The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
By Peter Dale Scott
URL of this article:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15752
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...a&aid=15752
Global Research
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4ImOFwQ6kwUXJNS
wfN5FtLzmwHWRxTnyeKpKKSG9e_wrHHrvAyjGnNg3HVYTKp57NIxA4WCzZKJZOsEGzENtAW_P95Q
nyZDGxenT05c4LlxJQ==,
October 21, 2009
The New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by Scott
Shane about the CIA's defiance of a court order to release documents
pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its so-called
Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer for a Cuban
exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public engagements with
Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald allegedly killed
Kennedy. For over six years a former Washington Post reporter, Jefferson
Morley, has been suing the CIA for the release of these documents. [1]
Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more newsworthy
than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971 publication of
the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for most people to read)
on the front page of the New York Times.
The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed,
perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA has
been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK
assassination.
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the
Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro
and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario
Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a
month in C.I.A. support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a
directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group's goal of
ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found
Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with
him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local
radio station.
That the October 17 story was published at all is astonishing. According
to Lexis Nexis, there have only been two earlier references to the CIA
Joannides documents controversy in any major U.S. newspaper: a brief
squib in the New York Daily News in 2003 announcing the launching of the
case, and a letter to the New York Times in 2007 (of which the lead
author was Jeff Morley) complaining about the Times' rave review of a
book claiming that Oswald was a lone assassin.
(The review had said inter alia that "''Conspiracy theorists'' should be
''ridiculed, even shunned... marginalized the way we've marginalized
smokers.'' The letter pointed out in response that those suspecting
conspiracy included Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, and
J. Edgar Hoover.)
The New York Times has systematically regulated the release of any facts
about the Kennedy assassination, ever since November 25, 1963, when it
first declared Oswald, the day after his death, to have been the
"assassin" of JFK. A notorious example was the deletion, between the
early and the final edition of a Times issue, of a paragraph in a review
of a book about the JFK assassination, making the obvious point that
"MYSTERIES PERSIST." [2]
Apparently there was similar jockeying over the positioning of the Scott
Shane story. In some east coast editions it ran on page eleven, with a
trivializing introductory squib, "Food for Conspiracy Theorists." In the
California edition, headlined "C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald
Mystery," it was on page one above the fold.
One can assume that the Times decision to run the story was a momentous
one not made casually. The same can probably be said of another recent
remarkable editorial decision, to publish Tom Friedman's op-ed on
September 29 about the "very dangerous" climate now in America, "the
same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin
assassination."
Friedman did not mention JFK at all, and his most specific reference was
to a recent poll on Facebook asking respondents, "Should Obama be
killed?" [3] Four days later the Wall Street Journal expressed similar
concern, adding to the "poll on Facebook asking whether the president
should be assassinated, a column on a conservative Web site suggesting a
military coup is in the works." [4]
Friedman's column broke a code of silence about the threats to Obama
that had been in place ever since two redneck white supremacists (Shawn
Adolf and Tharin Gartrell) were arrested in August 2008 for a plot to
assassinate Obama with scoped bolt-action rifles. Andrew Gumbel's story
about them ran in the London Independent on November 16, 2008; of the
fifteen related news stories in Lexis Nexis, only one, a brief one, is
from a U.S. paper.
It is possible to take at face value the concern expressed by Friedman
in his column. The Boston Globe, a New York Times affiliate, reported on
October 18 that "The unprecedented number of death threats against
President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of
antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service." [5]
But there may have been a higher level of concern in the normally
pro-war Wall Street Journal's reference to a military coup. Such talk on
a conservative web site is hardly newsworthy. More alarming is the
report by Robert Dreyfuss in the October 29 Rolling Stone that Obama is
currently facing an ultimatum from the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs: either
provide General McChrystal with the 40,000 additional troops he has
publicly demanded, or "face a full-scale mutiny by his generals...The
president, it seems, is battling two insurgencies: one in Afghanistan
and one cooked up by his own generals." [6]
One can only guess at what led the New York Times to publish a story
about CIA obstinacy over documents about the JFK assassination. One
explanation would be the similarities between the painful choices that
Obama now faces in Afghanistan - to escalate, maintain a losing status
quo, or begin to withdraw - and the same equally painful choices that
Kennedy in 1963 faced in Vietnam. [7] More and more books in recent
years have asked if some disgruntled hawks in the CIA and Pentagon did
not participate in the assassination which led to a wider Vietnam War. [8]
Six weeks before Kennedy's murder, the Washington News published an
extraordinary attack on the CIA's "bureaucratic arrogance" and
obstinate disregard of orders... "If the United States ever
experiences a `Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA..." one
U.S. official commented caustically. ("Seven Days in May" is a
fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the
U.S. Government.) [9]
The story was actually a misleading one, but it was a symptom of the
high-level rifts and infighting that were becoming explosive over
Vietnam inside the Kennedy administration. The New York Times story
about the CIA on October 17 can also be seen as a symptom of rifts and
infighting. One must hope that the country has matured enough since 1963
to avoid a similarly bloody denouement.
*Notes*
1. "C.I.A. Is Cagey About '63 Files Tied to Oswald," New York Times,
October 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/us/17inquire.html
<http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&s=9292&e=001kdCyFLWfE4KbEi1IZAU0cSKM
Ox3X8_KL_Mnzw1mWUjvOh4e3YFwPS1nW7Af8c1rkiMoKTjkaAJtH3AhvkGka0hku4CsEc2j7HtH4
F24Rq0NEaABz6A1s2x6XW_GikgCm2F3Y8n-gWQ2eifv0Vu3OEQljrsyB6eQP.
2. Jerry Policoff, The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy," in Peter
Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations:
Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1976), 268.
3. Friedman, in decrying attacks on presidential legitimacy, recalled
that "The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with
the bogus Whitewater "scandal." It is worth recalling also that the
public outcry about Whitewater was encouraged initially by a series of
stories by Jeff Gerth, since largely discredited, in the New York Times.
See Gene Lyons, "Fool for Scandal: How the New York Times Got Whitewater
Wrong," Harper's, October 1994.
4. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125452861657560895.html
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4IiAzjXpdw8okoW
ZCqfqCecjWbcqqnWcYWzhRqj_ZSPJvMDUc1NKJUFwkIp9b88U05ZwxFTUDiXHdOqG9vaOK9iNJGP
B9eQ4vMLmOpYkzJL1yhAHCJE7iliY9LK4blVYpPXTGgtnVgMezEvKed5r3eX>.
5. Bryan Bender, "Secret Service strained as leaders face more threats
Report questions its role in financial investigations," Boston Globe,
October 18, 2009,
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washingt.../18/secret_serv
ice_under_strain_as_leaders_face_more_threats/
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4JX8MmACYVZkloI
0f0IFgBwWTdW90RG8QHMH7I443bQf2Bk4jwhUwiUVUq076T8SmIueLtOE_C0PNNqMxEWLTILSU5-
ZtElgCK60ilALlreoIE39HIFQLfwhQVI3-1K3iOSFhaT7pavYNB9w8KzJ4YV4V0lE4-9aHcBAvPo
dcnNbr-AHb_RsaVPSXtgN4xREH5_TWZpjRTOyQEJHsgoUD6b3GP50-AIhQ2PSvm9HcMDl5PjiKK
WHpZRLdcKCrG5c=.
6. Robert Dreyfuss, "The Generals' Revolt: As Obama rethinks America's
failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies: the Taliban
and the Pentagon." Rolling Stone, October 29, 41. Several other articles
entitled "The Generals' Revolt" have been published since 2003,
including at least two earlier this year and a number in 2006, when
retired generals' pushed successfully for the removal of Rumsfeld over
his handling of the Vietnam War.
7. Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road
to War in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2005), 266.
8. See for example James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died
& Why It Matters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
9. Washington Daily News, October 2, 1963; discussed in Peter Dale
Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War
(Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 286.
Please support Global Research
Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers.
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4LCl04QLC7My_XQ
q_WJEBHgyAEsjviF6yEkBlvQAVXf6jJVVC_F6LFTrV-TDo4tNdO294bioz2FzJF_vwhIXbPsbygd
bjupCjDDdXaQJ0RMyXPG_qARnzp7gtFgWx6NGiCJEgdQwSrle31w82J424Zd8mLoGP7dSHNBE6aw
871NONHmpx0F_vZ9
Your endorsement is greatly appreciated
Subscribe to the Global Research e-newsletter
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4JcZenrotycC3g_
mVObUpekRuglSV9tNujcrYo0HS4PY5FeJjxKHHtmgh43EIO8i0UkE-GkNORd-aD_dfKMRk6KJacQ
oYGqbSZl7Sy1C6GHjexwylPopY02pCzFTPVcRPQcBogUNqTNMJDE52i8NT1X855HWRPdn8SMx7A6
UksCPvtrBYKOq3MJ
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole
responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the
Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are
of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on
Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or
incorrect statements contained in this article.
To become a Member of Global Research
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4KlheHIeR4fj0Eh
lLdRaGLuj3Z0nf4Ed8vDzC0xlz404fEZjWckhxVxgxUWOy3UDT9RbsCijS88fzNXCwlnvvu8TITH
mttdt_pHja4pj44TlpQO7C_e54r7QQvxY4SyHB2gzTAYBDlFwRnil_4lGx9XcboFIa3UMG5Ftf-m
PGMY3D-mWuEM5BX6
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research
articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not
modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For
publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms
including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
<mailto:crgeditor@yahoo.com>
www.globalresearch.ca
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4ImOFwQ6kwUXJNS
wfN5FtLzmwHWRxTnyeKpKKSG9e_wrHHrvAyjGnNg3HVYTKp57NIxA4WCzZKJZOsEGzENtAW_P95Q
nyZDGxenT05c4LlxJQ==>
contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such
material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in
an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and
social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for
research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted
material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission
from the copyright owner.
For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com <mailto:crgeditor@yahoo.com>
C Copyright Peter Dale Scott, Global Research, 2009
The url address of this article is:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15752
<http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&s=9292&e=001kdCyFLWfE4IYmCfd540G_HUO
eaFStzP5ctqYlF9v4y37nBAtts0lC2xU9Z2okSkcPuhuLlRCQhKbzmhHztUFtFM8repPKk2MFrrD
nADkxbV4rx4djXAHy6Qceuf_G2yUISFD3T16JtKyUXYAkLzKhWefKelrNp5zkfDu_jDHQ64=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
C Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca
Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102778862605&...4JgJX6JkxsnpCQk
CbU17ecbquNSrkqkAxaqVQZhpiBE9pWcDyCDED7cfPpu6145qAhNnB_mdS12DM_yCdrTDeeg2akc
ZfYgf8G2uN3u44_JzQ==
C Copyright 2005-2007