James DiEugenio

What this does is bring into question everything else that followed. Because what Dave is saying is that CE 139 was not at Klein's when it needed to be and the FBI knew that. Therefore everything else that followed was done after the fact to cover that up. Which is why the evidentiary trail to get the rifle to Oswald is so dubious and smelly. And even at that, Belin, who had to know it was the wrong model rifle, steered away from making that clear.

I would not agree with that. I have done a lot of work, I mean a lot of work, on Kennedy's foreign policy in addition to studying up about Krushchev. In my opinion, if one studies the Vienna summit and then the prelude to NIkita's decision, and then the transcripts of the crisis, I believe the reason for Krushchev taking that gamble was because of Berlin. And that is what Kennedy thought. It is also what Graham Allison, the foremost expert on the crisis thought. There is no way in the world that Castro needed that kind of giant nuclear armada to protect himself from MONGOOSE or even an invasion. What the Russians sent in was essentially a first strike with all three arms of the triad: air, submarine, rockets. Enough to knock out over 100 cities. JFK thought that what Krushchev was going to ask for was a deal: we get out of Cuba, you get out of Berlin. Kennedy was not going for that. Berlin was one place that the USA was not leaving. Kennedy thought that if we did that it would be the beginning of the end of the European alliance. Making it much easier for the Russians to move into Europe. Kennedy did not think that Indochina was a threat to our security and was ready to leave that theater. But not Berlin.

That is one way to look at it. Parnell's they dropped the ball excuse is just that, an excuse.

I don't really have a position on that one. If Joe McBride is lurking, that may be his position. At least in some talks I had with him he has insinuated that. But its certainly a plausible position off that statement made by LBJ to the JCS, just get me elected and I will give you your war. Stone had that in his film and its from Stanley Karnow's book.

It may have been both, but I would go with Number One. See, one of the major themes of Halberstam's book is that somehow, Vietnam was an unavoidable tragedy, like the Civil War. And that only people hidden in the lower rungs like John McNaughton, were resisting this trail of disaster. That is a false paradigm. But if Halberstam did then show what NSAM 263 was about, and how it was changed by 273 and then reversed by 288, he would not have a book. Or at least the book he wanted to write and made him rich. Another part of the story he misses is just how bad LBJ was on the war in 1965-66. When Humphrey wrote a memo saying we did not need to escalate, LBJ ostracized him from any future meetings on the war. Humphrey took it back and then when RFK proposed a peace plan in 1966, Humphrey attacked him. When Fulbright stated his gripping senate hearings on the war, LBJ used the FBI to surveil him for communist influences. You will not find those in Halberstam's book either.

Well that is an interesting question. Who the heck did Halberstam rely on the most? And why? Plus, didn't he see the problem he was facing? By this time, 1972, Vietnam was pretty much seen as a debacle that we had to get out of one way of the other. Example: that lying fruitcake Nixon always said that he was honoring the commitment that Kennedy and Johnson had made. LOL When in fact, he was the first administrative official to ever propose that we commit American troops there. This was during the siege of DIen Bien Phu back in 1954. Then he was part of the effort to create this fictional country that did not exist before i.e. South Vietnam. He was also part of the effort to subvert the Geneva Accords which would have united the country after the French colonial war. This began the whole American commitment with Lansdale, the phony elections, the scaring of the Catholics south to prop up Diem, the beginning of an American military commitment and the backing of the despotic regime of the Nhu brothers. And this was the mess Kennedy was left with in 1961. As I wrote in that article I posted, it was essentially Kennedy, Galbraith, Ball and Bowles who held out against just about everyone else not to send American combat troops to save the faltering Diem regime. And it was Galbraith who started Kennedy down the path to withdrawal. It is really hard to buy that Halberstam never talked to Galbraith, for the simple matter that the guy was easy to find and he liked to talk about Kennedy. The other part that Halberstam utterly screws up is McNamara. Halberstam is the guy who started the whole myth about Vietnam being McNamara's War. This is simply not sustainable today, and it was not back then. Vietnam was really the LBJ/Walt Rostow war. Kennedy moved Walt Rostow out of the White House. LBJ brought him back in as his National Security Advisor. I really think Walt Rostow was probably a big source for Halberstam.

One week before Kennedy’s murder, on November 15th, Angleton’s office received a full report from Warren DeBrueys of the New Orleans FBI office about Oswald’s activities there. As Morley writes, “If Angleton scanned the first page, he learned that Oswald had gone back to Texas after contacting the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico City. Angleton knew Oswald was in Dallas.” (p. 140) In other words, all the information that an intelligence officer needed in order to place Oswald on the Secret Service Security Index was available to Jim Angleton at that time. He did nothing with it. JIm DIEugenio's Review of Morley's The Ghost

LOL ROTF

I really don't know what he means by that. But I would guess that it meant that he was trying to buck something that simply was too big to buck.

I interviewed him at his office in Virginia in the nineties. An interesting afternoon. He was very open and sharp, with a neat sense of humor. He told me that during the Bay of Pigs, Cabell came down to his office and said he needed something to show the president that there were MIGs on the beach. Marchetti said, I cannot do that since I know that there are no MIGs in Cuba. I asked him how he knew and he said the CIA had pictures of the stuff being unloaded from Russian freighters and there were no crates or boxes that could have carried either the planes or the parts to assemble them with. It was also funny when he commented on his meeting with David Phillips at what he called a spook restaurant in New York. Phillips wanted him to join the ARIO. Marchetti decided not too. But in commenting on Phillips he said, "Dave was retired, but he wasn't really retired."

CAL would mean caliber, right?

Here is what I wrote about Halberstam and his bad book years ago. I would be even harsher today. https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/halberstam-david-the-best-and-the-brightest-part-1

Well, David Phillips did know Bugliosi. And they did exchange letters. That is in my book on Bugliosi. As per Halberstam, I have never seen anything showing he was an asset, although in my series on the Ken Burns special I did note that he was close to the CIA station in Saigon once he got there. But I cannot prove any direct quid pro quo on that.

Nope no one peer reviewed Bugliosi's book, that is for sure. I tried to explain this rather early in my writings. In his introduction, Vince writes one of the most ill advised sentences in the literature. He says that he will not present the evidence as he sees it, but as the critical community sees it and he will then dash their arguments. As I showed in my book, if Vince had been Pinochio, he would have fallen down because his nose had grown too long and heavy. He broke that pledge well over two dozen times in his book. To this day I do not know why he wrote it. But any smart editor would have asked him to strike it.

I peer reviewed Reclaiming History. Gary Aguilar also in American Lawyer.

Oh no, it was not a bluff on those two occasions. It was a bluff on another occasion when he wanted to simulate nuclear alert. Duck Hook was going to be a huge offensive in the fall of 1969. It was supposed to bring the war to an end with a Korea style settlement. Nixon planned on using atomic weapons over the Ho Chi Minh trail, (See America Divided by Kazin and Isserman p, 265) It was pushed back and then scrapped because of the giant moratorium. (BTW, Burns never mentioned this in his multi part series.) During the Easter Offensive, when Nixon wanted to bomb the dikes, Kissinger told him that would kill two hundred thousand people. Nixon then suggested an atomic bomb. Kissinger walked out of the room and said he was not going to do it anyway. This is on a tape that Jeff Kimball got from the Nixon Library. Kimball wrote two books on the subject that are the best out there on Nixon and the war. I agree with Ambrose about Nixon, he was really a bit unbalanced about Vietnam. According to Ellsberg, Kissinger suggested using them over a supply pass between China and the north. I really do not have an answer as to why Burns and Halberstam were so bad on Vietnam. I suspect it was to curry favor. It sure as heck worked if that was the reason. Halberstam's book today is not just bad, its pernicious. And I have a hard time believing he did not know better. It is just very hard to buy that he got so many things so utterly wrong. But what made that all worse is that he never went back and tried to correct it.

Well, that makes three of four administrations that oversaw the war who considered using atomic weapons. Foster Dulles wanted to use them at Dien Bien Phu, but Eisenhower vetoed it. Dulles then offered them to France to use. Nixon contemplated using them twice, once part of the aborted Duck Hook operation, and once during the Easter offensive. This would have been a nice observation for Ken Burn's to have mentioned. He crapped out of course. Because that is who he is.

Anybody who argues with Parnell from here on in does so at his own peril. He has now shown himself to be an American version of Carlier. Posner's book holds up quite well today? This is a guy who taped phone calls with people who say they never talked to him. And that did not happen just once. He later said he would produce them. He has not. This is a guy who said that there was no evidence that Oswald ever knew David Ferrie. Then PBS turns up a photo featuring both men together. Do you know what Posner said in reply to that? It might have been a composite done by Jim Garrison. First, that photo was not in Garrison's hands. Second, Garrison and Jaffe did not do composite photos for evidentiary purpose. He then said that the Clinton-Jackson incident did not happen because the witnesses recalled different things. This proves just what a joke Posner was and is. Because the guy never went to either town. He thought it all took place in Clinton. It did not. Jackson is a separate place about 5-10 miles apart. If the witnesses had seen the same thing, then you had something. And BTW, Posner missed the fact that there is a photo of this event. He missed that one too. But I am sure that Jerry would have said, well it was really a composite and Parnell would have gone along with him. I don't even want to bring up what the guy did with the ABA trial. That was just a disgrace.

Tracy and Francois: Its interesting to everyone here that you would now try and escape the point I was trying to make about all the so called "experts" your side has used and which I have shown to be complete frauds and now address Sandy's ideas about Harvey and Lee. There was a long thread about this already, or did you forget about it? What I just did was show how your side was the one that abided by theories--that all ended up being proven false, or they were knowing lies to begin with. And you have remained rather quiet about. In fact, the entire fulcrum of the WCR is knowingly based upon nothing but a half baked self serving fantasy, that is CE 399 and the Magic Bullet. That fantasy is so out there that your own commissioners refused to record the debate on it at the final executive meeting of the commission. They snookered Russell, Cooper and Boggs that this debate was being recorded. When in fact it was not. And they actually had an impersonator sitting there as a stenographer. Talk about consciousness of guilt! This is so bad that Bugliosi could not really own up to it and admit it. Then you pile that bunch of malarkey upon the fact that Specter then posed maybe 12 material questions to Boswell about the autopsy and they then did not call people like Stringer or Ebersole, or incredibly Burkley, or even more incredibly Sibert and O'Neil. So please do not try and insinuate that somehow our side is "out there", and then use Armstrong as some kind of out for everything else. What that does is show just how weak your case is on the core evidence. Which is the basis of any homicide case, especially a death by gunshot wounds.

David, Can you explain what you are comparing exactly, and the points of issue?

No question about that one. And as he was being questioned by the HSCA, he kept on reporting back to the FBI as to how much he thought the HSCA knew and what he should say if they called him back. Is it just a coincidence they sent to Dallas after to run the inquiry for the first FBI report. Which by the way was so bad that even the WC rejected it. I mean how bad is bad?

Francois, I am really glad you decided to return because now everyone can see you for what you are. You apparently read no one's books except your own. And you read no one else's web site except DVP and McAdams. I mean if you did then your posts would be a lot more informed and acute. Instead they remind me of a little kid throwing mud against a wall in order to kill a fly. I mean really, you never read my two part article on Fetzer? You did not read the Aguilar/Wecht take down of the Haags? That was actually in a peer reviewed journal, the kind of periodical that your buddy Tracy Parnell thinks is the be all and end all of credulity. You know Alvarez and the jet effect? But in this case, somehow, Mr. Parnell missed that one. Even though it was spread out over two issues. But if that is his standard of evidence then by all means, he should quit and go home right now because that was a literal demolition job. But he won't because like DVP, this forum has become his reason for being. Plus he has a see through double standard. For you to say that someone denies the facts about the medical evidence is really a hoot. There are no facts about that part of the case. Which is why Ayton and Von Pein wrote so little about it in their recycling of the WR. When you have the official autopsy photographer under oath, with the Chief Counsel of the ARRB holding the pics of the brain in front of him, and he asks, "Did you take those photos?" And they guy pauses, leans over and looks at the numbers on the print, and then says: "No. That is the wrong film, I never used that film. And these numbers mean its a press pack process. I never used that technique." That is a fact. Is it in your book? If not, why are you covering it up from your readers?

Does anyone read my books? Vosjoli was the main author of the disinfo tome Farewell America.

Yep Tracy, it takes three years to learn how to read a chart. Geez, how long do you think it took Guinn to make up his phony CBLA test? Which your side fell for and used for decades.

I really think that this is hard to get around: To come full circle here... the FBI had info related to a specific order and specific rifle serial # from FELDSOTT Friday eve. The FBI reports thru the morning of 11/24 that there was no C2766 on a June 18 1962 order... while also mentioning an order for rifles in March 1963 which has not documentation at all.. We also cannot forget that the first batch of rifles from THAT inventory at HARBORSIDE did not occur until AUGUST 1962....