with him, was known as an incredibly hard-working and gregarious person. In an interview I read recently, where he was interviewed by a Chilean magazine, Paloma, in 1973, during the brief time that we had returned to Chile and he served as the minister of foreign relations and the minister of defense in the weeks before the coup, he was asked by a journalist, ‘What would you have done if your friend, Salvador Allende, had not won the last election or if your life had turned out differently?” And my father said, “I think I would have been a singer.” My father had a beautiful voice. I grew up in a home in which love -- the love of art and the love of music was apparent and present in all moments. My greatest memories of my father are when him and my mother would play the guitar together and sing together in our home at the social gatherings we had. He had an enormous library. He loved books. He loved art. He loved music.

And most of all, in his work here in Washington for the Inter-American Development Bank, he had a very clear vision of a united Americas. He made no differentiation between north and south. He really had a Bolivarian pan-American vision of these continents. And he was extremely, extremely obsessed and interested in issues of development and how to channel resources to the places in our world, in our nation of the Americas, how to channel those resources to the places that needed them the most and to bring social justice to the corners where it didn't exist.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Peter Kornbluh, you have been doggedly pursuing the documentary evidence of who was involved and how this assassination occurred. Could you talk about that, what you’ve uncovered?

PETER KORNBLUH: Let me just say, listening to Francisco Letelier talk about Orlando, that Orlando Letelier was just an extraordinary human being and has been a tremendous loss to all of us and to the community that we're all a part of in the international community, not having him here for the last 30 years, as well as our loss of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, his colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, who was a 25-year-old woman from New Jersey and just had a full life of progressive work in front of her. And we truly miss them.

But, you know, we have been working for years to get the declassified record on the Letelier assassination out into the hands of the family, the Letelier family, into the hands of Ronni's parents, and into the public domain, really for one reason: because the ultimate person responsible has not been brought to justice, and that is Augusto Pinochet himself. It is clear that the Chilean secret police did not act without his authorization. And certainly they did not come to the streets of the capital city of the United States of America to commit an act of state-sponsored terrorism without the authorization of Augusto Pinochet. But he was not prosecuted by the Justice Department in the late 1970s, when the other Chilean secret police officials were indicted.

And six years ago, the Clinton administration, in part due to pressure from the Letelier and Moffitt families, did reopen the investigation into his role. There was a series of documents we asked the Clinton administration to declassify, identifying Pinochet's role in the crime and particularly in the cover-up of the crime. And those documents were supposed to be declassified, but they were all diverted into a Justice Department investigation that was going on in the spring of 2000. The FBI was sent to Chile, spent a month in Chile, interviewed 42 people, brought back 42 depositions. There was a report written by the FBI's international crime division, recommending that Augusto Pinochet be indicted as the mastermind intellectual author of this heinous act of international terrorism.

And instead of his being indicted, the Bush administration just basically sat on this report and continues to sit on this report and, even worse, all of the documents that were withheld as evidence for this investigation. Six years have gone by. We either need an indictment in court of Augusto Pinochet or we need the indictment of history that these secret documents would give us if they were now declassified. And that's what we're pushing for today. We really cannot stop in this case until all the historical record has been released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francisco Letelier, what are you calling for now? What would it mean to you?

FRANCISCO LETELIER: The declassification of the documents is essential. It's essential not only for, as Peter says, historical purposes and the case here in the United States, but it's also very important for legal efforts occurring now in Santiago. An enormous issue that's raised in this case is the idea of impunity, impunity by people who are entrenched in power and who hide behind the scenes.

Pinochet and the other individuals that worked to murder my father had already joined in to Operation Condor, which was occurring throughout Latin America and the United States. My father's murder, Ronni's murder, was part of Operation Condor. Hopefully the investigation of Pinochet, others that knew about the crime, and the declassified documents will shed further light on Operation Condor, a plan to silence opponents, liquidate opponents, wherever they may be, without respect to national boundaries, working with the intelligence agencies of not only Latin America, but other groups within the United States.

And it's these other people that were involved in the planning and execution of my father's murder, as you spoke about earlier -- Posada Carriles, being the godfather of many of the men that were involved in my father's murder. As you know, Guillermo Novo, one of the men that was imprisoned with Posada Carriles in Panama, was released with Posada Carriles. Guillermo Novo actually was flown on a United States plane and brought back to Miami, where he received a hero's welcome.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk for one moment about that, Peter Kornbluh. The timing of that, coming home to Miami, coming out of Panama, and the Bush administration.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Luis Posada Carriles and three other anti-Castro Cubans were caught in Panama with 35 pounds of C-4 explosive. They apparently had planned to blow up an auditorium that Fidel Castro was going to be speaking in that would have killed many, many innocent people. And they were finally prosecuted and sentenced to eight years for -- not for an assassination attempt, but for a threat to public security. After four years, they were actually pardoned by the outgoing Panamanian president, a conservative. There is some allegation that wealthy Cubans in Miami paid off the president and his people to issue this pardon. Posada became a fugitive. Then Guillermo Novo and two others flew back to Miami. There was a group of anti-Castro Cubans waiting at the airport applauding him. Guillermo Novo was intricately involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. He actually served two years in prison for perjury in that case.

AMY GOODMAN: And wasn't this the point right before the Republican Convention of 2000, and President Bush -- then not president -- went down to Miami?

PETER KORNBLUH: President Bush was present, because this was in 2004 --

AMY GOODMAN: 2004, before the second election.

PETER KORNBLUH: -- that they came back. But certainly the Bush administration had the opportunity to treat them as terrorists. They had been convicted in Panama of an attempted assassination using C-4 explosives. And instead they were welcomed back to the United States.

[Peter Lemkin]

This below is from 21 Sept 2006 www.democracynow.org
I'd just add that I had the privilege to meet Francisco Letelier several years ago in CA. This all ties in to many of the criminal and terrorist activities [Op Condor and MANY others] the USA was [and still is] operating. We as a nation say we are against terrorism...but we have practiced it many times as foreign policy and are not only the world superpower, but the world's superhypocracy! Here are two small examples!:
--------------
Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington DC. Letelier was a high-ranking government official in Chile under President Salvador Allende. Following the 1973 US-backed coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet, Letelier was imprisoned and tortured. After his release, he moved to the United States where we worked for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
On September 21st, 1976, Letelier was killed, along with his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, when a bomb planted under his car exploded as they rode into work. The assassination was eventually traced back to Pinochet's regime which was in the midst of a US-backed campaign against Chilean activists.

On this thirtieth anniversary of his killing, we speak with Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier as well as Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at The National Security Archive.

Francisco Letelier, his father, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated with U.S. activist Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington DC's Embassy Row.
Additional information at: Freethefive.org
Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at The National Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center in Washington. He is the author of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability."

JUAN GONZALEZ: Chilean President Michelle Bachelet spoke about Letelier’s killing in her speech to the General Assembly. When President Chavez took the stage not long after her, he also spoke about Letelier.

PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago, the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier. And I would just add one thing: those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event, where an American citizen also died, were Americans themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists. And we must recall in this room that in just a few days, there will be another anniversary. 30 years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana Aviacion airliner.

And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then-government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country protected by the government. And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to. And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence, and we are one of the peoples who are fighting for peace. Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here.

AMY GOODMAN: President Chavez, speaking at the United Nations before the General Assembly. Peter Kornbluh joins us now in our firehouse studio, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

PETER KORNBLUH: It’s great to be here in the studio with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. We usually either talk to you on the phone or have you in Washington.

PETER KORNBLUH: That is true.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about what Chavez referred to. He talked about Luis Carriles --

PETER KORNBLUH: Luis Posada Carriles.

AMY GOODMAN: -- and he talked about Orlando Letelier. Can you talk about the connection?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, there’s a loose connection. Anti-Castro Cubans that were part of an umbrella terrorist group, according to the FBI, were involved working with the Chilean secret police to assassinate the former foreign minister and former ambassador to Washington, Orlando Letelier, and his American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, 30 years ago this morning. And those same anti-Castro Cubans were part of a group that planned a series of terrorist attacks across Latin America in the summer of 1976, culminating in the infamous bombing of the Cubana Flight 455 on October 6. And that's where largely the connection lies. Posada himself was a mastermind of this attack, according to -- the plane attack, according to declassified documents.

AMY GOODMAN: You say “infamous,” but I think in this country most people don't even know what you're talking about. Explain exactly what happened.

PETER KORNBLUH: The Letelier case?

AMY GOODMAN: No, the Cubana bombing. And then we’ll go – and also after break, I’ll let people know that we’re going to be joined by Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier.

PETER KORNBLUH: It is absolutely true that people have forgotten that the most extraordinary act of international terrorism in the western hemisphere, at the time of 1976, was a civilian airliner blown up in midair off the coast of Barbados by bombs planted by anti-Castro Cuban terrorists. This has been largely forgotten, but 73 innocent people were killed, many of them young people -- the Cuban Olympic fencing team, six teenaged Guyanese students who were off to Cuba to study medicine on scholarships. Just a horrific act of international terrorism that in the end, in some ways, has gone fully uninvestigated and without really due process in this country.

One of the masterminds lives freely in Miami, Orlando Bosch. He has all but admitted that he planned this bombing of this plane. And the other one, Luis Posada Carriles, is currently in a detention center in El Paso, but could actually be released this week, because the Bush administration has refused to certify him as the terrorist that he is.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And of course, Venezuela has a direct connection to that bombing.

PETER KORNBLUH: Yes, because it was planned in Venezuela. Luis Posada Carriles was a former CIA kind of transfer to the Venezuelan secret police, and he was working out of Caracas with a group of other anti-Castro Cubans who were also part of the Venezuelan secret police planning attacks against Cuba in the 1970s. So Venezuela -- he was imprisoned in Venezuela. He escaped in 1985, went to work for Oliver North in Central America in the Contra War and has been in a detention center for a number of months now, but could be freed, because the Bush administration refuses to release the evidence and certify his terrorist past.

AMY GOODMAN: And he would be allowed to walk in the United States?

PETER KORNBLUH: He would join Orlando Bosch freely in Miami. And we’d be faced -- the country that purportedly is the leader in the fight against international terrorism would have the two -- would be essentially harboring two people who our own intelligence records say are the principal suspects in the bombing of this plane on October 6, 1976.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, we're going to go to break. And when we come back, we ask you to stay with us, and we'll be joined by Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier. 30 years ago today, his father, the Chilean diplomat, was killed in the streets of Washington, D.C., along with the American researcher, Ronni Moffitt. We’ll talk about it. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh is our guest here in our New York studio, author of The Pinochet File. We're also joined in Washington, D.C. by Orlando Letelier's son, Francisco Letelier. Orlando Letelier was assassinated with U.S. activist and researcher, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing September 21, 1976 in Washington, D.C.'s Embassy Row. Letelier was Chile's foreign ambassador in Salvador Allende's government. Salvador Allende, who died in the palace September 11, 1973, as the Pinochet forces rose to power. We welcome you, as well, Francisco Letelier, to this broadcast.

FRANCISCO LETELIER: Thanks, Amy. It's great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this day in 1976? Where were you?

FRANCISCO LETELIER: I had gone that morning to school. I was 17 years old. I was in high school in Bethesda, Maryland. And into my first period class, somebody ran to the classroom I was in, and I was asked to come down to the office, down in the high school office, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. I found my brother, Juan Pablo, and my Aunt Cecilia. My aunt told us that there had been an accident, and she had been instructed to take us to George Washington Hospital, close by here to the studio we're in.

As we drove downtown from Bethesda, we encountered a lot of traffic and a traffic jam as we approached the section of Massachusetts Avenue that's known as Embassy Row. We kind of detoured, but in the distance I was able to see that at Sheridan Circle there had been an accident. There were emergency vehicles, and there were firemen hosing down the street.

When we arrived at the hospital, my mother was there to greet us. And it was then that we understood that the accident had been a bombing that had taken my father's life, and what I had seen in Sheridan Circle were the police and the firemen cleaning up the human and automobile wreckage from the bomb blast that took the life of my father, as well as a heroic colleague of my father, a young American woman, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Can you tell us a little bit about your father, his involvement in the Chilean democracy movement, the man that you knew, because there’s been very little about -- certainly for American viewers -- about who was this diplomat who was assassinated on the streets of Washington, D.C.?

FRANCISCO LETELIER: Yeah. My father is remembered for the events that occurred in the last years of his life before he was killed. However, my father was not a politician, and he became a diplomat for the Allende government in the last years of his life. My father actually worked almost across the street from here for ten years, from 1960 to 1970, at the Inter-American Development Bank.

We left Chile shortly after I was born in 1959, the root cause being that my father had supported Salvador Allende’s first bid for the presidency in 1958. In that election in Chile, a conservative candidate, Alessandri, won the election. My father was an expert in copper, and he worked for the National Copper Corporation. When Alessandri came into power, my father was informed that he had lost his job and he would not find work in Chile. So we started our exile. A couple of months after I was born, we moved to Venezuela, where the idea of the Inter-American Development Bank, an international money lending organization that would help in the supposed development of Latin America, was born, with Felipe Herrera, a Chilean economist, and we transferred here to Washington, D.C., which is one of my hometowns where I grew up.

My father, as we grew up with him, was known as an incredibly hard-working and gregarious person. In an interview I read recently, where he was interviewed by a Chilean magazine, Paloma, in 1973, during the brief time that we had returned to Chile and he served as the minister of foreign relations and the minister of defense in the weeks before the coup, he was asked by a journalist, ‘What would you have done if your friend, Salvador Allende, had not won the last election or if your life had turned out differently?” And my father said, “I think I would have been a singer.” My father had a beautiful voice. I grew up in a home in which love -- the love of art and the love of music was apparent and present in all moments. My greatest memories of my father are when him and my mother would play the guitar together and sing together in our home at the social gatherings we had. He had an enormous library. He loved books. He loved art. He loved music.

And most of all, in his work here in Washington for the Inter-American Development Bank, he had a very clear vision of a united Americas. He made no differentiation between north and south. He really had a Bolivarian pan-American vision of these continents. And he was extremely, extremely obsessed and interested in issues of development and how to channel resources to the places in our world, in our nation of the Americas, how to channel those resources to the places that needed them the most and to bring social justice to the corners where it didn't exist.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Peter Kornbluh, you have been doggedly pursuing the documentary evidence of who was involved and how this assassination occurred. Could you talk about that, what you’ve uncovered?

PETER KORNBLUH: Let me just say, listening to Francisco Letelier talk about Orlando, that Orlando Letelier was just an extraordinary human being and has been a tremendous loss to all of us and to the community that we're all a part of in the international community, not having him here for the last 30 years, as well as our loss of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, his colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, who was a 25-year-old woman from New Jersey and just had a full life of progressive work in front of her. And we truly miss them.

But, you know, we have been working for years to get the declassified record on the Letelier assassination out into the hands of the family, the Letelier family, into the hands of Ronni's parents, and into the public domain, really for one reason: because the ultimate person responsible has not been brought to justice, and that is Augusto Pinochet himself. It is clear that the Chilean secret police did not act without his authorization. And certainly they did not come to the streets of the capital city of the United States of America to commit an act of state-sponsored terrorism without the authorization of Augusto Pinochet. But he was not prosecuted by the Justice Department in the late 1970s, when the other Chilean secret police officials were indicted.

And six years ago, the Clinton administration, in part due to pressure from the Letelier and Moffitt families, did reopen the investigation into his role. There was a series of documents we asked the Clinton administration to declassify, identifying Pinochet's role in the crime and particularly in the cover-up of the crime. And those documents were supposed to be declassified, but they were all diverted into a Justice Department investigation that was going on in the spring of 2000. The FBI was sent to Chile, spent a month in Chile, interviewed 42 people, brought back 42 depositions. There was a report written by the FBI's international crime division, recommending that Augusto Pinochet be indicted as the mastermind intellectual author of this heinous act of international terrorism.

And instead of his being indicted, the Bush administration just basically sat on this report and continues to sit on this report and, even worse, all of the documents that were withheld as evidence for this investigation. Six years have gone by. We either need an indictment in court of Augusto Pinochet or we need the indictment of history that these secret documents would give us if they were now declassified. And that's what we're pushing for today. We really cannot stop in this case until all the historical record has been released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francisco Letelier, what are you calling for now? What would it mean to you?

FRANCISCO LETELIER: The declassification of the documents is essential. It's essential not only for, as Peter says, historical purposes and the case here in the United States, but it's also very important for legal efforts occurring now in Santiago. An enormous issue that's raised in this case is the idea of impunity, impunity by people who are entrenched in power and who hide behind the scenes.

Pinochet and the other individuals that worked to murder my father had already joined in to Operation Condor, which was occurring throughout Latin America and the United States. My father's murder, Ronni's murder, was part of Operation Condor. Hopefully the investigation of Pinochet, others that knew about the crime, and the declassified documents will shed further light on Operation Condor, a plan to silence opponents, liquidate opponents, wherever they may be, without respect to national boundaries, working with the intelligence agencies of not only Latin America, but other groups within the United States.

And it's these other people that were involved in the planning and execution of my father's murder, as you spoke about earlier -- Posada Carriles, being the godfather of many of the men that were involved in my father's murder. As you know, Guillermo Novo, one of the men that was imprisoned with Posada Carriles in Panama, was released with Posada Carriles. Guillermo Novo actually was flown on a United States plane and brought back to Miami, where he received a hero's welcome.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk for one moment about that, Peter Kornbluh. The timing of that, coming home to Miami, coming out of Panama, and the Bush administration.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Luis Posada Carriles and three other anti-Castro Cubans were caught in Panama with 35 pounds of C-4 explosive. They apparently had planned to blow up an auditorium that Fidel Castro was going to be speaking in that would have killed many, many innocent people. And they were finally prosecuted and sentenced to eight years for -- not for an assassination attempt, but for a threat to public security. After four years, they were actually pardoned by the outgoing Panamanian president, a conservative. There is some allegation that wealthy Cubans in Miami paid off the president and his people to issue this pardon. Posada became a fugitive. Then Guillermo Novo and two others flew back to Miami. There was a group of anti-Castro Cubans waiting at the airport applauding him. Guillermo Novo was intricately involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. He actually served two years in prison for perjury in that case.

AMY GOODMAN: And wasn't this the point right before the Republican Convention of 2000, and President Bush -- then not president -- went down to Miami?

PETER KORNBLUH: President Bush was present, because this was in 2004 --

AMY GOODMAN: 2004, before the second election.

PETER KORNBLUH: -- that they came back. But certainly the Bush administration had the opportunity to treat them as terrorists. They had been convicted in Panama of an attempted assassination using C-4 explosives. And instead they were welcomed back to the United States.

[John Simkin]

Michael Vernon Townley made a full confession to the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. The authors, John Dinges & Saul Landau, used this confession for their book Assassination on Embassy Row (1980):

Townley added the final touches to the bomb as Paz held the parts in place for him. Suarez read and talked. Townley planned to place the bomb under the driver's seat; he molded the plastique to blow the full explosive force directly upward.

At about midnight he felt satisfied with his handiwork. The three left the motel in Paz's Volvo and stopped by the train station; Townley went to the ticket window to find out if there were any trains leaving for the New York area in the early morning hours. There were none.

"During the ride to Letelier's house," he wrote, "I was informed by Paz and Suarez that they expected me to place the device on the car as they wished to have a DINA agent, namely myself, directly tied to the placing of the device."

Townley kept quiet. He carried the bomb under his dark blue sweatshirt and wore corduroy pants. He hadn't planned on getting his pants dirty, but he had weighed the alternatives and decided he would have to tape the bomb himself.

Paz drove into the street parallel to Ogden Court. Townley walked from behind two houses into the turn-around area of the cul-de-sac and surveyed the block. People were entering a neighboring house, "so I turned around, returning to the parallel street, and walked up the hill on this parallel street, until I met Paz and Suarez, at which time we drove around to take up some time and then returned to the entrance of Letelier's street, where I was dropped off at the top of the hill."

On one side of the Leteliers lived an FBI agent; on the other, a Foreign Service officer. As Townley walked down the hill, some dogs barked, then stopped. Television screens glowed greyly through windows.

Letelier's car was parked in the driveway, nose in. Townley walked directly to the car, lay down on his back on the driver's side, pulled up his blue sweatshirt to expose the bomb, put his tools in accessible positions, and slid under the car. The space was small, Townley large. Moving as little as possible, he attached the bomb to the crossbeam with black electrical tape, occasionally flicking on a pencil flashlight to check its position.

Footsteps. Townley froze, trying to control his breathing. Not more than two inches separated him from the car chassis. The footsteps faded. He began to run tape from the speedometer cable to the explosive. What had seemed like an ample supply of tape now appeared scanty. He didn't want the bomb to slip or fall off.

He heard the sound of an engine: a car was approaching with its radio on. He stopped again, perspiration now pouring down his face and soaking his hands and body. The radio became louder; it was a police band. Townley fought to stay calm. The radio got still louder; now he could see the tires from the corner of his eye. But the car moved on, turned around in the cul-de-sac, and picking up speed, left the block. Townley flicked the flashlight on. The bomb was firmly attached, even though he would have preferred to run more tape around the crossbeam. He began to slide out. But had he taped the slide switch into the "on" position? He might have covered it in the "off" or "safety" position. He slid back under and felt, trying to remember which side was on and which off. He found the nub; it was off. He pushed it until it clicked, then pressed the tape into the groove with his finger to prevent the switch from falling back. But electrical tape is pliant and may not hold the switch, he thought.

Lack of time could lead to mistakes. Paz and Suarez had insisted that he place the bomb personally and that he do it that night. Townley felt a chill enter his sweat-laden body as he walked up the hill out of Ogden Court.

The Cubans picked him up on the deserted corner and headed slowly onto River Road. Townley told them of his uncertainty about the switch being in the correct position.

[James Richards]

Townley added the final touches to the bomb as Paz held the parts in place for him. Suarez read and talked. Townley planned to place the bomb under the driver's seat; he molded the plastique to blow the full explosive force directly upward. (John Simkin quoting text)

The guy on the far right below is Virgilio Paz.

James

[William Kelly]

Peter Dale Scott, in his Dallas COPA talk, twice mentions the Sheridan Circle DC car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffett, and the role of G. W. Bush in attempting to thwart the prosecution.

Eventually the evidence was presented to a Special Federal Grand Jury in DC, the type of Grand Jury we need to solve the JFK Assassination, and there were indictments and convictions.

BK

This post has been edited by William Kelly: Dec 9 2006, 08:30 PM

[Dawn Meredith]

Peter Dale Scott, in his Dallas COPA talk, twice mentions the Sheridan Circle DC car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffett, and the role of G. W. Bush in attempting to thwart the prosecution.

Eventually the evidence was presented to a Special Federal Grand Jury in DC, the type of Grand Jury we need to solve the JFK Assassination, and there were indictments and convictions.

BK

Great talk, I just watched it an hour ago. Bill what can we the people do to assist in the Grand Jury effort you and others have initiated? I did write to former Dallas DA Bill Hill a few years ago, but received no response. Big surprise. We need either the District Attorney in Dallas or a Federal Prosecutor to actually convene a Grand Jury.

A few years back I had high hopes with Fitzgerald, but he's done virtually nothing.

Do you- or anyone- know anything about the current Dallas DA?

Dawn

[William Kelly]

Peter Dale Scott, in his Dallas COPA talk, twice mentions the Sheridan Circle DC car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffett, and the role of G. W. Bush in attempting to thwart the prosecution.

Eventually the evidence was presented to a Special Federal Grand Jury in DC, the type of Grand Jury we need to solve the JFK Assassination, and there were indictments and convictions.

BK

Great talk, I just watched it an hour ago. Bill what can we the people do to assist in the Grand Jury effort you and others have initiated? I did write to former Dallas DA Bill Hill a few years ago, but received no response. Big surprise. We need either the District Attorney in Dallas or a Federal Prosecutor to actually convene a Grand Jury.

A few years back I had high hopes with Fitzgerald, but he's done virtually nothing.

Do you- or anyone- know anything about the current Dallas DA?

Dawn

Hi Dawn, While I don't want to hijack this post on the murder of Ronnie Moffet, the means that were used to solve that crime can and should be used to solve the JFK case. (For more info see the books Assassination on Embassy Row and Labrynth.

Fitzgerald is the type of guy you need to focus on JFK, but he's not the guy. Current DAs in Dallas and New Orleans could do what Garrison did, but they also saw what happened to him. I think a Special Fed. Grand Jury is way to go and in DC, where most of the evidence now is at the NARA, but we are going to send the first JFK Grand Jury petition to the Federal Court of North Texas soon.

We originally wanted to present it in person over the anniversary week in November in Dallas, but continuing unfolding events have interceeded. The delay is only temporary and we hope to get it into the registered mail for a certified response before the end of the year.

I will put a full update under the JFK Grand Jury Seminar in the Controversial Issues In History Section of this forum.

Rather than just convening a grand jury to investigate the case, we are are requesting a hearing at which we can present the evidence of crimes related to the assassination that can be resolved today. If we were granted such a hearign tomorrow however, I don't think we are ready to present a complete and convincing case, as we must.

What can people do to assist the grand jury project, well the evidence that will be presented must be refined and the list of living witnesses must be compiled and outstanding questions raised and,....

Those interested in pursing the grand jury project with us could read the stories about the assassination of Ronnie Moffet and learn how two enterprizing asst. DAs, Proper and Barcella, conducted their investigation, collection of evidence and prosecution of those responsible.

We're still in the collection of evidence stage, and need some guys like Proper and Barcella to take the ball. Know any?

BK

[Dawn Meredith]

Peter Dale Scott, in his Dallas COPA talk, twice mentions the Sheridan Circle DC car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffett, and the role of G. W. Bush in attempting to thwart the prosecution.

Eventually the evidence was presented to a Special Federal Grand Jury in DC, the type of Grand Jury we need to solve the JFK Assassination, and there were indictments and convictions.

BK

Great talk, I just watched it an hour ago. Bill what can we the people do to assist in the Grand Jury effort you and others have initiated? I did write to former Dallas DA Bill Hill a few years ago, but received no response. Big surprise. We need either the District Attorney in Dallas or a Federal Prosecutor to actually convene a Grand Jury.

A few years back I had high hopes with Fitzgerald, but he's done virtually nothing.

Do you- or anyone- know anything about the current Dallas DA?

Dawn

Hi Dawn, While I don't want to hijack this post on the murder of Ronnie Moffet, the means that were used to solve that crime can and should be used to solve the JFK case. (For more info see the books Assassination on Embassy Row and Labrynth.

Fitzgerald is the type of guy you need to focus on JFK, but he's not the guy. Current DAs in Dallas and New Orleans could do what Garrison did, but they also saw what happened to him. I think a Special Fed. Grand Jury is way to go and in DC, where most of the evidence now is at the NARA, but we are going to send the first JFK Grand Jury petition to the Federal Court of North Texas soon.

We originally wanted to present it in person over the anniversary week in November in Dallas, but continuing unfolding events have interceeded. The delay is only temporary and we hope to get it into the registered mail for a certified response before the end of the year.

I will put a full update under the JFK Grand Jury Seminar in the Controversial Issues In History Section of this forum.

Rather than just convening a grand jury to investigate the case, we are are requesting a hearing at which we can present the evidence of crimes related to the assassination that can be resolved today. If we were granted such a hearign tomorrow however, I don't think we are ready to present a complete and convincing case, as we must.

What can people do to assist the grand jury project, well the evidence that will be presented must be refined and the list of living witnesses must be compiled and outstanding questions raised and,....

Those interested in pursing the grand jury project with us could read the stories about the assassination of Ronnie Moffet and learn how two enterprizing asst. DAs, Proper and Barcella, conducted their investigation, collection of evidence and prosecution of those responsible.

We're still in the collection of evidence stage, and need some guys like Proper and Barcella to take the ball. Know any?

BK

Bill: I totally agree. No DA in Dallas is going touch this, so a Federal Grand Jury is the way to go. I am in the midst of trial prep myself today, but I will go back a re-aquaint myself with the Ronni Moffet case. I followed it closely when it first occurred. Just horrifying.

No, I don't know any DA's of the calibre of Proper and Barcella, tho I know a lot of terrific assistant DA's. I have no personal experience with Federal law, so don't know any Federal Prosecutors. But it would seem that this is the next step. Getting Congress to appoint such a person will be a problem. Also, a bigger problem is that there is no longer a special prosecutor statute. That ended after Clinton. Another hurdle. And Justice gets involved as well. Not gonna happen with the Bush Justice Dept. Perhaps Doug Caddy can weigh in here, with his background with Billie Sol, he may have some useful suggestions. Additionally, if we could find a Federal prosecutor he'd have to be appointed by W. Fat chance of that happening. But it's our last hope: Someone with the conscience, committment and authority of Garrison.

Dawn

[Guest_John Woods_*]

Peter Dale Scott, in his Dallas COPA talk, twice mentions the Sheridan Circle DC car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffett, and the role of G. W. Bush in attempting to thwart the prosecution.

Eventually the evidence was presented to a Special Federal Grand Jury in DC, the type of Grand Jury we need to solve the JFK Assassination, and there were indictments and convictions.

BK

Great talk, I just watched it an hour ago. Bill what can we the people do to assist in the Grand Jury effort you and others have initiated? I did write to former Dallas DA Bill Hill a few years ago, but received no response. Big surprise. We need either the District Attorney in Dallas or a Federal Prosecutor to actually convene a Grand Jury.

A few years back I had high hopes with Fitzgerald, but he's done virtually nothing.

Do you- or anyone- know anything about the current Dallas DA?

Dawn

Hi Dawn, While I don't want to hijack this post on the murder of Ronnie Moffet, the means that were used to solve that crime can and should be used to solve the JFK case. (For more info see the books Assassination on Embassy Row and Labrynth.

Fitzgerald is the type of guy you need to focus on JFK, but he's not the guy. Current DAs in Dallas and New Orleans could do what Garrison did, but they also saw what happened to him. I think a Special Fed. Grand Jury is way to go and in DC, where most of the evidence now is at the NARA, but we are going to send the first JFK Grand Jury petition to the Federal Court of North Texas soon.

We originally wanted to present it in person over the anniversary week in November in Dallas, but continuing unfolding events have interceeded. The delay is only temporary and we hope to get it into the registered mail for a certified response before the end of the year.

I will put a full update under the JFK Grand Jury Seminar in the Controversial Issues In History Section of this forum.

Rather than just convening a grand jury to investigate the case, we are are requesting a hearing at which we can present the evidence of crimes related to the assassination that can be resolved today. If we were granted such a hearign tomorrow however, I don't think we are ready to present a complete and convincing case, as we must.

What can people do to assist the grand jury project, well the evidence that will be presented must be refined and the list of living witnesses must be compiled and outstanding questions raised and,....

Those interested in pursing the grand jury project with us could read the stories about the assassination of Ronnie Moffet and learn how two enterprizing asst. DAs, Proper and Barcella, conducted their investigation, collection of evidence and prosecution of those responsible.

We're still in the collection of evidence stage, and need some guys like Proper and Barcella to take the ball. Know any?

BK

Bill: I totally agree. No DA in Dallas is going touch this, so a Federal Grand Jury is the way to go. I am in the midst of trial prep myself today, but I will go back a re-aquaint myself with the Ronni Moffet case. I followed it closely when it first occurred. Just horrifying.

No, I don't know any DA's of the calibre of Proper and Barcella, tho I know a lot of terrific assistant DA's. I have no personal experience with Federal law, so don't know any Federal Prosecutors. But it would seem that this is the next step. Getting Congress to appoint such a person will be a problem. Also, a bigger problem is that there is no longer a special prosecutor statute. That ended after Clinton. Another hurdle. And Justice gets involved as well. Not gonna happen with the Bush Justice Dept. Perhaps Doug Caddy can weigh in here, with his background with Billie Sol, he may have some useful suggestions. Additionally, if we could find a Federal prosecutor he'd have to be appointed by W. Fat chance of that happening. But it's our last hope: Someone with the conscience, committment and authority of Garrison.

Dawn

................

This post has been edited by John Woods: Dec 11 2006, 04:18 AM