Douglas Caddy

Larry Hancock writes on his current blog about Oswald being a patsy: http://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/patsy/ I’m speeding up the frequency of this “Connecting the Dots” series in order to wrap it up next week and build up my energy for the Dallas conference and experience. After that I’ll be turning my attention to the issue of Shadow Warfare, which is still on target for availability at the first of the year if not a bit earlier – I might even have a first galley copy in Dallas. But to the point here, one of the things that amazes me with the current explosion in commentary on the assassination, the option that Oswald was a patsy in the assassination receives virtually no mention. That despite the fact that he declared himself a patsy – undercutting the only plausible motive ever mentioned, a search for fame and notoriety - and that neither the Warren Commission nor anyone else ever established a credible motive for him, especially with his record of prior supportive remarks about President Kennedy. Its almost as if the people offering comments to the media feel that even considering that possiblity might start a slide towards actually examining a more complex scenario that would require some re-examination of the data – which of course would mean real engagement with new information – and potentially lots of time and work. Its probably just easier to say you are going to keep and open mind on the subject… that certainly requires less energy. Up to this point I’ve presented data that suggests Oswald, in his pro Cuba/pro Castro activities, had become visible and “identifiable” with a particular cause in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. We also looked at data suggesting that information about Oswald’s travels and his background was circulating in Miami and that Oswald had been observed in touch with individuals who would be considered both subversive and a potential threat to President Kennedy by the FBI. The question is, do we know anything more about such people. The answer, given the apparent destruction of relevant records in the possession of both the FBI and Secret Service is – not likely. However, we do have two separate anecdotal sources that do provide information, independently of each other. I will present their information below, analysis and context supporting each as a credible source is in SWHT and other places such as the work of Dick Russell and Tony Summers. John Martino’s information was provided to the HSCA, which with other of its information such as questions about David Morales simply did not have the context of information to properly evaluate or pursue it. I’ve talked with HSCA investigators and they can only express the frustration that they did not know what we have learned in later years. Basically Martino tells us that he served as a courier in the conspiracy to attack JFK, carrying money and information to Dallas. His knowledge of the overall operation was extremely limited, but he stated that Cuban exiles had contacted Oswald in New Orleans, maintained contact with him and manipulated him as a patsy. Despite Martino’s own early public attempts to tie Oswald to Castro, and promote American retaliation, I’m told that when at home, when hearing a news about the assassination over the following years, he would only remark that Oswald was nothing more than a “patsy”. Independently of Martino’s private remarks and even the HSCA memorandums, which did not become available for many years, Dick Russell researched the story of Richard Case Nagell, who had himself written privately to Congressmen concerning the assassination and Cuban exile manipulation of Oswald as a patsy. Nagell’s story is far more complex than Martino’s and much harder to follow unless you expend a huge amount of time and study, which most people who comment lightly on it have not. However what is quite noteworthy about Nagell’s information is that he describes his personal contact with Oswald in New Orleans and the Cuban exile maneuvering of Oswald relating to something that was supposed to happen in the Washington D.C. area in September – but which aborted. The Oswald letters to CPUSA and SWP, and other corroborative material – both from the early FBI questioning of Marina Oswald and the oral history interview of the young woman helping Marina pack to move to the Paines – did not emerge for decades, even then being something seen by a few hard core researchers. It certainly seems that Nagell’s early correspondance and private remarks about the aborted DC incident seem to be well validated by Oswald’s own documented actions. There are several other data points indicating that Oswald was known to and in contact with this particular set of individuals, who first became aware of him in New Orleans. And the upshot of all the information provided portrays Oswald as being literally nothing more than a patsy in an eventual attack on the President, someone whose profile will point the crime towards Cuba and Castro – which of course it ultimately did. I have a copy of a San Antonio newspaper from Nov 23 with the huge headline “Castro Supporter Shoots President”. However, for other reasons, such headlines hardly outlasted the weekend. The people considering using Oswald as a patsy were monitoring Oswald’s movements, his travels, they knew when he arrived in Dallas and contacted him there. There is every reason to think they knew were he worked and most likely had him under surveillance. And framing him was not really going to be that hard, if they could plant a single piece of obvious evidence – such a gun connected to him – at or near the scene of the attack on the President, given Oswald’s profile, he was going to take the fall for conspiracy. Martino even commented that Oswald was not the shooter. There was no reason that Oswald needed to be the shooter or to even know what was coming down. Ultimately, with a rifle traceable to him in the TSBD, he was going to be positioned as part of a conspiracy, and the conspiracy would be a Cuban/Communist one. Of course that was the view of the people “playing” Oswald but they could control matters only up to the time of the attack…. In the next couple of posts I’ll try to work this chain a bit further but I’m betting its not a conversation or scenario you will be seeing on any of the some 30 anniversary specials coming out or in the media interviews on the subject. ______________________________________________________________________ Larry Hancock is both a skilled researcher and talented writer. I concur with his analysis above. This is what I wrote in the forum on October 28, 2013 in response to a question from Thomas Graves: I have never held myself out to be an expert on the Kennedy assassination. My depth of knowledge is not great in contrast to many of the true experts in the forum who have a detailed grasp of the topic, such as William Kelly, James Richards, Pat Speer and Robert Morrow, to single out only four among many forum members whose credibility is recognized. Based on what I have learned and do know, my answer to your question is no. I think it was a well thought out conspiracy to kill the President and Oswald was groomed to be the patsy, the fall guy. As I wrote in a prior forum topic some time ago, at the time of the assassination I was working in the New York City office of Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the staff of Lt.-Gov. Malcolm Wilson. I received a phone call from a close friend who was a fellow night school student at NYU Law School and who worked on Wall Street. He told me breathlessly that his teletype machine had just reported the assassination. After conferring with Lt.-Gov. Wilson I walked through the five story townhouse at 22 West 55th Street that was the Governor’s private office and alerted the staff to what had happened in Dallas. Most I talked to uttered no word. They just looked shocked and for a moment or so may have thought I had lost my mind. At a political dinner the next night I sat next to a mutual friend of the Lt.-Gov. who was about to ascend to the bench as a judge. He predicted to me that Oswald would be killed soon because whatever he knew or did not know would be explosive and would open the door to the actual conspirators. He said it was obvious Oswald was a patsy. Two days later Oswald was killed. Those who were politically sophisticated realized immediately that there was much more behind the assassination of JFK, just as those who were politically sophisticated believed there was much more behind the arrests of five burglars at Watergate nine years later. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?s=9e7c976311faba36e9c2ec1a2d06ec5a&showtopic=20587

Video maintains Oswald’s fingerprint in on bullet casing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot5HO5jLNQY&feature=player_detailpage Jim Marrs in a recent interview declared that an FBI agent pressed Oswald’s hand against the rifle. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20589

Spartacus Educational: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKindex.htm

http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/roger-stone-it-was-lbj/ Lew Rockwell interview Roger Stone

David Talbot: CIA and New York Times are still lying to us Salon.com November 6, 2013 http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/the_jfk_assassination_we_still_dont_know_what_happened/

Are forum members ready for a good laugh? What planet is this guy from and when did he arrive on Earth? --------------------------------- 'JFK would want Britain to stay in the EU': David Miliband http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2487653/David-Miliband-JFK-want-Britain-stay-EU.html#ixzz2jncQhVj6

Barry Krusch is the author of The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald. Krusch maintains that Oswald was innocent and that the spent shells from the depository prove this.

http://www.democracynow.org/ Oliver Stone was interviewed today, Nov. 5, 2013, on Democracy Now.

When a person declares that he believes there was no conspiracy to assassinate JFK, he should be asked to explain why then were so many relevant documents and records destroyed by the government and why some still in existence will not be released to the public.

5 decades later, some JFK assassination files still sealed; researchers demand ‘transparency’ Washington Post November 3, 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/5-decades-later-some-jfk-assassination-files-still-sealed-researchers-demand-transparency/2013/11/03/768eb13e-4496-11e3-95a9-3f15b5618ba8_story.html

The final paragraph of the speech President John F. Kennedy was to deliver in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963: We in this country, in this generation, are — by destiny rather than choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility — that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint — and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal — and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

Lee Harvey Oswald widow convinced late husband did not kill President John F. Kennedy: report Marina Oswald Porter, a 72-year-old grandmother who has since settled with her family in a Dallas suburb, once believed that her 24-year-old husband assassinated JFK. But the woman is now convinced the father of two of her children was the scapegoat in a complex plot that included the CIA and the Mafia. By Joe Kemp / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, November 2, 2013, 11:50 AM Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lee-harvey-oswald-widow-convinced-late-husband-kill-president-john-f-kennedy-report-article-1.1504711#ixzz2jhQOXNPh Photos in article below are interesting: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/dallas-handcuffed-lee-harvey-oswald-prize-winning-photo-honored-article-1.1343509

Dr. Red Duke’s trauma room drama on day of JFK assassination http://www.khou.com/jfk/The-presidents-been-shot--Dr-Red-Dukes-trauma-room-drama-on-day-of-JFK-assassination-230302641.html

I was there when they shot JFK Four people who witnessed President John F Kennedy’s assassination 50 years ago this month explain their theories of who was responsible http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10422482/jkf-john-f-kennedy-conspiracy-shot-dallas-lee-harvey-oswald-grassy-knoll.html

Rebekah Brooks tried to hide evidence as News of the World closed, jury told Ex-News International chief conspired to conceal her notebooks in 'panic' around paper's closure, phone-hacking trial hears Lisa O'Carroll and Caroline Davies theguardian.com, Monday 4 November 2013 08.02 EST http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/04/rebekah-brooks-news-world-phone-hacking-trial Rebekah Brooks was involved in a deliberate effort to hide material from police during the "panic-stricken" days around the closure of the News of the World, the jury in the phone-hacking trial has been told. Brooks, then chief executive of News of the World publisher News International, and her personal assistant Cheryl Carter have been accused of trying to conceal seven boxes of her notebooks the day after the announcement that the paper was to close down and two days before its final edition. They deny the charges. Andrew Edis QC, for the prosecution, told the jury on Monday the attempt to hide evidence happened during the "fevered" and "anxious" days before the paper was closed in early July 2011. Edis said Brooks was aware Scotland Yard had reopened its investigation into phone hacking in January 2011 and had declared the company's determination to co-operate with the police. "There was always a course of justice in existence which could be perverted by hiding evidence. Hiding evidence was not acceptable at any time that year, but the atmosphere, we would suggest, became even more fevered as time went on," said Edis. On 7 July 2011 it was announced that the News of the World was to close. On 8 July Carter arranged to have the boxes containing Brooks's notebooks removed from the News International archive in Enfield, the jury was told. This day, said Edis, was a "significant day" as it was the day that the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, was arrested. "A media firestorm which was about to engulf the News of the World, so you can imagine the extremely anxious if not panic-stricken approach that must have been going on," Edis told the jury. "When we come to look at what Mrs Brooks was doing in July 2011, we always need to bear in mind the context. This was a big business for News International and for her. At all times she was aware there was a police inquiry, Operation Weeting," he added. Phone-hacking trial: Cheryl Carter arrives at the Old Bailey. Photograph: Barcroft Media The jury heard how Carter, along with her son Nick and Gary Keegan, the husband of Brooks's other personal assistant Deborah Keegan, went to Enfield to collect seven boxes of notebooks and took them to Carter's home. They were told they were selected for this exercise two days before the News of the World was to close because they could be trusted. Later, in an interview with police under caution, Carter said the boxes had in fact been mislabelled and contained her own notebooks, the prosecution said. The boxes of notebooks have never been found, Edis added. Carter was also alleged to have given a false alibi to the police about the whereabouts of Brooks on the same day claiming she was not in the office, when mobile phone records show that the two of them had been at News International's Wapping headquarters. "The false alibi was quite dishonest to cover what happened. Because she'd remember where the boss was on the Friday before the News of the World closed, wouldn't she?" said Edis. He claimed that Carter not only lied about the contents of the boxes but also about the reasons for removing them. Carter said when she was being questioned by police the reason why the boxes were removed was because Ian Mayes, the News International archivist, had asked her to move them because the archive was downsizing. Edis told the jury that was simply not true. "So there were a number of falsehoods about this exercise all of which were completely unnecessary if they related to material related to Mrs Carter, not Mrs Brooks," said Edis. Brooks ordered deletion of emails, court told Edis also alleged that Brooks ordered the deletion of emails that covered the entire period of her editorship of the News of the World and the Sun. It was "normal policy" for companies to have email deletion policies to improve efficiency. "There's nothing wrong with that in principle," he said, and News International's original plan was to delete everything "before December 2008". But by looking at "Mrs Brooks's personal involvement" in the email deletion, "we may learn what she hoped it might achieve for her", he said. In January 2010 Brooks sent an email to News International's legal affairs department asking: "What happens to my emails with deletion?" In June she inquired why the deletion programme was not already under way. "That's her chasing the implementation of the email deletion," said Edis. Then in August 2010 she sent another email reiterating that everyone needed to know that "anything before January 2010 will not be kept". When that date of January 2010 was queried, she replied: "Yes. January 2010. Clean sweep, Thanks." Edis said: "So there's a change in the date. Now it is anything before January 2010. Which happens to catch her entire time as a working editor at News International." On the changing of the email deletion date, Edis said: "We suggest that shows Mrs Brooks may have had a personal interest in this email deletion policy – both to the date of the cut-off and for her own personal emails – also that it should be got on with. "This is all going on in the context of the Guardian having published its article in the summer of 2009. "We suggest that there is some evidence that Mrs Brooks was keen to get rid of the material that related to her activities when she was editor, first of the News of the World and then of the Sun." Vince Cable: Brooks voiced concerns his stance on News Corp's BSkyB takeover. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA The jury was also shown an exchange of emails dating back to December 2010 between Brooks and Matthew Anderson, News International's head of corporate affairs. Brooks emailed Anderson about her concerns that Vince Cable, the business secretary, would not change his view on News International parent company News Corporation's bid to take full control of BSkyB. In an email dated 16 December 2010, she protested that the Financial Times was "attacking News International because News Corporation are trying to buy Sky", adding: "It's not going to change Cable's view of us." Anderson replied by saying he was confident that they could put some distance between the company and the phone hacking days of the past. "What we lose by not putting out a statement is credibility. We have spent months moving from rogue reporter to zero tolerance with some success," he wrote. Five days later, on 21 December 2011, Cable was stripped of responsibility for ruling on News Corp's Sky takeover after telling undercover Daily Telegraph reporters he was "at war" with Rupert Murdoch. The trial continues.

Rare Interview with Federal District Judge John R. Tunheim, Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, Adds Perspective to the Documents the ARRB Made Public and That are Now at the Center of Answering the Question: "Who Shot JFK?"; One-Hour Television Event Hosted by Award-Winning Journalist Bill Kurtis. REELZCHANNEL announced JFK: Inside the Evidence will premiere Monday, November 4 at 10pm ET/ 7pm PT. http://www.newsday.com/business/press-releases/reelzchannel-jfk-inside-the-evidence-special-to-premiere-monday-november-4-at-10pm-et-7pm-pt-1.6352179

Marina today: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2485077/Pictured-time-25-years-The-reclusive-widow-Lee-Harvey-Oswald-lives-fear-killed-Secret-Service-turned-3m-talk-JFK-assassination-ahead-50-year-anniversary.html

Ken, I do not know the answer to your question. Perhaps another forum member who is an expert on the assassination and Oswald can do this.

Weekend Edition November 1-3, 2013 cOUNTERPUNCH.ORG What’s Done Abroad Can be Done at Home Too... Is NSA Spying Really About Blackmail? by DAVE LINDORFF http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/01/is-nsa-spying-really-about-blackmail/ A revealing page-one article in today’s New York Times (“Tap on Merkel Provides Peek a Vast Spy Net”) reports on how the NSA’s global spying program, dating back at least to early in the Bush/Cheney administration, was vacuuming up the phone conversations (and no doubt later the internet communications) of not just leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but opposition leader Merkel before her party took power in Germany. As the Times puts it, the phone monitoring, which actually dates back to the Cold War Era before 1990, “is hardly limited to the 35 leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties.” That’s pretty far-reaching, and the paper says that it has learned, primarily courtesy of revelations from the documents released by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the spying went even beyond that, to target up-and-coming potential leaders of so-called “friendly states.” But the Times buys without question the explanation offered by professional xxxx James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence and ultimate head of the embattled National Security Agency, that the NSA’s spying on leaders and potential was and is and has been, first of all, well known to presidents, and secondly that its purpose was simply to see “if what they’re saying gels with what’s actually going on, as well as how other countries’ policies “impact us across a whole range of issues.” That’s pretty broad. The first explanation is really a euphemistic way of saying the NSA wants to see if American’s purported friends and allies are lying. The second is a euphemistic way of saying that the US is spying to gain inside information about its allies’ political goals and strategies, and probably their negotiating positions on things like trade treaties, international regulations, etc. What the Times does not ask in its entire report on this spying program on leaders and potential leaders is whether there could be another motive for this extraordinary spying campaign on leaders: blackmail. How else to explain the remarkably tepid response from the leaders who are the victims of this spying by the NSA on their private communications? How else to explain Europe’s unwillingness to grant sanctuary to Snowden, who after all has allowed them to know about the perfidy of the US? How else to explain Europe’s supine acquiescence to the US in its criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and its unquestioning support of Israel? Nor does the Times ask the next obvious question, which is: If the NSA is spying on foreign leaders so widely and thoroughly, actually recording the conversations, not just the numbers being called, and submitting the recordings to keyword searches, isn’t it likely doing the same thing to leaders in the US? And if it is possible to imagine that the NSA is enabling the blackmailing of foreign leaders, isn’t it equally possible that the same thing is going on domestically? Following that line of thinking, we should next ponder who would be doing the blackmailing? There has been some suggestion from the White House that the president “didn’t know” about the spying on Merkel and other leaders. Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander have denied that the president was kept in the dark about its spying on leaders of friendly nations, but both men are known to be liars regarding the NSA’s actions. Clapper indeed was forced to admit that he lied to Congress — and right there we have prima facie evidence that the NSA has been blackmailing members of Congress, or at least that the members of Congress think they are vulnerable to blackmail. This is because despite Clapper’s outrageous offense of lying to the Congress about his agency’s massive spying program, not one member of either Senate or House, or of the two Congressional Intelligence Committees, has called for a contempt resolution against him. How can that be? Members of Congress routinely cite or threaten to cite sports figures for contempt of Congress for lying to senators or representatives about their steroid use, and yet when the head of the nation’s spying organization network lies about an unprecedentedly huge spying operation, they just let it pass? T There has to be a reason for such cowardice in the face of such an institutional insult. It is nothing short of astonishing that with all the crimes being committed against the Constitution by this administration, the illegal war making, the spying on citizens, the lying by the White House, and the abject regulatory surrender to the banking industry — an industry universally reviled by the American public — that not one member of Congress has had the courage to file an impeachment resolution, the way Rep. Henry Gonzales (D-TX) did against George H. W. Bush in January 1991, when Pres. Bush the first launched the first US war on Iraq. It is nothing short of astonishing that in this age of routine Constitutional abuses and routinized corporate crime, there has been no Sen. Wayne Morse to question the whole premise of what is being done. (Recall that it was Sen. Morse (D-OR) who, along with Sen. Ernest Gruening (D-AK), voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which launched the US into a massive full-scale war in Indochina. (Apropos of this issue of blackmail, after Morse voted against the fraudulent Tonkin Resolution, and as he continued his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, it was later learned that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to surveil the senator in an effort to dig up information that could be used to silence him or defeat him politically.). I would argue that it is almost a certainty that the NSA spying on foreign leaders is just the tip of the political spying iceberg, and that the real horror is that it is spying on domestic politicians, and probably dropping hints to make it clear that it is in a position to blackmail them. On behalf of whom the NSA is acting is the question. Ordinarily one might assume it would be on behalf of the President and the White House, as was the case during President Johnson’s tenure. But in the present era, it may be that there are others who are in charge. This might explain the phenomenal weakness and lack of political will and courage of the current president. President Obama surely knows that the voters who elected him want an aggressive job creation program, want an end to foreign wars and a scaled down military, want a break-up of the big banks, and want national health care, not an insurance-industry-run Affordable (sic) Care Act that compels them to buy insurance from a private company, and that allows insurers to continue to suck profits out of the system. He knows too that the public wants not cuts in Social Security and Medicare, but expansions of both programs and improvements in benefits. Why would the president undermine his own legacy and the future prospects of his own party by failing to press for any of these issues? Why would he continually talk about a “Grand Bargain” that would involve cutting benefits to the poor and the elderly — two bulwarks of the Democratic Party’s majority. Could it be that he too is afraid of blackmail, or that has he already been successfully blackmailed? I of course don’t know the answer to these questions, but at this point they clearly need to be asked and contemplated. Years ago, I had an opportunity, with some journalist colleagues, to have an off-the-record dinner with Stanley Sporkin, currently a retired federal judge, but at the time the head of the enforcement division of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). One of the members of our group asked him how the SEC was able to discover some of the baroque corruption schemes that it was prosecuting (this was back in the last year of the administration of President Jimmy Carter, when the SEC still actually prosecuted corruption on Wall Street). Sporkin told us that members of his enforcement staff would actually sit around and dream up ways to defraud investors. Once they’d imaged a crooked scheme, they’d go out and look for evidence of it and, typically, they’d find someone doing it. The same, I suspect, is true of the NSA’s incredible new technological spying capabilities. If you can imagine that Kafkaesque agency doing something, it’s almost certain that the NSA is doing it. And right now I’m imagining massive NSA domestic and foreign political blackmail, on a staggering and unprecedented scale. And by the way, another NSA whistleblower, Russell Tice, has said that he was aware while at the NSA, that the agency, back in 2004, was spying on Barack Obama, then just a Democratic Senate candidate from Chicago. Besides, even if members of Congress and judges on the federal bench just think they’re being spied on and are thus vulnerable to blackmail, they are not likely to step out of line and vote or rule the wrong way. The only remaining question is who is behind all this spying and potential blackmail? Is the NSA itself a rogue operator acting to protect and expand its own power? Perhaps, but more likely, I would guess, is that some larger “permanent government” composed of the heads of key corporate interests — perhaps key leaders of the financial and the military/intelligence sectors and a few other key industries like the oil companies — is pulling the strings. Maybe Snowden has the answer to this question. If not, we’ll just have to wait for the next courageous whistleblower to come forward. Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the

Weekend Edition November 1-3, 2013 Counterpunch.org The Press and America's Pastor When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill a Million People by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/01/when-billy-graham-urged-nixon-to-kill-a-million-people/

John F Kennedy assassination: 50 years of conspiracy in fiction and film http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/john-f-kennedy-assassination-50-years-conspiracy-books-film

One key factor that may keep interest in the JFK assassination from dying after the 50th anniversary is the large number of videos that have been made concerning the event. Here are two videos that were made the day of the assassination. One has Oswald responding to reporters' questions and the other is a statement by the president of the Dallas Bar Association after he met with Oswald regarding legal representation:

THE 50th ANNIVERSARY MONTH OF THE MURDER OF JFK: SOME THOUGHTS November 2, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell I must confess, I enter the blogging phase for the month of November, 2013, with reluctance and trepidation, for as most know, this month, and the 22nd of this month, is the 50th anniversary of the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I did not suspect, that as a boy of six, home sick from school that Friday, that I would literally watch a president be murdered, and later that weekend, his alleged assassin’s murder. I did not suspect that, fifty years later, I would be writing this blog, and series of blogs, on the implications of that event, for the continued deterioration of American society, culture, and what remains of civil political discourse. There remain those in America that, in all honesty and sincerity, still believe the official story. I have no quarrel with them, nor even with the more sinister shills in public life who still promote the official version in spite of the mountain of evidence that it was, and was intended to be, a tapestry of lies and coverups. To make my own position clear, I am on of the growing majority of Americans who believe there was a conspiracy to murder the president that day, one going very deep, and embracing a multitude of factional interests. I am also one, within that group, of a smaller subset of people who believe essentially that a coup d’etat was staged that day, and that on that day, an oligarchy took open control of the instrumentalities of power, and has not relinquished them since. Or rather, it reasserted its privileged position in the face of an administration that threatened to unseat it. The implications of the coup hypothesis are, however, deep and profound, for ultimately, one of them is that the unresponsiveness of government institutions to the genuine wishes of the people can be rationalized: that non-responsiveness is the result of an oligarchical system, of a deep state that saw its privileged position threatened by the Kennedy Administration. There were, of course, scandals and deeply divisive issues in prior American history. One need only think of the populist movement, the election of 1896, and its ultimate denouement with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the IRS in 1913. There was the infamous Teapot Dome scandal. But the Kennedy assassination is different, for the reasons of what followed, the infamous and egregious examples of the fallout and blowback from that event. It qualitatively changed this country and its political culture profoundly for the worse. The prelude was Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex. The climax was Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963. The aftermath has been Watergate, Iran-Contra, BCCI, Nugan-Hand, the Savings and Loan Scandal, Waco, Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, and, of course, 9/11. All are manifestations of a covert culture of power and covert operations, of government by gunshot and and false flag ops. And the first shot, literally, in that transformation of the republic into an oligarchical state run by technocrats, military men, intelligence agency gurus, and financial paper shufflers and secret bookkeeping. When the ugly threat to promoted memes and oligarchical agendas occasionally occurs, that threat is removed. By scandal if possible, by “wet measures” if necessary. One can think of the more-than-suspicious deaths of US Senator Paul Wellstone(D-Minnesota), of Congressmen Begich(D-Alaska), Long(D-Louisiana), not to mention, of course, the murder of Robert Kennedy, and Dr. King. And on and on one could go. Having been a boy when it happened, the event has stuck with me all my life. I remember Lyndon Johnson being sworn in, I remember Lee Harvey Oswald being murdered on TV while Ike Pappas, the CBS news journalist reported, stunned, on the event. I remember when the Warren Commission Report was excerpted in our local newspaper, with its cute diagram of the “Magic Bullet.” I remember thinking we are being lied to, that something was deeply wrong. Above all, I remember the comments of my family and its friends: no one… absolutely no one in my family or its circle of friends believed the official story. A kind of sullen gloom descended for days. There were discussions around the kitchen table with friends over games of cards. The concensus? All agreed the truth would never come out completely, and the reason why was that a fundamental change had occurred in the nature of government. Happily, fifty years has proven at least a part of that prognosis untrue. The truth has come out due to the tireless and dogged research of literally hundreds of people who knew they were being lied to. Most people now believe the assassination was the work of a conspiracy. What most do not yet realize, are the deep connections of that event, via the same factions and interests of the deep state, to the other scandals that have been a feature of American governance and its “scandal per decade” since then. The only thing that has not changed is that the same corruption persist and has only deepened its divisive grip on the country. That grip tightened on Nov 22, 1963, to be sure. It has tightened even more in the decades since. But it is not yet total, nor complete. That’s why the Kennedy assassination still matters. And that’s why it matters to drill home, over and over again, to all those who will listen, that it was the work of a massive conspiracy. Because once that is understood, people will start to understand why the system is so broken. See you on the flip side. Read more: THE 50th ANNIVERSARY MONTH OF THE MURDER OF JFK: SOME THOUGHTS - Giza Death Star Community

Who shot JFK? Ask the man who was there Fifty years on, the one reporter who saw President John F Kennedy assassinated, Lee Harvey Oswald arrested and Jack Ruby open fire talks about what happened By Nigel Richardson 8:26PM GMT 01 Nov 2013 The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10420732/Who-shot-JFK-Ask-the-man-who-was-there.html This is how fate works. Hugh Aynesworth was a 32-year-old reporter with the Dallas Morning News when President John F Kennedy came to town on November 22 1963 – 50 years ago this month. That morning, feeling miffed that he wasn’t assigned to cover the story, Aynesworth finished his breakfast in the newspaper canteen – where, incidentally, a fellow diner was a well-known police groupie and Dallas low-life called Jack Ruby – and decided to stroll the four blocks to Dealey Plaza to see the presidential motorcade pass “because you don’t see a president every day, you know”. When the first shot rang out, he thought it was a motorcycle backfiring – there were plenty of police motorcycles around that day. “But the second and third shots were very clearly the whine of rifle shots,” he remembers. In the few seconds it took to assassinate a president, an era was defined – and Aynesworth’s life became enmeshed in it forever, as he explains to me in an interview at his home in Dallas. For once, the phrase “eyewitness to history” is not overblown. Aynesworth is the only reporter who was present at all the key moments: the shooting of the president; the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald; and the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby. He seems to have spent the rest of his life in a love-hate relationship with that fact and now, at 82, he is facing his own stock-taking as Dallas prepares to commemorate a painful anniversary. Back then, Aynesworth recalls, the city was a stronghold of “red-meat and wing-nut conservatism”; Kennedy, the modernising East Coast Democrat, was viscerally loathed and there was “bitter vitriol” in the air in the run-up to his visit. Locals are quick to point out that, half a century on, there are few people living there now who were around then, that the city that killed a president is a changed, cosmopolitan place (with a population that is more than 40 per cent Hispanic). Dallas prefers to boast of its football team, the world-famous Dallas Cowboys, of its 160 museums and art galleries, and the 18 Fortune 500 companies (America’s richest corporations) that have chosen to call it home – even if there is inescapable irony in its current marketing slogan: “Big things happen here”. Aynesworth has chosen not to attend the commemoration in Dealey Plaza on November 22 – a ticket-only event for 5,000 people that will take place in a security lock‑down – fearing that “something embarrassing” will happen (by which he means that a conspiracy nut will pull a stunt. “What would be the greatest thing for someone trying to sell a book? To get arrested by the Dallas police.”) But he has finally made his peace with fate by writing a book of his own for a modest local imprint, entitled November 22, 1963: Witness to History. It concurs with the conclusion of the 1964 Warren Commission report that there was only one shooter, Oswald, and no plot involving the mob, Vice President Johnson, Fidel Castro, J Edgar Hoover or the man in the moon, and that Oswald and Ruby were complete strangers. If that’s an unpromising standpoint from a marketing point of view – a poll earlier this year found that 59 per cent of Americans still believe Oswald didn’t act alone – the book has two rare qualities in JFK assassination literature: authority and integrity. The taxi driver who drove me out to Aynesworth’s discreetly affluent neighbourhood (George W Bush lives nearby) was from Togo, West Africa. He was 11 at the time of the Kennedy assassination and, like practically everyone in the world then alive and sentient, he remembers it well: the day off school that it procured, the sense of disbelief. In the intervening years, Aynesworth has struggled not to be defined by this single event. But its enormity has defeated him. “I’ve done so many other things, covered so much,” he says of a distinguished career in investigative reporting across national newspapers, magazines and television (he has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist four times). “But I don’t know. [The Kennedy assassination] changed me because everybody, when they hear my name, they connect me to that story.” “I think it changed him irrevocably,” says Paula, his wife, as she brings us iced teas in their front room and shoos away the cat. “It’s an odd thing, a very odd thing. Weird, that he was there in so many places.” Or you could call it reporter’s luck. It took a few seconds, he says, for his instincts to kick in after the echoes of the shots faded and pandemonium broke out around him in Dealey Plaza. Then, realising there had been an assassination attempt, he requisitioned a novelty pencil from a little boy (giving the lad two quarters for it), found two utility bills in his pocket to write on, and he was in business. Aynesworth was the first reporter to interview the most important witness of all, a pipe-fitter called Howard Brennan who was standing across Houston Street from him, facing the Texas School Book Depository, when the shots were fired at 12.30pm. “He had his hard hat with him. And he was scared to death. He said, 'I saw him up there in the window! He’s right up there!’ ” Brennan’s description of the suspect he had seen in the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository formed the basis of the APB (all points bulletin) broadcast on police radios 15 minutes later, and picked up by Patrolman JD Tippit in the Oak Cliff area of the city. Tippit approached a man who answered the description and the man – who was indeed Oswald – shot and killed him. Aynesworth heard of Tippit’s murder on the radio of a police motorcycle parked outside the Book Depository and immediately suspected a connection with what had just happened in Dealey Plaza (“It was good reasoning for a change,” he says modestly). This hunch took him to the scene of the Tippit shooting, where he learnt from another overheard report, on an FBI man’s radio, that the suspect had entered the Texas Theater cinema a few blocks away. Here it was, as a film called War is Hell flickered in the background, that Aynesworth came face to face with Lee Harvey Oswald. He saw Oswald pull his .38 on Officer Nick McDonald, who managed to get his hand in the firing mechanism to jam it, then Kennedy’s assassin was jumped on by five or six policemen. “They knocked him down and that’s when he got the cut on his face. But he fought pretty good for a little guy.” The next time Aynesworth saw Oswald was two days later in the basement of City Hall (the Dallas Police HQ), where he was being moved to the county jail. “I was about as far as from here to the swimming pool” – he points through the window to the garden beyond. “No, not that far, 15 feet maybe. People were in front of me but I saw Ruby lunge forward, I heard the pop – one shot.” That shot from Ruby’s Colt Cobra is the full stop on an extraordinary 48‑hour narrative with which Aynesworth is uniquely associated. But his story did not end there. Over the 50 years since, he has gone deep into the background to events, getting to know Oswald’s widow, Marina (with whom he is still in touch: the most surreal moment of our interview is when he plays back her Russian-accented voice on his telephone answering machine), the Ruby family and many witnesses, and running down “oh gosh, dozens and dozens of conspiracy theories”. Watching fruitcakes and frauds get rich peddling hokum to an eager world (he reserves special contempt for the Oliver Stone film JFK) has been tough for him. “The only lucrative business from a reporting standpoint has been conspiracy,” he said. “For every book that tells the exact truth, or tries to, there are 25 conspiracy books.” But he has always refused to make a killing from the killing. “Who do you think, given my background, would like to 'solve’ the assassination more than me? God! All I can say is, there’s not one scintilla of evidence to the contrary [that both Oswald and Ruby acted alone].” “He’s a beautifully humble man,” chips in Paula. “If he was a xxxx, he’d be so rich.” Aynesworth’s conclusion should be the final word on the events of half a century ago, but he knows it never will be. “We all love a conspiracy. No one wants to believe two nobodies could change the course of world history. But they did."

Tabloid Hacked Prince Harry’s Phone, Jury Is Told By STEVEN ERLANGER Published: November 1, 2013 The New York Times LONDON — The tabloid The News of the World, now defunct, hacked into Prince Harry’s cellphone in 2005 to write an article about how he had sought help from his private secretary, a former member of the military, to prepare a term paper for officers’ school at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the jury in Britain’s phone hacking trial heard on Friday.The young prince was seeking help for a paper on the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege in London. He asked his private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former Special Air Service officer who trained at Sandhurst: “Just wondering if you have any info at all on siege on the Iranian Embassy because I need to write an essay quite quickly on that. I need some inf. Have most of the stuff but if you have extra.” Help in doing academic work is a violation of academy rules, but there were few repercussions for the prince, now 29 and a helicopter gunner with the British Army. A prosecutor, Andrew Edis, read the transcript of the voice mail message and said the newspaper article was “based entirely” on it, although, he told the jury, the editors were careful that the article not be too specific, in an effort to disguise how the information had been obtained. The transcript was taken from Clive Goodman, the former royal editor of The News of the World, who was jailed over phone hacking in 2007 and lost his job. He apparently kept the document as part of a suit he filed against the newspaper, in which he claimed that senior editors supported his actions. The message was taken from Prince Harry’s phone by a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who was also jailed over phone hacking in 2007. He was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the newspaper and has pleaded guilty to additional charges of phone hacking. Mr. Edis, who is laying out the prosecution’s case before presenting evidence, said Andy Coulson, one of the tabloid’s senior editors, and Mr. Goodman had discussed how to publish the article about Prince Harry’s seeking help from his secretary without revealing how they learned of it. They decided not to refer to the siege itself, because it would be “too precise to get through unnoticed,” the prosecutor said. Mr. Edis also said Mr. Coulson had emailed a journalist at the tabloid to order him to “do” a celebrity’s phone, telling the jury that it would have to decide what the verb meant. The celebrity in question was the son of a famous soccer player, George Best. The prosecution is trying to prove that the eight defendants, among them Mr. Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, another senior editor at The News of The World, are guilty of crimes that include conspiracy to violate privacy and to suborn officials by paying them. In one instance, Mr. Coulson is said to have told Mr. Goodman to pay 1,000 pounds in cash to a policeman for a copy of the royal telephone directory. Mr. Edis claims that the acts of News of the World journalists could not have been unknown or unapproved by their senior editors. Journalists at the newspaper, he said, used phone hacking as a “perfectly rational but entirely illegal” way of finding and substantiating stories about the rich and famous.