Paul Rigby

Mark Lane is still alive and yet when someone challenged your interpretation ... you didn't bother trying to contact Mark so to try and avoid misrepresenting something that he had written. In this case, Lane read an article or saw something on TV that referenced Zapruder by way of the Muchmore film. You were made aware of this long ago and did nothing to validate your position.

”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html

Don't work, Bill: Lane explicity states the stills in Life were taken from the film shown on television. Couldn't be clearer.

Second, I have every intention of contacting Lane. He'll be invited to post his recollections directly onto the thread. Unlike you, I don't rely on secret back channels, and publicly cite my sources.

Third, how do you know what his response will be? Unless you've contacted him previously, you couldn't possibly know his response. Perhaps you're psychic.

Four, if you haven't contacted Lane, you're a hypocrite for chiding others for failure to do so. After all, what's stopping you?

I am always asking Gary Mack if these people bothered to contact him to acquire any data before posting their conclusions and the answer I get is in almost every instance is "NO!" We aren't talking about Mack's opinions, but instead the data pertaining to the witnesses and/or films. The Museum even has what is called an 'Oral History' which is where many of the people involved in and around the assassination either as a witness or in some other capacity was interviewed so to get a detailed accounting of their experience, which can add clarification to an issue being discussed here, but no one bothers to ask about them. Instead, we are flooded with peoples interpretations - often times we only hear what appears to be only slanted partial version of the facts when all this could be avoided by a more in-depth search for the available data.

The reputation of Mack for bias is legend and justified. A new and different curator of the Museum is another matter.

Paul

Well, let's start with a positive: Bogota Ripples is excellent stuff, for which commendation. I shall return to it in future and pay you the deserved compliment of citing it as a source.

So, to the negatives:

1) Your attempt to argue that Heroes was an inappropriate place to mention the minor fact that Pilger thought there was a second gunman in the pantry is bizarre, particularly since the book contains both a long, utterly standard New Left attack on RFK, and stuff on a very big CIA conspiracy with regard to Vietnam. If the former was indeed the cynical establishment figure of that NL caricature, what need for an elaborate plot to kill him? In suppressing the information about the presence of a second gunman, Pilger was very obviously protecting the NL party line. Now why would a truly independent - and thoroughly fearless, we are led to believe - investigative journalist do that? Have we run into yet another "left gatekeeper"?

2) Writing that it's hard to argue with the proposition that Sirhan was "one of the shooters" is an opinion, and is very obviously an erroneous one: Had Sirhan fired real bullets, the real assassin, standing right behind the target, might well have had his head blown off. One sees immediately the downside, for the plotters at least, of such an occurrence.

3) Asking questions about the veracity and timing of Pilger's journalism on RFK and his murder is no more a "witchhunt" - good to see that understatement and perspective are alive and well "Down Under" - than any other piece of research. Perhaps I've stepped on a raw Aussie nerve or two? Presumably confirmation that Pilger did suppress all mention of a second gunman in his contemporaneous reportage would transform what you ludicrously style "a witchhunt" into routine research?

4) Why not join in the research on Pilger? Aren't you even a tad curious? I know I am.

Paul

Paul, with due respect, to my mind, what is written only reinforces what I'd guessed previously... it was not the right book to be going off about second shooters and conspiracies. And maybe Pilger did not even have a say in that...

In any case, there is no contradiction between what he said in Heroes and more recent statements because he clearly still believes Sirhan was one of the shooters (a hard one to dispute really).

Couldn’t agree more. After all, it’s only another sixty plus pages on before Pilger introduces the CIA’s creation of “a master illusion” (the republic of Vietnam) and one “Ralph W. McGehee,” who “was for twenty five-years a career officer…and one of the creators of such illusions…an expert in ‘black propaganda,’ which is known today as ‘disinformation’” (Ibid., p.185). Not the remotest connection, there, surely, with the creation of the myth of Sirhan Sirhan as RFK’’s lone-nut assassin?

Paul, since Pilger was not pushing a conspiracy or lone nut scenario in the limited space he gave the assassination of RFK in Heroes, your suggestion he should have connected black propaganda ops in Vietnam to the creation of a mythical lone nut assassin re RFK, is asking quite a bit of Pilger - or indeed - anyone who deigns to write a passage or two about such things in a book which does not have conspiracy theories as the main thesis.

Likewise with your uncritical acceptance of the “fact” that Sirhan fired real bullets in the pantry.

Ease up a bit, mate. I never offered any opinion as to what was fired from Sirhan's weapon. By all means, correct me when I get the facts wrong, but don't put words in my mouth and on the basis of those (your) words, accuse me of anything like "uncritical acceptance".

I must have missed the independent investigation into the murder. No matter. Readers of a less establishmentarian cast of mind than your own might care to have a look at a fascinating chapter within The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (LA: Feral House, 2003), the DiEugenio/Pease anthology. The title of the Lisa Pease- authored chapter in question? The RFK Plot Part 1: The Grand Illusion – see pp.566 -570, in particular.

Establishmentarian? You can call me anything, Paul. That's a new one, though, and tremendously funny.

Readers of the Assassinations might also like to check out Bogota Ripples - which draws many similarities between Juan Roa Sierra and Sirhran Sirhan, and concludes that Sierra was the probably the first mind controlled assassin of the CIA.

Then there's the interesting quesion of Pilger's contemporaneous reportage of the RFK assassination. Is there any mention within it of a second-shooter? I don't know, but I'm beginning to suspect there wasn't.

I agree it would be good to know exactly what he said back then. The earliest "second shooter" account from Pilger I have located is in a 1988 edition of New Statement. He calls shopping malls and homicide the twin symbols of the 20th century in the US, and includes in the latter, "the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the piled dead of Vietnam, the victim of the assassins bullet."

"The Ambassador Hotel", he goes on, "can provide the latter" before going on to state the impossibility of Sirhan as Lone Nut, his encounter the next day with a witness to the Polka Dot lady etc.

Honestly Paul, before you go lambasting him for what you feel he should have included in Heroes, I think it's up to you to track down exactly what he did say contemporaneously. If he failed to mention in '68 the likelihood of at least one other shooter, I'll be an individual just like you, grab my pitchfork and lamp and join your merry little witch hunt. At least then, I'll know it's warranted.

Paul

Paul, with due respect, to my mind, what is written only reinforces what I'd guessed previously... it was not the right book to be going off about second shooters and conspiracies. And maybe Pilger did not even have a say in that...

In any case, there is no contradiction between what he said in Heroes and more recent statements because he clearly still believes Sirhan was one of the shooters (a hard one to dispute really).

Couldn’t agree more. After all, it’s only another sixty plus pages on before Pilger introduces the CIA’s creation of “a master illusion” (the republic of Vietnam) and one “Ralph W. McGehee,” who “was for twenty five-years a career officer…and one of the creators of such illusions…an expert in ‘black propaganda,’ which is known today as ‘disinformation’” (Ibid., p.185). Not the remotest connection, there, surely, with the creation of the myth of Sirhan Sirhan as RFK’’s lone-nut assassin?

Likewise with your uncritical acceptance of the “fact” that Sirhan fired real bullets in the pantry. I must have missed the independent investigation into the murder. No matter. Readers of a less establishmentarian cast of mind than your own might care to have a look at a fascinating chapter within The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (LA: Feral House, 2003), the DiEugenio/Pease anthology. The title of the Lisa Pease- authored chapter in question? The RFK Plot Part 1: The Grand Illusion – see pp.566 -570, in particular.

Then there's the interesting quesion of Pilger's contemporaneous reportage of the RFK assassination. Is there any mention within it of a second-shooter? I don't know, but I'm beginning to suspect there wasn't.

Paul

I take it you enjoyed the post, then, Bill? Thought you might.

Paul

Actually, I think anytime someone like yourself will run up threads about someone like Lane and what he has said concerning the Zapruder film without first making sure that you are speaking for the man correctly is irresponsible ... especially when you attempt to try and tie him in with supporting your pushing for Zapruder film alteration. Isn't it always the case ... misstate the record - avoid checking your facts - and then use someone like Mark Lane's name to promote your paranoia. If you don't like hearing what I said, then I doubt you'll like hearing what Mark Lane will say about it.

Bill Miller

I'm fascinated to know, Bill, how quoting Lane verbatim from an early 1963 piece of his constitutes a) "misstating" the record; avoiding checking facts; and c) promoting paranoia? Your third piece of frippery is particularly absurd given the nature of Lane's article. Remind me, what exactly was Lane seeking to achieve with that original defense brief of his - spread contentment with the official line?

Translated, all your post amounts to is - "Your citations are accurate, but I don't like the conclusion you draw from them, nor the hypothesis which lead you to look for supporting evidence in the first place." Tough. Now do something constructive for a change and explain what on earth possessed Lane to write of having seen the Zapruder film on TV in Nov-Dec 1963?

Paul

Saddam Hussein engaged in the genocidal extermination of over 50,000 Kurds. He idolized Josef Stalin. Saddam oppressed a Shia majority in favor of the Sunni minority, of which he was a member. The police state tactics he engaged in (and his son) are reported to have been cruel in the extreme (’The War Crimes of Saddam Hussein’, ’Life Under Saddam Hussein’, reported by Human Rights Watch, et al).

A piece of historical revisionism worthy of inclusion in a Soviet-era encyclopedia: Hussein was a creature of the CIA, and it was the US which both instigated his invasion of Iran and furnished him with the weaponry. Just another Langley mass murderer, in other words.

With respect to the Anglo American investment there: I understand the contempt this investment has garnered, but regardless of the benefit to Mugabe, creating and enforcing a virtual embargo on Zimbabwe can, and likely would, result in greater suffering for the innocent population than the government would ever suffer.

Don't forget the likely suffering of those hard-pressed Conservative MPs, many of them down to their last million or so:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/polit...ery-856583.html

Blood money: the MPs cashing in on Zimbabwe's misery: Tory frontbenchers are among those with shares in companies accused of propping up the violent – and now illegal – regime in Harare. Jane Merrick and Archie Bland report

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve heads a list of Tory MPs with sizeable shareholdings in companies accused of propping up Robert Mugabe's regime, The Independent on Sunday can reveal today.

Three of David Cameron's frontbenchers are among six Conservatives – and one Liberal Democrat – with investments together worth more than £1m in firms trading in Zimbabwe. The revelations will embarrass the Tory leader, who has sought to take the moral high ground over the crisis in Zimbabwe.

Mr Cameron has called on all companies and individuals with "any dealings" in Zimbabwe to examine their consciences and ensure that they are not keeping Mr Mugabe in power.

The companies include Anglo American, the mining giant rebuked last week for pushing ahead with a new £200m platinum mine in Zimbabwe, Rio Tinto, Standard Chartered, Barclays, Shell and BP.

The controversy will also hit Mr Cameron's attempts to consign sleaze to history.

In February, in echoes of Tony Blair's vow in 1997 to be "purer than pure", the Tory leader said: "Any arrangements we enter into are ones we are prepared to protect and defend in a court of public opinion." In June, he said: "Anyone who flies under the Conservative banner carries a wider responsibility to the reputation of the party."

But in recent months Mr Cameron has been hit by scandals involving MPs Derek Conway, Caroline Spelman, the party's chairman, and MEPs.

While the seven MPs at the centre of the Zimbabwe row have not broken any rules, critics have asked if it was morally right to own shares in firms giving a lifeline to Mr Mugabe. The MPs' investments have been described as "blood shares" which they should sell immediately in protest at the violence during the presidential elections.

When he was Prime Minister in the early 1970s, Edward Heath rounded on Lonrho over its investments in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, and labelled its chief, Tiny Rowland, the "unacceptable face of capitalism".

Mr Mugabe was expected to be sworn in today for a new term after a poll which was denounced as a sham, by, among others, the internal advisory group of Independent News and Media, publishers of The Independent on Sunday. Scores of opposition supporters were killed by forces loyal to Mr Mugabe since challengers put their names forward three months ago.

Mr Grieve insisted the shares had been declared in the "proper way". He added: "The Conservative Party has made it clear that companies operating in Zimbabwe must adhere to the highest ethical standards and I fully endorse that view."

Mr Grieve owns shares in Anglo American, Standard Chartered, Rio Tinto and Shell. Each investment is worth more than £60,000 – meaning his total shareholdings are more than £240,000.

One shadow minister, Robert Goodwill, admitted he was "not proud" to be a shareholder in Barclays, but said it was "not a very good time to sell shares". The suggestion that he was concerned about the stock market was described last night as "despicable".

Last Wednesday Mr Cameron told Gordon Brown at Prime Minister's Questions: "Businesses and individuals that have any dealings with Zimbabwe must examine their responsibilities and ensure they do not make investments that prop up the regime." William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, has urged companies investing in Zimbabwe to "examine their consciences very carefully".

Firms insist that their involvement keeps people in jobs and fights poverty. Yet experts say that a quarter of all hard currency traded in and out of Zimbabwe is creamed off by Mugabe.

Parliamentary rules state that shares worth more than an MP's salary of £61,820 must go on the register of interests. The latest register lists six Tory MPs and one Lib Dem MP with shareholdings in one or more companies that have interests in Zimbabwe.

Shadow Business minister Jonathan Djanogly owns shares in Barclays, BP, Shell, WPP and Tesco. He said: "Shareholders should be encouraged to make representations to the companies in which they invest. I have no comment on my own personal shareholdings."

Shadow Transport minister Mr Goodwill owns shares in Barclays. "I don't have any influence in the bank because the size of my shares," he said. "If I tried ringing the chairman of Barclays, he wouldn't talk to me. But anything we can do to bring pressure to bear on this dreadful regime and evil man needs to be done. I don't feel particularly proud to be a Barclays shareholder, but I think it is better to bring pressure to bear as a shareholder than selling the shares. And probably because it is not a very good time to sell the shares."

Anthony Steen, Tory MP for Totnes, said he had no idea that Unilever and Shell were doing business in Zimbabwe. "I would like to do everything I can to help get rid of this evil regime and I am going to discuss it with David Cameron as to how he sees that I might be able to assist."

Three MPs with shares in the firms could not be contacted for comment: Tim Boswell, MP for Daventry, owns shares in Barclays and Tesco; Sir John Stanley owns shares in Shell; Sir Robert Smith, Lib Dem MP for Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine, has shares in Rio Tinto and Shell.

Barclays has attracted the greatest controversy for its Zimbabwean operations. It owns two- thirds of Barclays Bank Zimbabwe, and has to buy £23m in government bonds under the terms of its licence. It also contributes to a government loan scheme that has lent money to at least five ministers for farm improvements. The British parent company took a £12m dividend in 2006, and the Zimbabwean subsidiary's profits rose by 135 per cent in 2007.

Barclays insists it "always seeks to conduct its business in an ethical and responsible manner" and complies with EU sanctions.

Standard Chartered Bank contributes money through the same compulsory bonds as Barclays. Earlier this month, the Foreign Office confirmed that it was investigating if the firm had breached EU sanctions. Unlike Barclays, Standard Chartered operates in Zimbabwe directly, rather than through a subsidiary. The bank said that thousands of people rely on it for wages, and it had an obligation to stay.

Anglo American, the biggest platinum miner in the world, plans to invest an additional £200m in its mine at Unki, the biggest overseas investment in the country to date. Anglo has defended pouring new money into the country as part of its responsibility to the local community. The opposition MDC said that the decision made Anglo "complicit in the regime".

Rio Tinto, a rival mining giant, has a diamond mine at Murowa.

A spokesman defended the company's continued activity there as part of "a duty to our workforce and the community", but said there would be no new investment until the political situation stabilises.

Between them, Shell and BP control 40 per cent of Zimbabwe's petrol market, distributing fuel to more than 200 sites around the country through BP/Shell Marketing Services Ltd. Neither is directly involved in retail, but BP has 70 employees there. A BP spokesman said it was important to maintain supply to its customers in Zimbabwe.

Unilever has run a soap factory in the country since 2001, when it moved there from Zambia. It makes a loss, and says it will examine its options in the region.

Tesco is one of several British supermarkets, including Morrisons and Waitrose, to source food from Zimbabwe, including sugar snap peas and green beans. Dr Vincent Magombe, director of the pressure group African Inform International, has accused the company of taking food "watered by the blood and tears of the Zimbabwean people". But a Tesco spokesperson said: "There s precious little employment of any sort in Zimbabwe and it would be irresponsible to deprive thousands of people of their only means of feeding their families."

The advertising giant WPP pledged to sell its share of a Zimbabwean affiliate, Imago, because the firm's managing director had been working on ads for the Mugabe campaign.

Labour MP John Mann said: "Politicians profiting from the blood of the Zimbabwean people need to consider their position. What this shows is that greed for money supersedes moral responsibility." Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb said: "It is a despicable attitude to put personal interests before the interests of the people of Zimbabwe."

Mr Cameron declined to comment on the IoS revelations.

Tory politicians touched by the 'whiff of sleaze'

Caroline Spelman

The Tory party chairman is under investigation by Parliament's standards commissioner over payments from her parliamentary expenses to her nanny a decade ago. Mrs Spelman, who referred the case herself after it was revealed on 'Newsnight', denies wrongdoing. She claims Tina Haynes was employed from 1997 to 1999 to look after her children and do some secretarial work. Her other secretary, Sally Hammond, said she was "shocked" to discover how much Ms Haynes was paid.

Sir Nicholas and Ann Winterton

The husband and wife Tory MPs bought a Westminster flat as a second home in 2002, which they placed in a trust for their children. They claimed £165,828 in rent on expenses, though it was bought outright. The practice was then within the rules, but was banned in 2006. After investigation, standards commissioner John Lyon this month found the couple had committed an "unequivocal" breach of parliamentary rules, but did not order them to repay the money.

Derek Conway

The MP was suspended from the Commons for 10 days in January for misusing public funds after putting his son Freddie on the payroll for apparently very little work. But when it emerged that the MP had also paid his elder son Henry as a researcher in his parliamentary office, Mr Cameron threw Mr Conway out of the Conservative Party. Mr Conway will stand down as MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup at the next election.

Giles Chichester

The Tory MEP was forced to quit as Conservative group leader earlier this month for ploughing £445,000 through a company where he was a paid director. At first he tried to apologise – "hands up, mea culpa" – but Mr Cameron told him to go, after the breach in European Parliament rules. The row also triggered the departure of Tory MEP, Den Dover, as chief whip in Brussels. Mr Dover denied breaking any rules in paying his wife and daughter a reported £750,000 for work over nine years, but the whiff of sleaze forced him out.

To have your say on this or any other issue visit www.independent.co.uk/IoSblogs

Thanks for posting this. It is one of the few examples of a left-wing journalists taking interest in the case. Robin Ramsay looks at this issue in his latest book, Politics & Paranoia.

Do you know if Pilger wrote anthing else on this case?

Possibly more so re RFK since if memory serves he was there and swore more than one gun was blasting away.

But not, Greg, in his 1986 book (reprinted in paperback in 1989), Heroes, in which there is no mention whatever of a second gunman in the relevant passage on RFK's murder (Pan paperback, 1989, pp.128-9). Odd, no?

Paul

Maybe Paul. I haven't read it, so I can only speculate that perhaps a diversion into assassination conspiracy didn't fit the parameters of the book. There have, I'm sure been a number of books and articles which touch on JFK where no opinion on the assassination is rendered, even though the author believes it to have been the result of a conspiracy.

Here's what he told Ms Goodman at Democracy Now:

There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins. And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.

And here's Pilger working as an assiduous salesman for the official lone-nut nonsense:

Kennedy jumped down from the podium, shook more hands and, with Rosie Greer cutting a swathe through the crush, headed for the kitchen. Inside the pantry serving-area, he shook hands with a chef in his big white hat and with others of the kitchen staff, who were mostly blacks and chicanos; and then, before thought and sound could be synchronised, there were reports like balloons bursting or flash bulbs popping; they were not shots, I thought, because surely it could not happen again. The unreality persisted, until a woman collapsed at my side with blood trickling from her head. She had been shot. Several had been shot, including Senator Kennedy.

The staring little man in the kitchen had taken a .22 revolver from underneath his yellow jacket, jumped on to a table and taken aim; Kennedy had seen him, screamed, ‘No!’ and half-glanced for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He had been shot still smiling that rabbit smile of his, and he lay beside a refrigerator with a chicano dishwasher kneeling over him. Ethel flailed out with her fists, her lips sucked in with the horror and shock, and for a brief time she prevented anybody, even friends, from touching her husband. ‘Where’s the doctor?’ she shouted; and when a brooch fell from her dress on to Kennedy’s chin, she put her face close to his and said, ‘I’m sorry, my darling, please forgive me…’

From somewhere a priest appeared and said, ‘I must be with Senator Kennedy. You know that!’ Rosie Greer, tears flowing with rage, lifted Sirhan Sirhan off his feet, smashed his hand and disarmed him. Others attempted to beat their fists on his small body, but Greer protected him in a stranglehold that might have dispatched him there and then had four policeman not arrived and run with him from the hotel…

Robert Kennedy died the next day…And the assassin said in a television interview, ‘I loved him…he was the hope of all the poor people in this country. I’m not rich, otherwise, I wouldn’t be here on this programme. I had no identity, no hope, no goal to strive for. Everyone in America loves a winner, and I was a loser,’

John Pilger. Heroes (London: Pan Books, paperback edition,1989), pp.128-130.

Defective memory syndrome, perhaps?

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/5/democ...obert_f_kennedy

June 05, 2008

Democracy Now! Special: Robert F. Kennedy’s Life and Legacy 40 Years After His Assassination

The Australian British journalist John Pilger was with Robert F. Kennedy the night he was killed. Pilger had been covering the Kennedy campaign as it traveled across the country. He has written critically of Kennedy’s record as Attorney General and as presidential candidate.

Earlier today, I spoke with John Pilger on the telephone from Italy. He was reporting for the Daily Mirror at the time and had one of the last interviews with Robert F. Kennedy, which he described as a long, languorous interview, in which Robert Kennedy took out some beer, was relaxed, was in a small plane, his campaign plane, speaking with this journalist reporting for the British Daily Mirror. John Pilger is known for scores of documentaries he has done over the decades, more than fifty of them, on everything from Vietnam to Cambodia to East Timor to Iraq. His latest film is called The War on Terror.

I asked John Pilger to describe the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot.

JOHN PILGER: I had been traveling with Robert Kennedy as a correspondent for the London Mirror in the end of May, early June, primarily through California. And this was the primary that Kennedy had to win to show that he could gain the nomination. In fact, by winning in California, which he did, he would almost certainly have gained the nomination.

But I had one of the last interviews with Kennedy. In those days, there was good access to the candidates. There were spin doctors, but the protection around the candidate was fairly minimal, in that you could speak to him and have an interview. And I had a very long interview with Kennedy, in which I asked him about his alleged opposition to the war. You may remember, he was running against Senator Eugene McCarthy then, whose so-called children’s campaign was very much an antiwar campaign, and Kennedy really only came into the campaign after McCarthy had won in New Hampshire and Lyndon Johnson had decided not to seek another term. So Kennedy was really running as the new liberal candidate, antiwar, which he wasn’t, and somebody—he was like Barack Obama of his time, very much for—he was supported by young people, although they were divided then between McCarthy and him, and he was supported by minorities. So the interview I had with Kennedy was about two or three days before he arrived in Los Angeles.

And I went along to the Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy was due to appear, having won that primary. And in fact I had been invited with a number of other journalists to join him and his entourage at what was then a fairly well-known discotheque in Los Angeles called The Factory. And we had been told to follow the candidate through the kitchen, because they were going out the back way. And as we waited for Kennedy to appear on stage in the ballroom at the Ambassador, one of the Kennedy workers came up to us and said, “There’s a funny-looking guy in the kitchen. He’s giving me the creeps.” Well, that was Sirhan Sirhan. And I have to say that none of us journalists where we were went off and inquired who this funny-looking guy was.

Kennedy arrived, stood on the stage, made a very short speech, which ended famously with now “on to Chicago,” where the Democratic nomination would have happened, the convention there. And then, he and Ethel, his wife, and his two protectors—Bill Barry, former FBI agent, and Rosey Grier, NFL player—followed by a half a dozen journalists, including myself, started to walk towards the kitchen. Kennedy entered the kitchen. Sirhan leapt up on a serving area, pointed a gun at him and fired. He was wrestled. Kennedy fell. He was wrestled to the ground, and then there were other shots.

There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins. And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, what about Robert Kennedy’s views of Vietnam? Also, of course, your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins.

JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear the second part. His views of Vietnam and…?

AMY GOODMAN: Your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins there. But—

JOHN PILGER: Well, I told—the FBI interviewed quite a few of us, and I told the FBI at length just what had happened, the numbers of shots that were fired that I heard—I thought I heard. And I’m pretty sure I did hear them, which Sirhan Sirhan—

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

JOHN PILGER: —couldn’t have fired. There were two people seen running from the Ambassador Hotel, including one famous woman in a polka dot dress. A number of us thought we saw those. We can’t be absolutely sure about that. There is a new documentary out, which I haven’t seen, which I understand goes into this in depth. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, John, on the issue of Vietnam, where you feel Robert Kennedy stood—today, forty years later, remembered as being the antiwar candidate, as Eugene McCarthy was—your view?

JOHN PILGER: He wasn’t, no. He wasn’t an antiwar candidate. Kennedy was essentially a carpetbagger. He had no intention actually of running that year, and it was only McCarthy’s win in New Hampshire and the tremendous outpouring of support around him and also around Martin Luther King. You may remember that Martin Luther King had drawn together both the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, which then had command of many of the streets in the United States. And he had made the connection between the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, so it was building now into 1968 pretty quickly. And Kennedy rode this wave.

But Kennedy himself had actually supported the war and, even when he was running as a candidate, had made it quite clear—and here, there is a definite echo of Barack Obama—where he said, well, yes, I’m going to withdraw the troops, but when? And just as Obama is now saying—reserving his right not to withdraw troops next year. Kennedy was saying pretty much the same thing. And the impression I got traveling with him was that he was quite uncomfortable with being an antiwar candidate.

AMY GOODMAN: In what way?

JOHN PILGER: Well, he was equivocal. And again, I draw the comparison. I see so many echoes in Barack Obama of Robert Kennedy. He was equivocating. And when you’re equivocating at that stage, in an atmosphere—a charged antiwar atmosphere—by then, most Americans were against the war in Vietnam. There was a momentum to get out of Vietnam. It had really begun in earnest then. Kennedy was hedging. He was hedging his bets. And he was never saying outright that he was getting the troops out. And I think he provides a very good lesson for those whose hopes are pinned on one candidate at the moment.

AMY GOODMAN: His relationship with Dr. King? It had actually just come out a few weeks before Robert Kennedy was assassinated that he had been involved as Attorney General with the wiretapping of Dr. King. That information, though it had been years before, came out just before he himself was assassinated.

JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I missed the beginning of that, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: His relationship with Dr. King. It had just come out, right before Robert Kennedy was assassinated, that he had authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King years before, when he was Attorney General.

JOHN PILGER: Yes. Yes, that’s right. Yes, I understand. Yes, that’s right. Kennedy had a very checkered past. He—it seemed to me that he was—I mean, his relationship with the other McCarthy is known. He was very much—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking Joe McCarthy? What was his relationship?

JOHN PILGER: Joe McCarthy, when he was—he did work as a junior lawyer around that time and was involved with the committee. His relationship in—I mean, his relationship with black people in the United States, I thought, was always compromised. He once described them, for which he later apologized, as immigrants.

And I thought all the contradictions and confusion that are often invested in the Kennedy name were really very vividly expressed in Robert Kennedy himself. He was very hard to pin down. He spoke in a rhetoric. I was looking back on my notes recently of the interview I did with Kennedy, and, you know, there was just a stream of consciousness of rhetoric, really refusing to be pinned down on the major issues. He was an image candidate, bar none. He used the memory of his martyred brother, President John Kennedy, to—a lot. He spoke with different rhetoric to different audiences. All politicians do that, of course, but I was struck to hear Kennedy speak to, let’s say, a blue-collar audience, white blue-collar audience, in a very conservative way and use the code for race, which was law and order then, and then he would go into the vineyards of California among Mexican Americans and really be received almost like as a Christ-like figure.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, covered Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign in the last months, was one of the last extended interviews he did with Robert F. Kennedy. He was there, back in the kitchen, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot and assassinated.

In his 1986 book, Heroes, Pilger was an assiduous propagator of the official lone assassin guff:

Kennedy jumped down from the podium, shook more hands and, with Rosie Greer cutting a swathe through the crush, headed for the kitchen. Inside the pantry serving-area, he shook hands with a chef in his big white hat and with others of the kitchen staff, who were mostly blacks and chicanos; and then, before thought and sound could be synchronised, there were reports like balloons bursting or flash bulbs popping; they were not shots, I thought, because surely it could not happen again. The unreality persisted, until a woman collapsed at my side with blood trickling from her head. She had been shot. Several had been shot, including Senator Kennedy.

The staring little man in the kitchen had taken a .22 revolver from underneath his yellow jacket, jumped on to a table and taken aim; Kennedy had seen him, screamed, ‘No!’ and half-glanced for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He had been shot still smiling that rabbit smile of his, and he lay beside a refrigerator with a chicano dishwasher kneeling over him. Ethel flailed out with her fists, her lips sucked in with the horror and shock, and for a brief time she prevented anybody, even friends, from touching her husband. ‘Where’s the doctor?’ she shouted; and when a brooch fell from her dress on to Kennedy’s chin, she put her face close to his and said, ‘I’m sorry, my darling, please forgive me…’

From somewhere a priest appeared and said, ‘I must be with Senator Kennedy. You know that!’ Rosie Greer, tears flowing with rage, lifted Sirhan Sirhan off his feet, smashed his hand and disarmed him. Others attempted to beat their fists on his small body, but Greer protected him in a stranglehold that might have dispatched him there and then had four policeman not arrived and run with him from the hotel…

Robert Kennedy died the next day…And the assassin said in a television interview, ‘I loved him…he was the hope of all the poor people in this country. I’m not rich, otherwise, I wouldn’t be here on this programme. I had no identity, no hope, no goal to strive for. Everyone in America loves a winner, and I was a loser,’

John Pilger. Heroes (London: Pan Books, paperback edition,1989), pp.128-130.

I have an idea, but it won't be as fun for you as writing response after response full of theory - conjecture - propaganda - all designed to push paranoia ........ Why not contact Lane and see what he tell you??????

Bill Miller[/b]

I take it you enjoyed the post, then, Bill? Thought you might.

Mark Lane is never hard to find. As far as I know, this information is current

http://marklane.com/

Cheers, Jay, I'll give it a shot.

Paul

Evan was applauding me (literally) for responding to Peter’s personal attacks calmly and because I proved my case. So Peter*, Paul and Jan (and Dean) tell us, under the circumstances, what exactly was “immature and undignified” about him saying “Well said Len! Peter cries…HELP”

* I assume he will object as well.

As a moderator, Evan's action was equivalent to the referee in a soccer match pulling down his shorts and mooning at the players of one side, then pulling his shorts back up and shaking the hand of the captain of the other team.

I expect moderators to insist, even handedly, on some sort of order and decorum amidst passionate and heated debate.

Evan is a disciple of the Mark Clattenberg school of impartiality, for the benefit of the unitiated. Follow this link for the whole outrageous story. Be warned - you may well weep as you peruse this shameful tale:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/foo...icle2716956.ece

________________________________________________

Assorted sources (key words: program pale horse)

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat

on him was death, and hell followed with him". Revelation 6:7

Operation Phoenix was modeled on Project Pale Horse--a CIA-funded "black op"... that used Navy SEALs and Green Berets in Vietnam to lead indigenous teams of killers in detaining, torturing and murdering grassroots political leaders, and anybody else that the U.S. high command disliked. According to congressional investigations of Phoenix in the early 1970s, Vietnamese mercenaries and U.S. special operations forces selectively terminated more than 21,000 South Vietnamese civilians--so-called terrorist suspects--during the war. (Vietnamese sources state the number is more than 40,000. Basically it was shoot fist and then label victin as VC.)

Most of the counterinsurgency Pathet Lao and VC infrastructure experts were in the "snuff and snatch" (assassination and kidnap) teams operating under the command (1962-1963) of John L. Lee, a CIA clandestine service field advisor, TDY (on loan) from the US Army.

A HALO-qualified Airborne Ranger and an "insurgent terrorist neutralization specialist," Lee had successfully trained, advised, and operationally commanded 3-5 man Black op "snuff and snatch" CIA counter-terror teams operating under the name of Project Pale Horse in the northeastern provinces of Laos between January 1962 and April 1963, when his "neutral civilian foreign aid worker" cover was compromised.

Project Pale Horse sidestepped the official U. S. Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program (ICEX), Lao, and GVN military chain of command, and had been running six years prior to the establishment of the "official" GVN Phoenix (Kế Hoạch Phụng Hoàng) program in Vietnam.

Lee's CIA Pale Horse counter-terror ops were so effective against advisors of the Soviet KGB First Chief Directorate, the Pathet Lao, and Red Chinese military advisors that the KGB director at the time, Vladimir Semichastniy, placed a $50,000 bounty in gold bullion for Lee's capture or confirmed assassination (allegedly referring to him as a "Pale Horse's Ass"). The bounty was rescinded after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Lee reported to William E. Colby from 1962 to 1963, and to John Richardson in 1963, respective CIA Chiefs of Station, Saigon Vietnam, CIA Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, Lt. Gen. Wm P. Yarborough, Cmdr. Special Warfare Center, Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Vietnam, in '82 Ex-Phoenix operative reveals that sometimes orders were given to kill U.S. military personnel* who were considered security risks. He suspects the orders came not from "division", but from a higher authority such as the CIA or the ONI. Covert Action Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly) summer 82 52.

Vietnam, 67-73 The Phoenix Program used the CIA's assassination squads, the former counter terror teams later called the provincial reconnaissance units (PRU). Technically they did not mark cadres for assassinations but in practice the pru's anticipated resistance in disputed areas and shot first. People taken prisoner were denounced in Saigon-held areas, picked up at checkpoints or captured in combat and later identified as VC. Sheehan, N. (1988), A Bright Shining Lie, 732.

Vietnam. Phung Hoang aka Phoenix Program quotas for units set by komer for all 242 districts. One result indiscriminate killing with every body labeled VCI. Powers, T. (1979), The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 181-2.

*Fragging by any other name smells just as foul...

Turns out CIA-organised and -funded pseudo-gangs - death squads - were at work, on a surprisingly large scale, from the very beginning:

“U.S. involvement in operations against civilian activists was not limited to military sweeps, however. Beginning in mid 1955, ‘Civic Action’ teams began to arrive in the wake of the occupying troops. The Civic Action Program was one of the main activities developed and supported by Lansdale’s SMM team. Conceived of originally by a former Viet Minh officer, Kieu Cong Cung, and using university-trained anti-Communist refugees from North Vietnam dressed in black pajamas, the program was further modified by Lansdale based on his experience in the Philippines. Rufus Phillips of Lansdale’s national security team helped write a training and operations program, and Lansdale got seed money from the CIA to support its start-up. The Civic Action Program was established in January 1955, and by May 1955, 1,400 cadres organized in mobile teams were already working in ten provinces that had been occupied by the army. Eventually there were 1,800 cadres in over 100 teams in the field…A Saigon newspaper’s account of the military’s pacification operation in the delta in 1956 confirmed that the troop’s were accompanied by black-clad Civic Action teams who were involved in countering ‘dissident activities’ in the former Viet Minh villages,”

Gareth Porter. Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005), pp.89-90.

PS Anyone know where John Dolva is these days? Is he well/busy/preoccupied with equally weighty matters?

Well said Len!

Peter cries....

That is truly one of the most immature and undignified posts I have seen from a moderator on any site. Ever.

Servile adherence to the American imperium's lies has that effect. Even on Aussies, ordinarily a robustly independent-minded bunch. A shame.

This extract is from the expanded – eight-page pamphlet version – of Mark Lane’s original article on the case, “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963:

”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html

How could Lane write, in an article published in the 19 December 1963 edition of the National Guardian, of having viewed the Zapruder film on television, when, according to the Department of Zapruderland Security and fellow-travellers, the film wasn’t shown on television until 1975? (1).

Well, if the hypothesis advanced in the thread Was Muchmore’s film shown on WNEW-TV, New York, on 26 November 1963? – to wit, that the first version of the Z film debuted on that station at 12:46 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, 26 November 1963 - is correct, we have an explanation.

So where was Lane 25-26 November 1963? According to the forward to A Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane replies (NY: Fawcett Crest, April 1969), in New York. From the same source, we learn that he commenced work on his defence brief for Oswald on Tuesday, 26 November:

“…Henry Wade, the Dallas prosecutor, called a press conference soon after Oswald’s death was announced…When the New York Times published the text of the press conference two days later (2), I was able to study the allegations more leisurely…I sat down to analyze the charges…When I was finished, I had written a ten-thousand word article…,” p.16

Lane’s recollection of the showing of the Z film fulfils the classic criteria for preferment as an historical source: it was spontaneous; contemporaneous; and disinterested. It also had recent and related precedent.

Just as in the case of Dan Rather and his rather more detailed descriptions of the radically different first version of the Z film, as offered on CBS (radio and TV) on 25 November, Lane could have had no inkling of the plotters’ plans for the film. There never was, it almost passes without remark, formal notice of the first version’s withdrawal for “editing,” merely the announcement that Time-Life had acquired film rights in addition to the still ones.

In A Citizen’s Dissent, Lane noted that advance proof sheets of his original defense brief were “sent to the United Press International (UPI) by the Guardian. The UPI responded that they ‘wouldn’t touch it’” (3) No wonder. If the Milwaukee Journal report of 26 November 1963 was accurate, UPI had “obtained” (or, more likely, merely been allocated) the original film rights for the Z film’s first version (4). Lane’s reference to having viewed it on TV would inevitably have set alarm bells ringing within the senior ranks of the organisation: It was now involved in the dissemination of amnesia and confusion with regard to the film, not the film itself.

Notes:

(1) Complete drivel, of course, as Pat Valentino recently proved on Len Osanic’s Black Op radio: the film was shown on a Los Angeles TV station, KTLA-TV, during the Clay Shaw trial, in February 1969, six years earlier than Groden and the DZS claim. http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2008.html (Show #368, 3 April 2008).

(2) DeLloyd J. Guth & David R. Wrone. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Biography, 1963-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), p.267: “Dallas Prosecutor’s News Conference,” NYT, 26 November 1963, p.14. The transcript, the compilers note in parenthesis, was “from WBC-TV.” Curious how this conference was faithfully recorded, but not that given by the Parkland doctors on 22 November 1963.

(3) Mark Lane. A Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane replies (NY: Fawcett Crest, April 1969), p.19.

(4) AP, "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3: "The film also was being distributed by United Press International Newsfilms to subscribing stations. WITI-TV in Milwaukee is a subscriber, but will reserve judgment on whether to show the film until after its officials have viewed it."

Sometimes a photo can be worth a lot of words.....this one speaks volumes to me. Yes, I think it is generally so that the Oligarchs have their own 'military' called the intelligence agencies and they make sure only vetted candidates run or get elected. Problems are 'eliminated' one way or another. So, the 'elected' leaders certainly don't serve the People - at least not the 'average' person....only the few, behind the curtains of power.

One of these two men is a right-wing lecher - the other is the President's father.

Thanks for posting this. It is one of the few examples of a left-wing journalists taking interest in the case. Robin Ramsay looks at this issue in his latest book, Politics & Paranoia.

Do you know if Pilger wrote anthing else on this case?

Possibly more so re RFK since if memory serves he was there and swore more than one gun was blasting away.

But not, Greg, in his 1986 book (reprinted in paperback in 1989), Heroes, in which there is no mention whatever of a second gunman in the relevant passage on RFK's murder (Pan paperback, 1989, pp.128-9). Odd, no?

Paul

All I ever see are claims against the US government, claims of secret societies or New World Orders, calls for people to throw off chains of supposed oppression by the US (and on far lesser occasions, the UK).

Does no-one care about Zimbabwe? Why aren't Forum members voicing concerns that the western world is not doing anything (or much) to stop a dictator, whether that action be political, economic, or military?

A lessor situation occurs in Fiji, where a military junta rules. Is this fair to the Indian population? Are they being treated justly?

Why aren't Forum members (specifically those who spend the majority of their time here making posts) making people aware of these situations, instead of concentrating on anti-US comments? Do they not care? Are they biased?

Evan,

We've been waiting for Anglo-American to tell the UK and US governments what to do next.

Paul

Thank you Paul, may this be copied and reposted?? A very thoughful and informative article of the times...

B.,

Deploy as you see fit!

Paul

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/5/democ...obert_f_kennedy

June 05, 2008

Democracy Now! Special: Robert F. Kennedy’s Life and Legacy 40 Years After His Assassination

The Australian British journalist John Pilger was with Robert F. Kennedy the night he was killed. Pilger had been covering the Kennedy campaign as it traveled across the country. He has written critically of Kennedy’s record as Attorney General and as presidential candidate.

Earlier today, I spoke with John Pilger on the telephone from Italy. He was reporting for the Daily Mirror at the time and had one of the last interviews with Robert F. Kennedy, which he described as a long, languorous interview, in which Robert Kennedy took out some beer, was relaxed, was in a small plane, his campaign plane, speaking with this journalist reporting for the British Daily Mirror. John Pilger is known for scores of documentaries he has done over the decades, more than fifty of them, on everything from Vietnam to Cambodia to East Timor to Iraq. His latest film is called The War on Terror.

I asked John Pilger to describe the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot.

JOHN PILGER: I had been traveling with Robert Kennedy as a correspondent for the London Mirror in the end of May, early June, primarily through California. And this was the primary that Kennedy had to win to show that he could gain the nomination. In fact, by winning in California, which he did, he would almost certainly have gained the nomination.

But I had one of the last interviews with Kennedy. In those days, there was good access to the candidates. There were spin doctors, but the protection around the candidate was fairly minimal, in that you could speak to him and have an interview. And I had a very long interview with Kennedy, in which I asked him about his alleged opposition to the war. You may remember, he was running against Senator Eugene McCarthy then, whose so-called children’s campaign was very much an antiwar campaign, and Kennedy really only came into the campaign after McCarthy had won in New Hampshire and Lyndon Johnson had decided not to seek another term. So Kennedy was really running as the new liberal candidate, antiwar, which he wasn’t, and somebody—he was like Barack Obama of his time, very much for—he was supported by young people, although they were divided then between McCarthy and him, and he was supported by minorities. So the interview I had with Kennedy was about two or three days before he arrived in Los Angeles.

And I went along to the Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy was due to appear, having won that primary. And in fact I had been invited with a number of other journalists to join him and his entourage at what was then a fairly well-known discotheque in Los Angeles called The Factory. And we had been told to follow the candidate through the kitchen, because they were going out the back way. And as we waited for Kennedy to appear on stage in the ballroom at the Ambassador, one of the Kennedy workers came up to us and said, “There’s a funny-looking guy in the kitchen. He’s giving me the creeps.” Well, that was Sirhan Sirhan. And I have to say that none of us journalists where we were went off and inquired who this funny-looking guy was.

Kennedy arrived, stood on the stage, made a very short speech, which ended famously with now “on to Chicago,” where the Democratic nomination would have happened, the convention there. And then, he and Ethel, his wife, and his two protectors—Bill Barry, former FBI agent, and Rosey Grier, NFL player—followed by a half a dozen journalists, including myself, started to walk towards the kitchen. Kennedy entered the kitchen. Sirhan leapt up on a serving area, pointed a gun at him and fired. He was wrestled. Kennedy fell. He was wrestled to the ground, and then there were other shots.

There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins. And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, what about Robert Kennedy’s views of Vietnam? Also, of course, your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins.

JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear the second part. His views of Vietnam and…?

AMY GOODMAN: Your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins there. But—

JOHN PILGER: Well, I told—the FBI interviewed quite a few of us, and I told the FBI at length just what had happened, the numbers of shots that were fired that I heard—I thought I heard. And I’m pretty sure I did hear them, which Sirhan Sirhan—

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

JOHN PILGER: —couldn’t have fired. There were two people seen running from the Ambassador Hotel, including one famous woman in a polka dot dress. A number of us thought we saw those. We can’t be absolutely sure about that. There is a new documentary out, which I haven’t seen, which I understand goes into this in depth. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, John, on the issue of Vietnam, where you feel Robert Kennedy stood—today, forty years later, remembered as being the antiwar candidate, as Eugene McCarthy was—your view?

JOHN PILGER: He wasn’t, no. He wasn’t an antiwar candidate. Kennedy was essentially a carpetbagger. He had no intention actually of running that year, and it was only McCarthy’s win in New Hampshire and the tremendous outpouring of support around him and also around Martin Luther King. You may remember that Martin Luther King had drawn together both the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, which then had command of many of the streets in the United States. And he had made the connection between the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, so it was building now into 1968 pretty quickly. And Kennedy rode this wave.

But Kennedy himself had actually supported the war and, even when he was running as a candidate, had made it quite clear—and here, there is a definite echo of Barack Obama—where he said, well, yes, I’m going to withdraw the troops, but when? And just as Obama is now saying—reserving his right not to withdraw troops next year. Kennedy was saying pretty much the same thing. And the impression I got traveling with him was that he was quite uncomfortable with being an antiwar candidate.

AMY GOODMAN: In what way?

JOHN PILGER: Well, he was equivocal. And again, I draw the comparison. I see so many echoes in Barack Obama of Robert Kennedy. He was equivocating. And when you’re equivocating at that stage, in an atmosphere—a charged antiwar atmosphere—by then, most Americans were against the war in Vietnam. There was a momentum to get out of Vietnam. It had really begun in earnest then. Kennedy was hedging. He was hedging his bets. And he was never saying outright that he was getting the troops out. And I think he provides a very good lesson for those whose hopes are pinned on one candidate at the moment.

AMY GOODMAN: His relationship with Dr. King? It had actually just come out a few weeks before Robert Kennedy was assassinated that he had been involved as Attorney General with the wiretapping of Dr. King. That information, though it had been years before, came out just before he himself was assassinated.

JOHN PILGER: I’m sorry. I missed the beginning of that, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: His relationship with Dr. King. It had just come out, right before Robert Kennedy was assassinated, that he had authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King years before, when he was Attorney General.

JOHN PILGER: Yes. Yes, that’s right. Yes, I understand. Yes, that’s right. Kennedy had a very checkered past. He—it seemed to me that he was—I mean, his relationship with the other McCarthy is known. He was very much—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking Joe McCarthy? What was his relationship?

JOHN PILGER: Joe McCarthy, when he was—he did work as a junior lawyer around that time and was involved with the committee. His relationship in—I mean, his relationship with black people in the United States, I thought, was always compromised. He once described them, for which he later apologized, as immigrants.

And I thought all the contradictions and confusion that are often invested in the Kennedy name were really very vividly expressed in Robert Kennedy himself. He was very hard to pin down. He spoke in a rhetoric. I was looking back on my notes recently of the interview I did with Kennedy, and, you know, there was just a stream of consciousness of rhetoric, really refusing to be pinned down on the major issues. He was an image candidate, bar none. He used the memory of his martyred brother, President John Kennedy, to—a lot. He spoke with different rhetoric to different audiences. All politicians do that, of course, but I was struck to hear Kennedy speak to, let’s say, a blue-collar audience, white blue-collar audience, in a very conservative way and use the code for race, which was law and order then, and then he would go into the vineyards of California among Mexican Americans and really be received almost like as a Christ-like figure.

AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, covered Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign in the last months, was one of the last extended interviews he did with Robert F. Kennedy. He was there, back in the kitchen, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot and assassinated.

Not quite Pilger's take in 1968, from this piece:

Daily Mirror, 22 November 1968, pp.17-18

A wreath in Dallas

By John Pilger

Five years ago on this day the first of the crop was harvested: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a true spirit of change, was ambushed and shot to death on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas.

The world stopped that day and, in unison, we all spewed our grief.

Some did not. Some, like the hate-weaned innocents at a school in Dallas, stood and cheered, while their parents hastily convened parties at which glasses were raised in grotesque salutes to what had happened that day; and if these truths are unimaginable then so, too, is the truth of John Kennedy’s death.

For after five years of cataclysm in America, in which three other men of change have been assassinated and the very idea of America as a civilised country challenged, we still do not know the complete story of Dallas. We have, of course, the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes of finely-honed yet patently inconclusive reassurance, compiled, it would seem, only for those who needed reassuring, and perhaps in 1964 when the report was published we were not unlike those citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World who lined up for their peace of mind.

I came to Dallas because on election day, when front pages were filled with poll predictions of the candidates, I read in the Los Angeles Times the results of the most important poll of all. It was taken by the Louis Harris group and it said in effect that 81 per cent of the American people no longer accepted the findings of the Warren Commission and now believed that there was a conspiracy to kill the President of the United States.

So I am in Dallas, in November and a pale ghost of a sun flits across a sky that is both enormous and hard; and down on Elm Street, on the grassy knoll near the Texas School Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald was said to have done his work, two young soldiers quizzically study a wreath sent by a student group to await the anniversary. On it is written:

Send him not these flowers,

Send us the truth.

Dallas has not changed. The organised forgetting has not worked; only the city’s mask is new.

A great deal of money has been poured on civic wounds and into prefabricated banks, like gargantuan filing cabinets; and yet the John F. Kennedy memorial, Dallas’s tribute, still lies in the planning room of City Council.

It could have happened anywhere, they still chorus. The Mayor of Dallas, multi-millionaire Erik Jonsson said: “We are not ashamed, sir!” The deposed police chief of Dallas, Jesse Curry, who has these five years carried the public guilt for the murderous circus that tried and killed Oswald in his headquarters basement, said: “Please, ah just want to go mah own way now, and forget.”

It could have happened anywhere, but it did not. Dallas was the chosen place and the world said Dallas killed the President with its air of hate and tradition of death and violence, with its assorted nuts of the paramilitary Right and a daily newspaper that believes civil rights is the Communist line. And in reply Dallas asks to be excused. Big D is a doer, they say with pride; Dallas man was born to act, not to contemplate the past. Or anything. Hamlet would hate it here.

Dallas, it must be emphatically said, is not America. The conscience which was custom-made for comfort here is a time bomb ticking away almost everywhere in the United States. Nor is that conscience being aroused by the sworn enemies of the American establishment. Such pillars as Life Magazine and The New York Times, both of which greeted the Warren Report as “exhaustive,” have long since called for a new inquiry.

Life called for a new inquiry on the basis of the film it bought for $25,000 from Abraham Zapruder who, from the grassy knoll in Elm Street filmed the President’s motorcade as it approached and kept his camera running as the shots were fired. The film, according to Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated directly in front of the President and was critically wounded, shows that he was not hit until after President Kennedy was shot for the first time, which suggests that the two men were struck by separate bullets. No one assassin using a bolt action rifle could have fired two shots that fast.

Since February of last year, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison has been on the stage with his revelation of a conspiracy plot in which, he says, Oswald played only a minor part; and in spite of the guns of scepticism aimed at him, he has gathered enough evidence for three judges to indict a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw, of whom the Warren Commission makes no mention, for conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States.

Perhaps it is indicative of all the assassination intrigue that the strongest case for a new inquiry might eventually rest within the bizarre. Since 1963 an estimated thirty-five to forty-seven people connected with the assassination have died in unbelievable situations.

For example two Dallas reporters who were at a meeting with Jack Ruby the night before he killed Oswald, died violently: one when a revolver “went off” in a California police station, the other by a “karate chop” in the shower at his Dallas apartment. Two strippers who worked for Jack Ruby in his Carousel Club have also died violently, one from gunshot wounds and the other, held overnight in a Dallas jail on a petty charge, was found hanged in her cell.

Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was the only journalist to have a private interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, was found dead in her New York apartment after telling friends she was going to Washington “to bust the whole thing open.”

Is it true that a CIA agent who told friends he could no longer keep quiet about the assassination was found shot in the back in his Washington apartment? The verdict was suicide.

Pilot David Ferrie was found dead in his New Orleans home, ostensibly from natural causes, but with two suicide notes beside him. Four days earlier, Ferrie had told reporters that Jim Garrison had him “pegged as the getaway pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy.” The odds against these and other deaths have been calculated at 100 trillion to one.

Much of the sequence is already known: what is not known are the answers to a melange of questions that haunt both critics and defenders of the Commission. At random: Why should two-thirds of the eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza report that shots came from in front of the President, and not from behind as the Commission says? And why were only a small portion of these witnesses interviewed?

And why were all the investigations not published? I have seen a Secret Service report that supports Governor Connally’s two bullets theory. It was not published in the Warren Report. A similar FBI report also was not published.

Why did the doctor who received the President at Parkland Hospital say the bullet entered his throat from the front, only to change his mind to agree with the autopsy performed later in Washington which contended that the bullet entered the back? Why did the chief pathologist at the autopsy burn the draft of his first report? How could the bullet – the only bullet linked to Oswald’s gun – emerge virtually unscathed after a journey through two bodies causing extensive wounds, smashing bones and a wrist?

What of the film that shows a policeman holding a rifle which he had just carried from the School Book Depository before the “Oswald rifle” was found?

The answers to these questions are not proof on their own, but together they mean something, perhaps even the beginning of a way out of the monstrous whodunnit into which the Kennedy assassination has been allowed to sink.

But the whodunnit is real. This year I have spoken to many of its authors and critics and of those I met in Dallas, I should mention here two who most impressed me.

One of them is Penn Jones, Jr., editor of the Midlothian Mirror, in the town of Midlothian, south of Dallas – a crusading small-town editor.

Years before the assassination Penn Jones exposed the John Birch Society in his columns and, for this, his office and printing presses were fire-bombed. He, like almost all the critics, believes in the political conspiracy theory.

“Anyone who has read all twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report knows by his basic common sense that it reeks of whitewash.” He said: “The report is its worst enemy; those who defend it usually haven’t read it; they just can’t conceive something that doesn’t agree with what is thought to be the respectable viewpoint. And those of us who have read all of it – and we’re few – know damn well what’s happening…”

Penn Jones sent me to Roger Craig, whose testimony to the Commission, on page 160 of the report, he repeated for me in a Dallas restaurant.

Now the City Judge and Justice of the Peace of Midlothian, Craig was a deputy sheriff in Dallas five years ago and was on duty in Dealey Plaza on November 22. He saw the President shot. He also saw a man he identified as Oswald running from the School Book Depository building fifteen minutes after the shooting.

He said Oswald got into a station wagon which had been cruising along Elm Street and he later identified him at Dallas police headquarters. He said that Oswald remarked: “Everybody will know who I am now.” What is important here is that Oswald, according to the Commission Report, should have been well on his way home when Craig saw him. The Commission dismissed Craig’s testimony on the basis that his superior officer, Captain Fritz, a man who said he “never took notes,” did not remember the Oswald identification.

Roger Craig is a gaunt, erect man who speaks almost at a whisper. “I have spent my life in law enforcement and I know what I saw. I looked at Oswald’s eyes. It was him.”

Last November, Craig was shot at in a Dallas parking lot, three days after giving evidence to District Attorney Garrison, and today his family live in a virtual state of siege. Molly, his wife, has been followed by the same car for months and their phone is monitored.

The road from Dallas invariably leads to New Orleans and to District Attorney Garrison. He is the only public official in the United States inquiring full-time into the assassination. For all his intriguing without him there would be no public dissent.

“Oswald,” he said, “was a decoy who became a patsy. He never knew the true nature of his job. He never expected to die. There were about seven men involved in an old-fashioned ambush of the President. Shots came from the grassy knoll area, from the Depository building and another building in the Plaza.

“They probably did not leave the scene until well after they did the job.

“The assassination team were fanatical Anti-Castro Cubans and Right Wing paramilitary types and we are investigating connections with elements of the Central Intelligence Agency. Don’t raise your eyebrows: just consider their record outside this country, the Bay of Pigs, the U-2 incidents…

“John Kennedy was working for a peaceful détente with Castro and with all the Communist world. And he was thinking ahead to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. He wanted everything changed. He had to go.”

So who changed in the intervening 40 years - Pilger, or RFK?

Do you know if Pilger wrote anthing else on this case?

Never researched Pilger's journalism, John, but there is at least one other piece I have, this from the tenth anniversary. Highlights, italics etc., as in the original, save for the bit about Chaney:

Daily Mirror, 22 November 1973, pp. 14-15

Assassination City Ten Years On

By John Pilger

It’s ten years today since John F. Kennedy was murdered in this antheap of banks in the Texas desert and some remembrance is planned.

An 82-channel readout computer will assist.

“Ah was just putting mah baby to sleep when ah heard the news on the radio,” says a voice out of the computer, supported by a medley of Greensleaves, the Last Post and a heavenly choir of sighs. “Why, ah almost dropped the child.”

The computer is currently playing to tourists in a former warehouse just across Elm Street from Dealey Plaza where the President was shot.

For a 65p entrance fee it will emit “actual” gunfire and screams along with the “full incredible story of how Lee Harvey Oswald stole our leader from us.” And at the end of every session there is a monologue by a man who says, with the sincerity of a funeral director, that he feels a deep and personal loss each and every day…”all will y’awl please write your appreciation on the small white cards provided.”

Killed

“Fantastic! A must when in Dallas!” wrote Mrs. Lilly Seaford of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

“HORSExxxx!” wrote Mr. William Danbury of Philadelphia, in block letters.

“I don’t mind anybody laying it on about JFK or even making a dollar or two, but surely it’s time for Americans to stop being so damned gullible about how he died and who killed him. We’ve come a long way since then.”

One block away Big Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney, swivels in his leather chair and says: “Now ah never really believed that Oswald got up one morning and went out and killed the President on his own.”

“Of course ah don’t doubt that the Warren Report (the official enquiry into the assassination) was well intentioned. Folks in this country wanted to be reassured that a madman had done it and no more, but folks like me know that two bullets from that old rifle could not have done what it done. He must have had back up people.”

Why didn’t Big Henry say this at the time?

“On the day Kennedy was shot I got a call from the White House saying they didn’t want any talk of a conspiracy. So we left it to them. The climate’s different now. People are talking easier.”

In Dealey Plaza the Cadillacs, big hats and geriatric blue rinses glide past the assassination point beside the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald’s rifle was found. A tourist attraction.

But in reality, on the eve of the anniversary, Big D is unmoved.

In ten years the murder rate here has doubled and is almost the highest in the world.

Across the street from the police headquarters where Jack Ruby shot Oswald with most of the world watching, former Dallas police chief, Jesse Curry, now works at the Security Officer of a bank.

Riding

Ten years ago Chief Curry said: “We’ve got this case wrapped up. There is no question in my mind that Oswald was the only killer.

Now, he says: “Ah guess ah’ve done some revaluating since.”

“Hell, no. Oswald wasn’t the only assassin. Patrolman Chaney, who was riding right by the President, saw him hit in the face and I don’t believe the Warren Commissioners ever talked to him. You’ll remember that Oswald shot from the rear.

“The truth of the matter is that I didn’t have men up front near the bridge and Lee Bowers, a railroad signalman, said he saw three men making a getaway from there. He’s dead now.”

In the last few years, and especially since Watergate, the defections from the official version of the assassination have increased from a trickle to a cataract. They include two members of the Warren Commission itself and even Lyndon Johnson, who shortly before his death, told a TV interviewer that he didn’t believe Oswald acted alone.

“Watergate has completely changed the atmosphere in this country. It’s made people doubt and talk,” says Penn Jones, Jr., editor of the Midlothian Mirror near Dallas.

For ten years the paper has campaigned for a reopening of the assassination inquiry. Penn Jones still combs Dealey Plaza for clues and still asks in his editorials why dozens of people connected with the assassination have died violently and against odds calculated at millions to one.

Witnesses like Lee Bowers, the railroad signalman, strippers at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club and two reporters who interviewed Ruby the night before he shot Oswald.

And why several hundred documents and ballistic reports were withheld from the Warren Commission because of “national security.” Why the chief pathologist at the President’s autopsy burned his first report, which he changed.

Why Kennedy’s preserved brain is “missing” from the national archives.

Angry

“Ten years ago,” says Penn Jones, “if I’d asked these questions my readers would only write angry letters, telling me to let the President rest in peace.

“Now it’s a whole new ball game. Since the Watergate cover-up they want to know more about Dallas.

“I tell yer, you dig into any honest American and ask him where all our traumas of the last decade began, and he’ll tell you ‘in Dallas’.”

Daily Mirror, 22 November 1968, pp.17-18

A wreath in Dallas

By John Pilger

Five years ago on this day the first of the crop was harvested: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a true spirit of change, was ambushed and shot to death on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas.

The world stopped that day and, in unison, we all spewed our grief.

Some did not. Some, like the hate-weaned innocents at a school in Dallas, stood and cheered, while their parents hastily convened parties at which glasses were raised in grotesque salutes to what had happened that day; and if these truths are unimaginable then so, too, is the truth of John Kennedy’s death.

For after five years of cataclysm in America, in which three other men of change have been assassinated and the very idea of America as a civilised country challenged, we still do not know the complete story of Dallas. We have, of course, the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes of finely-honed yet patently inconclusive reassurance, compiled, it would seem, only for those who needed reassuring, and perhaps in 1964 when the report was published we were not unlike those citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World who lined up for their peace of mind.

I came to Dallas because on election day, when front pages were filled with poll predictions of the candidates, I read in the Los Angeles Times the results of the most important poll of all. It was taken by the Louis Harris group and it said in effect that 81 per cent of the American people no longer accepted the findings of the Warren Commission and now believed that there was a conspiracy to kill the President of the United States.

So I am in Dallas, in November and a pale ghost of a sun flits across a sky that is both enormous and hard; and down on Elm Street, on the grassy knoll near the Texas School Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald was said to have done his work, two young soldiers quizzically study a wreath sent by a student group to await the anniversary. On it is written:

Send him not these flowers,

Send us the truth.

Dallas has not changed. The organised forgetting has not worked; only the city’s mask is new.

A great deal of money has been poured on civic wounds and into prefabricated banks, like gargantuan filing cabinets; and yet the John F. Kennedy memorial, Dallas’s tribute, still lies in the planning room of City Council.

It could have happened anywhere, they still chorus. The Mayor of Dallas, multi-millionaire Erik Jonsson said: “We are not ashamed, sir!” The deposed police chief of Dallas, Jesse Curry, who has these five years carried the public guilt for the murderous circus that tried and killed Oswald in his headquarters basement, said: “Please, ah just want to go mah own way now, and forget.”

It could have happened anywhere, but it did not. Dallas was the chosen place and the world said Dallas killed the President with its air of hate and tradition of death and violence, with its assorted nuts of the paramilitary Right and a daily newspaper that believes civil rights is the Communist line. And in reply Dallas asks to be excused. Big D is a doer, they say with pride; Dallas man was born to act, not to contemplate the past. Or anything. Hamlet would hate it here.

Dallas, it must be emphatically said, is not America. The conscience which was custom-made for comfort here is a time bomb ticking away almost everywhere in the United States. Nor is that conscience being aroused by the sworn enemies of the American establishment. Such pillars as Life Magazine and The New York Times, both of which greeted the Warren Report as “exhaustive,” have long since called for a new inquiry.

Life called for a new inquiry on the basis of the film it bought for $25,000 from Abraham Zapruder who, from the grassy knoll in Elm Street filmed the President’s motorcade as it approached and kept his camera running as the shots were fired. The film, according to Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated directly in front of the President and was critically wounded, shows that he was not hit until after President Kennedy was shot for the first time, which suggests that the two men were struck by separate bullets. No one assassin using a bolt action rifle could have fired two shots that fast.

Since February of last year, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison has been on the stage with his revelation of a conspiracy plot in which, he says, Oswald played only a minor part; and in spite of the guns of scepticism aimed at him, he has gathered enough evidence for three judges to indict a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw, of whom the Warren Commission makes no mention, for conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States.

Perhaps it is indicative of all the assassination intrigue that the strongest case for a new inquiry might eventually rest within the bizarre. Since 1963 an estimated thirty-five to forty-seven people connected with the assassination have died in unbelievable situations.

For example two Dallas reporters who were at a meeting with Jack Ruby the night before he killed Oswald, died violently: one when a revolver “went off” in a California police station, the other by a “karate chop” in the shower at his Dallas apartment. Two strippers who worked for Jack Ruby in his Carousel Club have also died violently, one from gunshot wounds and the other, held overnight in a Dallas jail on a petty charge, was found hanged in her cell.

Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was the only journalist to have a private interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, was found dead in her New York apartment after telling friends she was going to Washington “to bust the whole thing open.”

Is it true that a CIA agent who told friends he could no longer keep quiet about the assassination was found shot in the back in his Washington apartment? The verdict was suicide.

Pilot David Ferrie was found dead in his New Orleans home, ostensibly from natural causes, but with two suicide notes beside him. Four days earlier, Ferrie had told reporters that Jim Garrison had him “pegged as the getaway pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy.” The odds against these and other deaths have been calculated at 100 trillion to one.

Much of the sequence is already known: what is not known are the answers to a melange of questions that haunt both critics and defenders of the Commission. At random: Why should two-thirds of the eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza report that shots came from in front of the President, and not from behind as the Commission says? And why were only a small portion of these witnesses interviewed?

And why were all the investigations not published? I have seen a Secret Service report that supports Governor Connally’s two bullets theory. It was not published in the Warren Report. A similar FBI report also was not published.

Why did the doctor who received the President at Parkland Hospital say the bullet entered his throat from the front, only to change his mind to agree with the autopsy performed later in Washington which contended that the bullet entered the back? Why did the chief pathologist at the autopsy burn the draft of his first report? How could the bullet – the only bullet linked to Oswald’s gun – emerge virtually unscathed after a journey through two bodies causing extensive wounds, smashing bones and a wrist?

What of the film that shows a policeman holding a rifle which he had just carried from the School Book Depository before the “Oswald rifle” was found?

The answers to these questions are not proof on their own, but together they mean something, perhaps even the beginning of a way out of the monstrous whodunnit into which the Kennedy assassination has been allowed to sink.

But the whodunnit is real. This year I have spoken to many of its authors and critics and of those I met in Dallas, I should mention here two who most impressed me.

One of them is Penn Jones, Jr., editor of the Midlothian Mirror, in the town of Midlothian, south of Dallas – a crusading small-town editor.

Years before the assassination Penn Jones exposed the John Birch Society in his columns and, for this, his office and printing presses were fire-bombed. He, like almost all the critics, believes in the political conspiracy theory.

“Anyone who has read all twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report knows by his basic common sense that it reeks of whitewash.” He said: “The report is its worst enemy; those who defend it usually haven’t read it; they just can’t conceive something that doesn’t agree with what is thought to be the respectable viewpoint. And those of us who have read all of it – and we’re few – know damn well what’s happening…”

Penn Jones sent me to Roger Craig, whose testimony to the Commission, on page 160 of the report, he repeated for me in a Dallas restaurant.

Now the City Judge and Justice of the Peace of Midlothian, Craig was a deputy sheriff in Dallas five years ago and was on duty in Dealey Plaza on November 22. He saw the President shot. He also saw a man he identified as Oswald running from the School Book Depository building fifteen minutes after the shooting.

He said Oswald got into a station wagon which had been cruising along Elm Street and he later identified him at Dallas police headquarters. He said that Oswald remarked: “Everybody will know who I am now.” What is important here is that Oswald, according to the Commission Report, should have been well on his way home when Craig saw him. The Commission dismissed Craig’s testimony on the basis that his superior officer, Captain Fritz, a man who said he “never took notes,” did not remember the Oswald identification.

Roger Craig is a gaunt, erect man who speaks almost at a whisper. “I have spent my life in law enforcement and I know what I saw. I looked at Oswald’s eyes. It was him.”

Last November, Craig was shot at in a Dallas parking lot, three days after giving evidence to District Attorney Garrison, and today his family live in a virtual state of siege. Molly, his wife, has been followed by the same car for months and their phone is monitored.

The road from Dallas invariably leads to New Orleans and to District Attorney Garrison. He is the only public official in the United States inquiring full-time into the assassination. For all his intriguing without him there would be no public dissent.

“Oswald,” he said, “was a decoy who became a patsy. He never knew the true nature of his job. He never expected to die. There were about seven men involved in an old-fashioned ambush of the President. Shots came from the grassy knoll area, from the Depository building and another building in the Plaza.

“They probably did not leave the scene until well after they did the job.

“The assassination team were fanatical Anti-Castro Cubans and Right Wing paramilitary types and we are investigating connections with elements of the Central Intelligence Agency. Don’t raise your eyebrows: just consider their record outside this country, the Bay of Pigs, the U-2 incidents…

“John Kennedy was working for a peaceful détente with Castro and with all the Communist world. And he was thinking ahead to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. He wanted everything changed. He had to go.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pilger is well known and respected for his search for the objective truth on matters - LC is the one who is known for false spin on people and issues. Pilger has produced so many absolutely fantastic investigative journaslistic pieces and films. The world would be a much sadder, ill-informed and dangerous place with fewer like Pilger or more like LC. IMO

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I quite agree, Peter, but something nags. Here's Pilger in the pages of the Daily Mirror on the fifth anniversary of the coup that removed JFK and claimed his life. Compare and contrast the characterisation here of RFK as one of three men of "change" with Pilger's recent views on the same figure:

Daily Mirror, 22 November 1968, pp.17-18

A wreath in Dallas

By John Pilger

Five years ago on this day the first of the crop was harvested: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a true spirit of change, was ambushed and shot to death on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas.

The world stopped that day and, in unison, we all spewed our grief.

Some did not. Some, like the hate-weaned innocents at a school in Dallas, stood and cheered, while their parents hastily convened parties at which glasses were raised in grotesque salutes to what had happened that day; and if these truths are unimaginable then so, too, is the truth of John Kennedy’s death.

For after five years of cataclysm in America, in which three other men of change have been assassinated and the very idea of America as a civilised country challenged, we still do not know the complete story of Dallas. We have, of course, the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes of finely-honed yet patently inconclusive reassurance, compiled, it would seem, only for those who needed reassuring, and perhaps in 1964 when the report was published we were not unlike those citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World who lined up for their peace of mind.

I came to Dallas because on election day, when front pages were filled with poll predictions of the candidates, I read in the Los Angeles Times the results of the most important poll of all. It was taken by the Louis Harris group and it said in effect that 81 per cent of the American people no longer accepted the findings of the Warren Commission and now believed that there was a conspiracy to kill the President of the United States.

So I am in Dallas, in November and a pale ghost of a sun flits across a sky that is both enormous and hard; and down on Elm Street, on the grassy knoll near the Texas School Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald was said to have done his work, two young soldiers quizzically study a wreath sent by a student group to await the anniversary. On it is written:

Send him not these flowers,

Send us the truth.

Dallas has not changed. The organised forgetting has not worked; only the city’s mask is new.

A great deal of money has been poured on civic wounds and into prefabricated banks, like gargantuan filing cabinets; and yet the John F. Kennedy memorial, Dallas’s tribute, still lies in the planning room of City Council.

It could have happened anywhere, they still chorus. The Mayor of Dallas, multi-millionaire Erik Jonsson said: “We are not ashamed, sir!” The deposed police chief of Dallas, Jesse Curry, who has these five years carried the public guilt for the murderous circus that tried and killed Oswald in his headquarters basement, said: “Please, ah just want to go mah own way now, and forget.”

It could have happened anywhere, but it did not. Dallas was the chosen place and the world said Dallas killed the President with its air of hate and tradition of death and violence, with its assorted nuts of the paramilitary Right and a daily newspaper that believes civil rights is the Communist line. And in reply Dallas asks to be excused. Big D is a doer, they say with pride; Dallas man was born to act, not to contemplate the past. Or anything. Hamlet would hate it here.

Dallas, it must be emphatically said, is not America. The conscience which was custom-made for comfort here is a time bomb ticking away almost everywhere in the United States. Nor is that conscience being aroused by the sworn enemies of the American establishment. Such pillars as Life Magazine and The New York Times, both of which greeted the Warren Report as “exhaustive,” have long since called for a new inquiry.

Life called for a new inquiry on the basis of the film it bought for $25,000 from Abraham Zapruder who, from the grassy knoll in Elm Street filmed the President’s motorcade as it approached and kept his camera running as the shots were fired. The film, according to Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated directly in front of the President and was critically wounded, shows that he was not hit until after President Kennedy was shot for the first time, which suggests that the two men were struck by separate bullets. No one assassin using a bolt action rifle could have fired two shots that fast.

Since February of last year, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison has been on the stage with his revelation of a conspiracy plot in which, he says, Oswald played only a minor part; and in spite of the guns of scepticism aimed at him, he has gathered enough evidence for three judges to indict a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw, of whom the Warren Commission makes no mention, for conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States.

Perhaps it is indicative of all the assassination intrigue that the strongest case for a new inquiry might eventually rest within the bizarre. Since 1963 an estimated thirty-five to forty-seven people connected with the assassination have died in unbelievable situations.

For example two Dallas reporters who were at a meeting with Jack Ruby the night before he killed Oswald, died violently: one when a revolver “went off” in a California police station, the other by a “karate chop” in the shower at his Dallas apartment. Two strippers who worked for Jack Ruby in his Carousel Club have also died violently, one from gunshot wounds and the other, held overnight in a Dallas jail on a petty charge, was found hanged in her cell.

Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was the only journalist to have a private interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, was found dead in her New York apartment after telling friends she was going to Washington “to bust the whole thing open.”

Is it true that a CIA agent who told friends he could no longer keep quiet about the assassination was found shot in the back in his Washington apartment? The verdict was suicide.

Pilot David Ferrie was found dead in his New Orleans home, ostensibly from natural causes, but with two suicide notes beside him. Four days earlier, Ferrie had told reporters that Jim Garrison had him “pegged as the getaway pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy.” The odds against these and other deaths have been calculated at 100 trillion to one.

Much of the sequence is already known: what is not known are the answers to a melange of questions that haunt both critics and defenders of the Commission. At random: Why should two-thirds of the eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza report that shots came from in front of the President, and not from behind as the Commission says? And why were only a small portion of these witnesses interviewed?

And why were all the investigations not published? I have seen a Secret Service report that supports Governor Connally’s two bullets theory. It was not published in the Warren Report. A similar FBI report also was not published.

Why did the doctor who received the President at Parkland Hospital say the bullet entered his throat from the front, only to change his mind to agree with the autopsy performed later in Washington which contended that the bullet entered the back? Why did the chief pathologist at the autopsy burn the draft of his first report? How could the bullet – the only bullet linked to Oswald’s gun – emerge virtually unscathed after a journey through two bodies causing extensive wounds, smashing bones and a wrist?

What of the film that shows a policeman holding a rifle which he had just carried from the School Book Depository before the “Oswald rifle” was found?

The answers to these questions are not proof on their own, but together they mean something, perhaps even the beginning of a way out of the monstrous whodunnit into which the Kennedy assassination has been allowed to sink.

But the whodunnit is real. This year I have spoken to many of its authors and critics and of those I met in Dallas, I should mention here two who most impressed me.

One of them is Penn Jones, Jr., editor of the Midlothian Mirror, in the town of Midlothian, south of Dallas – a crusading small-town editor.

Years before the assassination Penn Jones exposed the John Birch Society in his columns and, for this, his office and printing presses were fire-bombed. He, like almost all the critics, believes in the political conspiracy theory.

“Anyone who has read all twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report knows by his basic common sense that it reeks of whitewash.” He said: “The report is its worst enemy; those who defend it usually haven’t read it; they just can’t conceive something that doesn’t agree with what is thought to be the respectable viewpoint. And those of us who have read all of it – and we’re few – know damn well what’s happening…”

Penn Jones sent me to Roger Craig, whose testimony to the Commission, on page 160 of the report, he repeated for me in a Dallas restaurant.

Now the City Judge and Justice of the Peace of Midlothian, Craig was a deputy sheriff in Dallas five years ago and was on duty in Dealey Plaza on November 22. He saw the President shot. He also saw a man he identified as Oswald running from the School Book Depository building fifteen minutes after the shooting.

He said Oswald got into a station wagon which had been cruising along Elm Street and he later identified him at Dallas police headquarters. He said that Oswald remarked: “Everybody will know who I am now.” What is important here is that Oswald, according to the Commission Report, should have been well on his way home when Craig saw him. The Commission dismissed Craig’s testimony on the basis that his superior officer, Captain Fritz, a man who said he “never took notes,” did not remember the Oswald identification.

Roger Craig is a gaunt, erect man who speaks almost at a whisper. “I have spent my life in law enforcement and I know what I saw. I looked at Oswald’s eyes. It was him.”

Last November, Craig was shot at in a Dallas parking lot, three days after giving evidence to District Attorney Garrison, and today his family live in a virtual state of siege. Molly, his wife, has been followed by the same car for months and their phone is monitored.

The road from Dallas invariably leads to New Orleans and to District Attorney Garrison. He is the only public official in the United States inquiring full-time into the assassination. For all his intriguing without him there would be no public dissent.

“Oswald,” he said, “was a decoy who became a patsy. He never knew the true nature of his job. He never expected to die. There were about seven men involved in an old-fashioned ambush of the President. Shots came from the grassy knoll area, from the Depository building and another building in the Plaza.

“They probably did not leave the scene until well after they did the job.

“The assassination team were fanatical Anti-Castro Cubans and Right Wing paramilitary types and we are investigating connections with elements of the Central Intelligence Agency. Don’t raise your eyebrows: just consider their record outside this country, the Bay of Pigs, the U-2 incidents…

“John Kennedy was working for a peaceful détente with Castro and with all the Communist world. And he was thinking ahead to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. He wanted everything changed. He had to go.”

Where would the British state be without them?

In jail, in many instances, where they belong. That's if the police were doing their job, of course, and not trying to criminalise legitimate political protest.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-...sks-writer.html

Interesting gulf between this description and his reaction to the WC.

Understatement: I so admire it.

Paul

Paul, have you ever spoken to Mark Lane ??? ... Because if you have, then you have purposely mislead this forum.

No, Bill, never spoken to the man, but if you are in communication, do ask him for his assistance in clearing up this little mystery. I've even given it a title.

Mark Lane and the “quiet transformation” of evidence: The strange case of the vanishing sentence (and left turn)

In Mark Lane’s Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (Fawcett Crest, April 1969), he resurrects a line from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the efforts of the Warren Commission (1), as to be found in the British historian’s Introduction to Lane’s own Rush To Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (2).

“It is fascinating, for instance, to watch the quiet transformation of the medical evidence,”

No less fascinating, I can’t help feeling, is the handling of the Zapruder film in the works of Mark Lane. Not so much “quiet” as stealthy:

1) Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.66, footnote 2:

The Commission explained the method it used to designate the individual frames of the film for purposes of reference: “The pictures or frames in the Zapruder film were marked by the agents, with the number ‘1’ given to the first frame where the motorcycles leading the motorcade came into view on Houston Street. The numbers continue in sequence as Zapruder filmed the Presidential limousine as it came around the corner and proceeded down Elm,” (223).

Note 223 to chapter 3 is to be found on p.423 – it cites WCR at 98. On p.418, Lane explains that the version of the WCR he used was the one published by the “U.S. Government Printing Office (1964).”

So far, then, so clear: Zapruder filmed the turn from Houston onto Elm, precisely as attested by the former on November 22, 1963. Now, two years on, look what happens to the left turn at Lane’s hands: A source is conveniently truncated!

2) Mark Lane’s Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (Fawcett Crest, April 1969), p. 244:

“The frames of the Zapruder film were numbered, as the Report noted, “with the number ‘1’ given to the first frame where the motorcycles leading the motorcade came into view on Houston Street.” (44)

(44) p.307: WCR98

Now, if you can't get a straight answer to the strange case of the inexplicably truncated senstence, you could always try blackmail. After all, you've used that before.

Notes:

(1) Mark Lane’s Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (Fawcett Crest, April 1969), p.91 n9, detailed on p.293: “RTJ, 12.”

(2) Rush To Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.12.

This extract is from the expanded – eight-page pamphlet version – of Mark Lane’s original article on the case, “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963:

”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html

uhhh...he read in a paper that a film was shown, and since he hadn't heard of the Muchmore film, assumed it was the Zapruder film....

If Mark Lane--who's jumped at every chance there is to claim conspiracy--saw the Zapruder film on TV in the days after the shooting, don't you think he'd have made a big stink about it for years afterward?

Well, if he did see the first version of the Z fraud on TV, the version with the left turn from Houston onto Elm still present, we might expect to find this reflected in his first book on the case. Happily, we do:

Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.66, footnote 2:

The Commission explained the method it used to designate the individual frames of the film for purposes of reference: “The pictures or frames in the Zapruder film were marked by the agents, with the number ‘1’ given to the first frame where the motorcycles leading the motorcade came into view on Houston Street. The numbers continue in sequence as Zapruder filmed the Presidential limousine as it came around the corner and proceeded down Elm,” (223).

Note 223 to chapter 3 is to be found on p.423 – it cites WCR at 98. On p.418, Lane explains that the version of the WCR he used was the one published by the “U.S. Government Printing Office (1964).”

Paul

I realise a persons mental age regresses as they get older "gramps" but going by this last post "gramps" if you regress any more you'll be seen crawling round the old folks home on all fours, wearing a nappy. And Ive never claimed to have any "film/photo credential" they are not needed to combat your nonsense Healy, all you require is a brain and common sense, the two commodities you very definitely lack. Now, instead of all this pathetically childish name calling and "Denise" gibberish, try posting something to convince me, some facts, figures, anything to back up your argument on Z film alteration. I know you cant post anything from your "famous" chapter in Fretzers, LOL, "book" as that's all been shown to be pure rubbish long ago, but surely you have something new by now, after all its not much to show for a life times work, is it Healy? Oh, by the way, I received an unwelcome email yesterday from one of your "fans" over at alt.conspiracy.jfk. I sincerly hope the accusations concerning you, circulating over there aren't true, although that would of course explain why your post's are so weired. I was also supplied with a link to a web page dedicated to famous Healy post's and statments, which, I am told, proves the allegations to be true. I'm sure you'll be relived to hear I've resisted the temptation to visit there, as I dont wish to be associated with the foul mouthed bunch from alt.conspiracy.jfk, nor sink to their level, which I suppose, also means I dont wish to associate with you either as you seem to be one of them. Why dont you just stay there Healy and leave this board to the more decent, serious researcher. You really dont belong here, you know. The ED forum standed requires a lot more than having the ability to think up ingenious ways of insulting people and adding a letter or two to their name for amusement. PS Who's Holmes by the way?

Sir Joseph Bazalgette plainly laboured in vain - the sewers of London run as rank as ever.