Paul Rigby

For the overwhelming majority of students of the JFK case in particular and deep politics in general, breadth of knowledge is vastly overvalued and tragically under-represented in comparison to depth of understanding.

It is one thing to be able to cite chapter and verse on the "histories" of CIA anti-castro efforts, the Bay of Pigs, and other agency "failures."

It is quite another to summon the requisite insight and creativity to understand them to be perfect failures.

Arthur Schopenhauer:

"Students and learned men of every kind and every age go as a rule in search of information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything: it does not occur to them that the information is merely a means towards insight and possesses little or no value in itself."

Of course they didn't "intend for Castro to be removed." They had put the bastard in power! Tosh Plumlee was flying missions for CIA from 1956 through at least 1958 running guns from the Florida Keys to Castro and the 26th of July Movement! It was Raul Castro who got Plumlee off the island when his plane went down on one of the runs in 1958, and Fidel game him a fatigue hat, for the love of Christ!

What kind of hoser actually thinks CIA didn't have any idea what Castro was when they armed him and backed him and put him into power, but then suddenly had their heads spin around like Linda Blair on crack in 1960 and realize with a blinding euphoria of cognition that he had to be [LEWIS BLACK]"remooooooooved"[/LEWIS BLACK]?

Half a century's worth of CIA nonsense shredded in two paragraphs. Splendid.

It's the same reason the Bay of Pigs "failed." Failed, hell! It never was organized to take Castro out at all.

Bravo. The truth. Innit liberating?

Paul

In Columbia Pictures' Vantage Point, Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) and Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) are two Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Ashton (William Hurt) at a landmark summit on the global war on terror. When President Ashton is shot moments after his arrival in Salamanca, Spain, chaos ensues and disparate lives collide. In the crowd is Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), an American tourist videotaping the historic event to show his kids when he returns home. Also there is Rex (Sigourney Weaver), an American TV news producer who is reporting on the conference. It's only as we follow each person's perspective of the same 15 minutes prior to and immediately after the shooting that the terrifying truth behind the assassination attempt is revealed. The release date is set at February 15, 2008.

Type following into internet address bar for film trailer:

http://vantage-point-trailer.blogspot.com/

Just what do you think was the CIA's objective in backing McCarthy?

A little remembered contribution of McCarthy’s to open government occurred in early 1967. The nearest thing the Senate boasted to an Ethics Committee - a rare treat this, an organised-hypocrisy-as-oxymoron - was on the trail of Senator Thomas Dodd, stalwart of the China Lobby, the Katanga Lobby, the LBJ lobby, and the Brown Envelope Lobby, to name but four. “Clean” Gene was a member of said ethical guardian and anxious to ensure that all hearings after the initial one should be held in closed session (1). He lost the vote 5-1, which permitted reporters to report, and thus the public to hear, among other items, confirmation of just how much it cost to buy Dodd’s support for an ambassadorial nomination: $10, 500, according to Time magazine’s account of the week-long public hearing (2).

The identity of the would-be US ambassador to France is not without interest: Abram N. Spanel, founder of the International Latex Corporation, the manufacturer of “ladies’ undergaments,” as the breakers of the story, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, so delicately put it a just under a year before (3). Born in Russia but reared in Paris until the age of ten, Spanel founded the ILC in Delaware in 1932, and was its chairman for twenty-six years (1949-1976). In that time, he earned the distinction of being Red-baited by Westbrook Pegler (4), and decorated by a Bolivian government fresh from massacring opponents in the Cocha bamba valley (5). In mitigation, there was over a decade between the two achievements. As Time magazine had it on his death, however, Spanel “was probably best known to the public for his habit of regularly buying newspaper space, at a cost of millions over four decades, to promote his beliefs, notably world unity, support for Israel and understanding for France” (6). The latter was no idle boast. In March 1954, Spanel had been presented with the Cross of Officer of the French Legion of Honour by the then French Ambassador in Washington, Henri Bonnet (7).

Support for Israel and understanding for France did not always co-exist harmoniously, though, particularly in the age of De Gaulle. As soon as he had regained power in 1958, De Gaulle had “severed some of the extraordinarily close ties in defence and atomic collaboration which had been created between Israel and successive French governments” in the two years before (8), a fact which did not prevent CIA propagandists in late 1960, in response to Arabic-language broadcasts from Moscow identifying the US as the source of Israel’s recent acquisition of atomic armaments, from redirecting blame to France (9). Israel was later to be implicated, along with Portugal and Spain, in supportive roles for the CIA-backed Challe-led putsch of April 1961 (10).

In March 1962, the NYT reported that a delegation of French deputies, representing the France-United States Friendship Committee of the National Assembly, had paid a visit to the White House – there to insist upon the need for Franco-American co-operation in “combating the spread of Communism in South America and Africa” – before being “entertained…at a private reception given by A.N. Spanel” (11). It almost goes without saying that by 1962 it was totalitarianism emanating from the West rather than the East which preoccupied De Gaulle and his circle.

One month later, the same source detailed on the same day the appearance of a) George Bidault in Switzerland, where “the twice Premier of France and nine times Foreign Minister” joined the National Council of Resistance (12), the most prestigious political front for the OAS; and a pamphlet in Oran published by the National Committee of American Friends of the French Secret Army Organisation (13). Who were these mysterious American supporters of OAS terrorism?

According to Nicholas Wahl, the doyen of American scholars of Gaullism – and a contributor to the CIA’s October 1960 symposium on the subject held at Columbia University (14) – one of those friends was none other than Abe Spanel, who served as a money conduit to the OAS (15).

In attempting to shield Dodd, “Clean Gene” was protecting the public from much more of interest. How lucky the country was to have such a considerate Senator.

(1) Drew Pearson & Jack Anderson, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round: McCarthy Effort to Shield Dodd Fails,” Washington Post, 8 February 1967, p.B11.

(2) “An Oft-Blurred Line,” Time, 24 March 1967: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 836871,00.html

(3) Drew Pearson & Jack Anderson, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round: Spanel Pushed by Dodd as Envoy,” The Washington Post, 1 March 1966, p.B11.

(4) “Unfair Enough,” Time, 14 November 1949: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 934315,00.html

(5) “Bolivia Gives Award,” NYT, 19 January 1961, p.33: The trinket in question was the Decoration of Grand Officials of the Condor of the Andes. It was presented in person by Vice-President Juan Lechin. The massacre in question took place in November 1960. See “100 Dead in Clash in Bolivia,” The Times, 21 November 1960, p.12.

(6) “Milestones,” Time, 15 April 1985: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 966196,00.html

To catch the flavour of Spanel’s crassly self-promoting ads, try the one entitled “Special Hero,” NYT, 18 December 1967, p.18, in which a Justice Department official called John Doar was eulogised for his work in the “Deep South.” The ad was of course “Presented as a public service by International Latex Corporation, 350 Fifth Avenue, NYC.”

(7) “France Honors Industrialist,” NYT, 18 March 1954, p.55.

(8) Bernard Ledwidge. De Gaulle (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p.304.

(9) “Israel Fails to Allay US Anxiety/”Secret Building of Reactor,” The Times, 21 December 1960, p.6: “Also on December 9 the Joint Congressional Committee on atomic energy received a briefing from an official of the Central Intelligence Agency about “intelligence information” that Israel might be developing atomic weapons. A subsidiary reason why the American reaction might be more public than usual is that an Arabic broadcast from Moscow recently accused the United States of having delivered a ready-made atomic bomb to Israel. Surprised indignation about the idea of a Franco-Israel bomb seemed a more effective response than a mere denial.”

(10) “No Embarrassing Questions,” The Nation, 17 June 1961, p.511: “Nobody seemed at all curious about the roles Spain, Portugal and Israel were slated to play were the revolt successful. And, of course, nobody asked a single question about the American CIA.”

(11) “French Legislators Urge Anti-Red Plan,” NYT, 10 March 1962, p.8.

(12) Henry Giniger, “Bidault Reported Joining Anti-Gaullist Subversives,” NYT, 13 April 1962, p.1.

(13) “US Group Supports Algeria Terrorists,” NYT, 13 April 1962, p.6.

(14) New York University Archives: Guide to the Papers of Nicholas Wahl, 1944-1995:

http://dlib.nyu.edu/eadapp/transform?sourc...es/archives.xsl

(15) For Wahl’s career, see, among other sources: “Obituary: Prof Nicholas Wahl,” The Daily Telegraph, 23 September 1996, clipping unpaginated; “Professor Nicholas Wahl,” The Times, 20 September 1996, p.21. I’ve mislaid, temporarily I hope, the source of Wahl’s comment pointing the finger at Spanel, but will cite when located.

There is an International Court that could try the Generals in abstentia and issue arrest warrents if needed. Then and only then would I approve of attempts to arrest them, if no War were involved. I hate the Generals dictatorship, and hope the democracy movement will prevail, but intervention if done wrong and illegally will only make matters worse. Long ago all major countries should have frozen the Generals assets; stopped trade with Burma and put diplomatic pressure on them, and arrested any of the Generals if they left the country to travel. Verbal support for the Democracy Movement will also do a lot. War will not.

John Laughland has written a number of excellent pieces on the farce that is victor's justice - sorry, read "international law" and the Hague. Links to three of them:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...,651187,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2023025,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2186684,00.html

For a criticial look at who and what Laughland represents, try this link:

http://www.martinstabe.com/blog/archives/2...are_these_p.php

I would be genuinely astonished if the CIA did not know, as in the case of Allende, precisely where the junta's bank accounts are, and what's in them. After all, the Agency used Ne Win et al to destroy the pro-neutralist Burmese civilian government in 1962. Langley set the generals up in business.

We should also be clear about the consequence of a US-orchestrated "democratic revolution": It will lead, as intended, to the much more intensive exploitation of Burma's rich natural resources (from oil to militarily strategic minerals); the creation of a privileged, US-controlled business and financial elite; the ruthless exploitation of a cheap, abundant and non-unionised labour force etc. There will be an upside in some or all of those developments: greater wealth, freedom, improved healthcare etc. But let us not harbour any illusions that a genuine democracy will be created; or that Western intervention is anything other than self-interested. After all, how can one trust a US administration which twice stole its own elections?

Trying the puppets is good theatre. Trying the puppet-masters is justice.

Paul

This is only tangentially related to conspiracies, but I thought it might be relevant here:

Should the US / the UN / the Western nations / democratic nations be sending in a military force to remove the current government of Burma and install a democratic government?

What are the pros and cons of action / inaction?

Before taking a position on Burma, I’d urge readers to do some background reading. British and American motives for urging a change of regime in Burma are spurious, and their pretence at moral outrage just that, a pretence.

A short guide, then, to what has really happened in post-war Burma; and who really did it.

First, let us look at the present. For a selection of recent pieces in the Guardian detailing powerful British business interests doing very nicely out of the thuggish junta, follow this link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/burma/0,,970917,00.html

By way of demolishing the myth that the West – I here include India very much within that grouping – has not been intervening military in Burma, see the following piece in this morning’s Guardian:

Burmese rebels accuse India of betrayal

34 men in secret trial deny being arms smugglers

Case highlights growing trade links with Rangoon

Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi

Monday October 8, 2007, p.22

Thirty-four men who are being tried in secret by India, accused of being arms smugglers, are Burmese anti-junta rebels who were once backed by the Indian army, say human rights activists who are demanding their freedom.

The Indian army says the men, who belong to the Arakan ethnic minority that is fighting the Burmese army, were captured by Indian security forces in February 1998, along with a cache of arms and weapons, in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

New Delhi claimed Operation Leech had smashed a group of gunrunners who had been aiding anti-Indian separatists. However the men say they are Karen National Union (KNU) and National Unity Party of Arakan (Nupa) rebels who were fighting Burma's junta and who had been provided with arms and a sanctuary by India.

The Indian authorities held the men in jail for six and a half years before charges were brought. Now the trial is taking place in secret - no reporters are allowed and the public has been banned.

The case has become a cause célèbre among India's pro-democracy activists, especially since the uprising in Burma earlier this month. "We have to ask our government why Burma's freedom fighters have been imprisoned in India like this when people are taking to the streets in Rangoon for freedom," said Nandita Haskar, a civil rights lawyer who is campaigning for the men's release.

Their case is supported by a retired Indian intelligence officer and the leadership of the two anti-junta groups, which are based in Thailand but which had close dealings with New Delhi until Operation Leech.

The men say they were double-crossed by an Indian army colonel named Grewal, who was in the pay of the junta. The army says it has never heard of the colonel.

"These people are not gun runners, they are our men," said Khin Maung of Nupa. "They were promised a camp in the Andaman islands by this colonel, but he took them there and they were [either] captured [or] shot."

During the 1990s, India began to reverse its historic stand against the junta and to jettison its pro-democracy links. Since Operation Leech, it has emerged as Burma's second largest export market, after Thailand. The Indian defence establishment now trains and supplies Burma's armed forces. India is also in a race with China to acquire gas reserves off Burma's coast.

DB Nandi, a former Indian intelligence officer who worked in Burma, said he suspected that New Delhi had too much at stake to allow the truth to be told. "This whole thing was designed to smash the revolt of the Arakanese. These people were not prejudicial to the security interests of India. But they were butchered and imprisoned," he said.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

India, I hasten to add, is merely following in the great tradition of armed (and murderous) Anglo-American intervention in Burma. Among the highlights of this brutal and disgusting strategy:

A British claque – including prominent Tory MPs, a prominent right-wing journalist, military men, the local British Council rep., etc. – organised the assassination of Aung San, the Burmese independence leader, and six colleagues, on 19 July 1947. For a brilliant investigation of the case, see: Kin Oung. Who Killed Aung San? (Bangkok: White Lotus Company Ltd., expanded second edition, 1996).

For a sustained attempt to duck the question of whether this British claque was, in essence, MI6, see Fergal Keane’s “Save us from our friends,” The Guardian, Saturday, 19 July 1996, The Week section, p.5. The piece is nevertheless overwhelmingly supportive of Kin Oung’s book, and well worth a look. It was published to accompany a Keane-fronted BBC2 documentary, “Who Really Killed Aung San?,” shown at 1915hrs that same evening.

For CIA intervention in post-war Burma, most notably in support of Kuomintang opium armies, see Robert H. Taylor’s Foreign and Domestic Consequences of the KMT Intervention in Burma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Data Paper 93, Southeast Asia Program Department of Asian Studies: July 1973). Successive US ambassadors railed against US support for the KMT; and successive US presidents vowed – and tried – to terminate that aid. To no avail.

Why would a President Clinton (Hilary) or Obama obtain compliance from an unreformed CIA that defied Eisenhower, then Kennedy?

As for who, in 1962, really installed Ne Win and the crowd of military gangsters whose successors now rule Burma, we have been fed a great deal of pap about about the alleged “leftism” of the junta. To give a concrete example: Ne Win’s adopted son, and quasi-nemesis, Tin U, was trained by the CIA on the Pacific island of Saipan in the 1950s. Tin U was appointed head of the MIS by Win in 1972. (Kin Oung. Who Killed Aung San?, p.82).

You will also find reference to the training Israel afforded Burmese military high-flyers pre-1962 in William C. Johnstone’s Burma’s Foreign Policy: A Study in Neutralism (Harvard UP, 1963), p.327, n19. It would appear that Israel’s military was almost as close to the Burmese soldier-gangsters as it would soon become to South Africa's senior military men.

Paul

http://www.shankly.com/quotes.htm

Great man, some great quotes – but seemingly compiled by a Kopite Warren Commissioner, as it omits the most poignant one of all, on his retirement years:

”I might add that I count Everton among the clubs who have welcomed me over the last few seasons. I have been received more warmly by Everton than I have by Liverpool. It is scandalous and outrageous that I should have to write these things about the club I helped build into what it is today.”

James Corbett. Everton: The School of Science (London: Macmillan, 2003), p.200, citing Shanks’ 1976 autobiography, Shankly by Shankly (London: Mayflower, 1976), p.150.

“If you know you’re history…”

PS John & Andy - you've established a great forum, don't chuck it all away from exasperation, tiredness etc. It's a very rare thing, indeed, in this country - a place of genuinely free speech.

Paul

Consider again the nature of the damage to the Merc. The front of the car bore a pronounced dent at the mid-front, to the extent that the wings of the car appeared to have curved round the impediment. It had clearly struck the column head on, not on either wing; and it was thus anything but a glancing blow.

On 25 January 1998, the Sunday Times published, on page 11 of its “Focus” section, a report by its fabled Insight team entitled “Diana: The crash investigator and the mystery driver.” Accompanying the story was the customary photo display at the top of the page. The middle of the three pictures offered was of the Mercedes, in an upright position, in the tunnel road with, clearly visible, two lifting straps lying beneath it in preparation for the car’s removal. The unattributed photograph in question was taken from above and clearly shows the roof of the car present, in one piece (if crumpled and dented), and, in so far as one tell with any exactness, still attached to the rest of the car. The photograph also shows the deep indent at the engine’s midline, with the two sides of the car’s front curving toward the centre – unquestionably evidence of a fast, head-on impact against an unmoving tunnel pillar.

I mention the above in light of a series of still photographs which appeared in many British newspapers this morning. Never before seen, they were released yesterday on “an official website by the coroner Lord Justice Scott Barker” (1). Eight of the nine photos in this morning's Daily Mail purport to be a contemporaneous record of the crash’s immediate aftermath, showing, among other things, the first police and medical responders on the scene. The photographed numbered1 in the sequence is described thus: “The full extent of the catastrophic crash is clear from this angle. Firemen have cut open the roof to free the Princess and Rees-Jones and remove the bodies of Henri Paul and Dodi Fayed” (2). In this morning’s Daily Mirror, a different, and even clearer – though similarly unattributed - photograph of the roofless Mercedes, is printed at the right bottom of page 7. It is described thus: “Aftermath: All that was left of the Mercedes once the four victims had been cut free” (3).

Interestingly, none of the photos in either the Mirror or the Mail show the car’s front, and its deep central indent. Why? Because both are selling us the richoceting Mercedes story, a tale of glancing blows – from a white Fiat or somesuch – and upright landings.

The official narrative is in a mess. It also has the authentic whiff of MI6 about it: The peasants don’t read; and can’t remember anything.

(1) Richard Kay, Untitled text at the heart of nine colour photographs, The Daily Mail, Wednesday, 3 October 2007, pp.2-3. The official website is here: http://www.scottbaker-inquests.gov.uk/

(2) Ibid., p2. Follow this link, see picture 8: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1770

(3) Victoria Ward, “The Diana Inquest: Her Final Trip,” Daily Mirror, 3 October 2007, p.7. Follow this link, picture 8: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/20...89520-19887470/

Yet the workings of this network are labyrinthine. Sir Colin McColl, known as C, for “Chief” of MI6, regularly communicates with the Queen’s private secretary, currently Sir Robin Fellowes, who is also, to complicate things further, Diana’s brother-in-law. MI6 enjoyed a special relationship with the Queen and her Palace advisers. Adverse reports about their behaviour have been included in classified diplomatic telegrams from British missions overseas, concerned about the damage the continuing scandals are inflicting on British “prestige”.

Stumbled across this Daily Mail piece this morning. Apologies if it's appeared here before. It's from last year: Interesting, if unsubstantiated, claim that Robert Fellowes - not to mention two senior MI6 nasties - was in the British embassy in Paris on the evening of Diana’s assassination:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1770

If true, it is very, very interesting.

John Simkin said:

Thank you for posting these fascinating articles. I was not aware that the Spectator took this position in 1964. Do you know if they published any other articles on the JFK assassination after April 1964?

The Spectator on the assassination of JFK

The following list is taken from DeLloyd J. Guth & David R. Wrone. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography, 1963-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980). The Guth and Wrone citations are in parentheses at each entry’s end, first page, then item number.

Editorial, “Death of a Modern,” 29 November 1963, (7066), p.681 (G&W: 151, 1332)

Murray Kempton, “The Roman Way,” 29 November 1963, (706), p.683 (G&W: 146, 1240)

Robert Conquest, “A Spectator's Notebook: What killed Kennedy? The Mythsmiths [The haste among some newsmen to blame everyone],” 29 November 1963, (7066), p.684: (G&W: 166, 1544)*

Quote

Nicholas Davenport, “A Johnson Boom,” 6 December 1963, (7067), p.766: (G&W: 141, 1165)

Mary Holland, “Failures and Heroes [Reactions in the Irish Republic],” 3 January 1964, p.25: (G&W: 145, 1234)

Emma Booker, “Frost at Midnight [international tribute through the arts],” 31 January 1964, (7075), p.146: (G&W: 157, 1423)

Murray Kempton, “Jack Ruby – Surviving Victim,” 28 February 1964, (7079), p.270: (G&W: 227, 2503)

Mordecai Brienberg, “The Riddle of Dallas,” 6 March 1964, (7080), pp.305-6: (G&W: 99, 550)

Richard Gombrich & Martin Gilbert, “Letters: The Riddle of Dallas,” 13 March 1964, (7081), p.343: (G&W: 100, 563)

Mordecai Brienberg, “Letters: The Riddle of Dallas,” 3 April 1964, (7084), pp.448-9: (G&W: 99, 550)

Editorial (Iain Macleod), “Open Justice,” 3 April 1964, (7084), pp.435: (G&W: 105, 651)

Murray Kempton, “Waiting for the verdict on Oswald,” 10 April 1964, (7085), pp.472-3: (G&W: 91, 419)

Murray Kempton, “The Warren Report – Reasonable Doubt,” 2 October 1964, (7110), pp.428-9: (G&W: 117, 815)

Murray Kempton, “Looking back on the anniversary,” 4 December 1964, (7119), pp.778-9: (G&W: 159, 1443)

Quoodle (Iain Macleod), “Spectator's Notebook: J.F.K. [Reviews USIA's film],” 26 February 1965, (7131), p.255: (136, 1095)

Iain Macleod's first edition in charge was that of 29 November 1963; his first editorial on 6 December: He resigned the editorship on 11 October 1965, though he did not vacate his office until 30 December. See Robert Shepherd’s Iain Macleod: A Biography (London: Random House, 1994), pp.412-5, in particular.

R.A. Cline, “Warren in the dock: Who killed Kennedy? [Reviews Lane & Epstein],” 23 September 1966, (7213), pp.371-2: (G&W: 114, 763)

Murray Kempton, “Ruby, Oswald and the State,” 21 October 1966, (7217), pp.505-506: (G&W: 228, 2507)

Murray Kempton, “A Queen and her servant [Manchester's Death of a President],” 23 December 1966, (7226), pp.806-7: (G&W: 199, 2055)

Murray Kempton, “America [Kennedys vs. Look magazine and William Manchester],” 6 January 1967, (7228), pp.5-6: (G&W: 199, 2056)

Murray Kempton, “The Disposable Jack Ruby,” 13 January 1967, (7229), p.35: (G&W: 228, 2508)

R.A. Cline, “Post-script to Warren [by A.L. Goodhart],” 27 January 1967, (7231), p.99: (G&W: 114, 764)

Alan W.B. Simpson, “Letters: Post-script to Warren [Critique of R.A. Cline],” 3 February 1967, p.133: (G&W: 121, 868)

Stuart Hood, “Television: The Marathon [Lane's Rush to Judgment on BBC2], 3 February 1967, (7232), pp.131-2: (G&W: 167, 1561)

Randolph Churchill, “Shivs, Kazzazza and Code 4,” 21 April 1967, (7243), pp.447-449: (G&W: 198, 2034?5)

Quote

* Conquest had worked for British intelligence’s notorious far-right propaganda arm, the Information Research Department. Was this piece the consequence of an official briefing from his “former employer,” in effect, the IRD “party” line? The section in his weekly column entitled, “What killed Kennedy?,” concludes with a prime piece of establishment pseudo-wisdom: “In fact, those who, either way, would blame political orientation for any of the crimes of our epoch are acquitting the true offender – political fanaticism, swinish idealism.” His second section in response to Kennedy’s murder, “The Mythsmiths,” finished with a hymn to that old favourite of establishment conspirators, “lone fanatics.”

As Pasternak once wrote: "This age will pass; the scorching beam will cool/ Turn charcoal-black, and curiosity/ One day will pore by candlelight in archives/ For works which thrill and dazzle men today./ What now passes for clarity and wisdom/ Our grandsons will regard as raving…,” (Encounter, July 1970, p.17).

Curiosity did, with the result we can now see Conquest for what he was: a servant of power every bit as unscrupulous and unprincipled as the Soviet ideologues he invited us – not without reason, for sure - to hold in contempt.

Thank you for posting these fascinating articles. I was not aware that the Spectator took this position in 1964. Do you know if they published any other articles on the JFK assassination after April 1964?

It did, John, but to the best of my recollection, none were as good as Brienberg's. I have a list somewhere and will attempt to find it.

By the way, Iain Macleod, Tory MP and future Chancellor of the Exchequer, was number 18 on Bertrand Russell's list of prospective members for the "Who Killed Kennedy?" Committee. Macleod declined membership, but, as demonstrated, that didn't stop him from publishing Brienberg.

Ian Gilmour was a principled politician whose political career was destroyed by his opposition to Thatcher's policies in the 1980s. He was right on every account and it was sickening to see Brown praising this woman last week.

Amen.

The Spectator, 6 March 1964, pp.305-306

The Riddle of Dallas

By Mordecai Brienberg

The author of this article, a former Rhodes Scholar from Canada, is a lecturer in sociology at Berkeley, California.

There are two widely held interpretations of President Kennedy’s assassination and the events in Dallas. The ‘liberal’ position contends that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of the hatred and the violence preached by the ‘extremists of all kinds.’ In this view, radicals of the right and the left are responsible for the assassination. The ‘conservative’ interpretation traces responsibility for the assassination to ‘leftists and Communists’ alone; for, they contend, ‘was not Oswald a professed Marxist?’ But more crucial than the differences in these to postures are their similarities. Both presume that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, guilty of the murder of the President; both by-pass an examination of whether or not this assertion is demonstrable.

In its next edition, 13 March 1964 (p.343),The Spectator’s letters pages carried an attack on Brienberg’s article from, to this reader at least, a surprising joint source – Richard Gombrich, soon-to-be Oxford lecturer in Indology; and Martin Gilbert, the historian (of all things Churchill, in particular.) Brienberg replied three weeks later:

Mordecai Brienberg, “Letters: The Riddle of Dallas,” The Spectator, 3 April 1964, pp.448-9

Sir – Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert are ungrateful when they attack District Attorney Wade, for he is the “father” of the very method they employ in their letter. Beginning with the presumption of guilt, they by-pass intransigent evidence and proceed on the basis of a cursory examination to the conclusion that Oswald alone was guilty.

Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert do not reject most of the factual evidence I present. They ignore, for example, my discussion of (a) the murder weapon; ( Oswald’s alleged movements after the assassination; © the murder of Tippit. They mention other evidence which I presented, but remain unaware of its implication for the official account of the assassination. Thus they are off-hand both in their discussion of the number of bullets fired, and, in their discussion of the bullet-hole in the front windshield of the President’s car. No matter how many bullets were fired, or what an examination of the windshield would reveal, their conclusion – as it is their initial and unalterable presumption – would remain unshaken. Nowhere do they allow for the possibility that more than one person might have been involved, or that shots might have been fired from several directions.

Where I have been concerned to critically examine the case against Oswald, Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert are concerned to reaffirm that Oswald was the sole assassin. They erroneously accuse me of pretending to a complete and watertight explanation, whereas my explicit concern in the article, and in this letter, is to show the incompleteness, and contradictory nature of official claims to a total explanation.

What of the evidence which Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert do confront directly? Initially it must be recognised that one explains nothing by attributing behaviour to excitement. All this does is to make any behaviour appear plausible, and, hence predisposes the reader to accept the arbitrarily selected evidence. Thus when Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert argue that the doctors’ original statement about an entrance wound in the President’s throat was an error attributable to ‘an unprecedented emergency,’ they are not offering an explanation. For these same doctors, in the same ‘unprecedented emergency,’ performed an operation based on a diagnosis of the nature of the President’s wound with a competence and control that neither Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert, nor anyone else, has challenged. And do Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert really believe that the lengthy FBI interrogation of the doctors was simply to calm their excited nerves?

Disrespect for facts is a hallmark of their letter. They are anxious to explain away Marina Oswald’s seclusion on the grounds of ‘safety,’ ignoring the fact that Oswald’s mother had explicitly requested police protection and was refused on the ground that her safety was not endangered. Yet it was the mother, and not the wife, who was the subject of public antipathy and vilification.

The authors seek to impale me on the horns of a dilemma. Here they display an ignorance of police organisation. It was the Secret Service and not the Dallas police who were responsible for the President’s safety; and thus there is nothing contradictory about Oswald not being watched (by the Secret Service) and his being arrested (by the Dallas police). Their attempt to contest the possibility that Oswald worked for a Federal agency is pathetically humorous. While they may juxtapose the information I present, they still conclude with the contention that the FBI gave a private (not an office) phone number to a ‘subversive,’ requesting him to inform them of his whereabouts. However ‘civilised,’ calling card espionage is a figment of their imagination. I suppose Oswald was also given the licence number of an agent’s unmarked car so the he might hail the occasional ride without public embarrassment.

Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert question that the Warren Commission is proceeding arbitrarily. What else is one to close closed hearings, the failure to provide for any public examination of the testimony and the evidence as it is presented? But the authors’ faith in this Commission is unbounded. With a final rhetorical flourish they say: ‘Certainly we want the evidence to be made public, but who says it will not be?’ Obviously Messrs. Gombrich and Gilbert have not read Mr. Warren’s own statement when he was questioned about the release of the testimony. The New York Times, February 4, quotes him as saying: ‘Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime.’

Not having the excuse of the Dallas environment or the immediate confusion of the assassination, Mssrs. Gombrich and Gilbert’s letter still stands on a par with the ratiocination of District Attorney Wade. The general point is that it is not sufficient to scapegoat the Dallas police when other individuals and institutions, which flatter themselves on being more responsible, are merely seeking to legitimate the initial distortions.

For reasons which escape me, I’ve not been able to take Martin Gilbert seriously since learning of this exchange.

The Times obituary:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/o...icle2517666.ece

“In the Conservative view,” he said, “economic liberalism, à la Professor Hayek, because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of community, is not a safeguard of political freedom but a threat to it.”

The Guardian obituary:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicsobi...2175738,00.html

“Gilmour opposed and/or voted against most Thatcher mistakes and diktats - the paving bill to abolish the Greater London council, denial to local authorities of council house sales revenue, the freeze on child benefit, the poll tax, the three-line whip against Conservative MP Richard Shepherd's reform of the Official Secrets Act, identity cards at football matches and the then chancellor Nigel Lawson's "extremely slack financial policy". There was a peculiar poignancy about his call to meet the massive unemployment of the day with investment in reshaping a battered infrastructure. He was president of Medical Aid for the Palestinians (1993-96) and chairman of the Byron Society from 2003.”

The Spectator, 6 March 1964, pp.305-306

The Riddle of Dallas

By Mordecai Brienberg

The author of this article, a former Rhodes Scholar from Canada, is a lecturer in sociology at Berkeley, California.

There are two widely held interpretations of President Kennedy’s assassination and the events in Dallas. The ‘liberal’ position contends that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of the hatred and the violence preached by the ‘extremists of all kinds.’ In this view, radicals of the right and the left are responsible for the assassination. The ‘conservative’ interpretation traces responsibility for the assassination to ‘leftists and Communists’ alone; for, they contend, ‘was not Oswald a professed Marxist?’ But more crucial than the differences in these to postures are their similarities. Both presume that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, guilty of the murder of the President; both by-pass an examination of whether or not this assertion is demonstrable.

Some very few Americans have taken seriously the tradition that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. These individuals have attempted to assess the evidence in the case. My purpose in this article is to summarise their minority enquiries, in order to make more widely known some pertinent information.

The complete case against Lee Harvey Oswald is contained in the F.B.I. and Secret Service report submitted to the Warren Commission, which is unavailable to the public. However, the essence of the ‘water-tight case’ against Oswald was presented in a nation-wide radio and television statement made by the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade. This statement was made after Oswald was murdered, while still in police custody. The F.B.I. and the Secret Service have themselves ‘leaked’ to the news media information from their own subsequent investigation. What follows is a brief resume of the official reconstruction of the assassination.

Lee Harvey Oswald, positioned at the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building (TSBD), fired three rifle shots at the President’s car as it was moving away from the building. The President was struck twice, once in the neck and once in the head; Governor Connally of Texas was struck once. This occurred between 12.30 and 12.31. Oswald then walked down four flights of stairs to the second floor of the building, where he took a coke from the coke-machine. A policeman who rushed into the building immediately after the shooting approached Oswald, selecting him from among several persons gathered around the coke-machine. But the owner of the TSBD, who was accompanying the policeman, intervened and stated that Oswald ‘works in the building.’ Presumably satisfied by this comment, the policeman discontinued his interrogation and ran to the sixth floor. It is only after this brief encounter with the law that Oswald is alleged to have fled the building itself. He supposedly walked several blocks to catch a bus, which he rode for several more blocks; he then hailed a taxi and rode four miles to his apartment. After taking a jacket from his room, he left; and some time later he shot a policeman, officer Tippit. Finally, it is alleged, Oswald entered a movie theatre where his ‘suspicious movements’ caused the cashier to call for the police. It was in the theatre that Oswald was arrested.

The official account of the Kennedy assassination consists of assertions about (a) the murder weapon; ( the place from which the shots were fired, and the number of shots fired; © the escape of the alleged assassin; and (d) the murder of officer Tippit. I will critically examine each aspect in turn, questioning the plausibility of the official account and pointing out the significant discrepancies that appear when earlier explanations are matched against the final account that I have just outlined.

(a) Weapon

There is on file in Dallas an affidavit by the police officer who found a rifle on the sixth floor of the TSBD. That affidavit states that the weapon was a 7.65 mm Mauser. Wade, on November 22, stated that this was the murder weapon, and that Oswald’s palm-print was found on the weapon. The next day the F.B.I. released a report that Oswald had purchased a rifle in March under the alias Hiddel. But this rifle was a 6.5 mm Italian carbine. After this report, Wade reversed his position; the rifle he had in his possession was now an Italian carbine; it was no longer a Mauser. It was after this F.B.I. report that Wade announced that he knew Oswald used the alias Hiddel – because he had found an identification card in this name on Oswald’s person at the time of his arrest. But Wade did not explain why this alias was not released the previous day when he had asserted that Oswald used the alias Lee. The omission is most puzzling when one considers that the alias Lee was not immediately accessible to the Dallas authorities (as was the alias Hiddel), but had to be uncovered by a separate investigation.

Aside from questions about the rifle itself and the alias under which it was purchased, what evidence is there that Oswald fired the rifle? The results of paraffin tests, administered to Oswald to determine whether or not he had recently fired a weapon, are on record in Dallas. While positive results in such tests can be produced by contact with substances other than gunpowder, negative results definitely indicate that a person has not recently fired a weapon. The firing of a rifle leaves gunpowder traces on the hands and face, if it is fired from the shoulder. And it would seem rather ridiculous for a person to have fired a rifle with telescopic sights from the hip. The results of the paraffin tests were positive for Oswald’s right and left hands. The paraffin tests on Oswald’s face proved negative. Moreover, contrary to Wade’s assertion on November 22 about palm-prints, the F.B.I. now states that ‘no palm-prints were found on the rifle.’

( Scene of the Shooting

The crucial question here is to reconcile the nature of the wounds inflicted on the President with the unwavering contention that the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository building. Let us follow the changing official reports as they attempt such a reconciliation.

The three doctors who attended the President at Parkland Memorial Hospital immediately after the shooting stated to reporters at the hospital that one of the bullets had entered the President’s throat ‘just below the Adam’s apple.’ There is a great deal of difference between an entrance and an exit wound, and all three doctors claimed to have dealt daily with gun wounds. The bullet, these doctors further stated, ranged downward without exiting. If the President had been shot as his car approached the TSBD along Houston Street, then the nature of the throat wound would be consistent with the allegation that the shots were fired from the sixth floor of that building. This was the first F.B.I. interpretation. But all the witnesses as well as the photographs of the shooting made clear that the car had already made the turn and was heading towards the overpass when the first shot was fired in the President’s throat. Photographs indicate his car was seventy-five to one hundred yards past the building. The F.B.I. next argued that the President had turned his head around (almost 180 degrees) and was looking back when the first shot was fired. Mrs. Connally contradicted this by stating that she was speaking to the President immediately before he was shot – and she was sitting directly in front of Mrs. Kennedy. The films also show the President facing forward as the first shot struck him. How, then, can a bullet shot from behind enter Kennedy’s throat from the front?

If the place of the shooting is fixed, if the posture of the President is fixed, then the consistency of the final account can only be achieved by altering the initial interpretation about the nature of the President’s wound. After the three physicians were questioned by the F.B.I. they issued a statement reversing their earlier view – on which they had been unanimous and definite. The throat wound, they now say, is an exit wound. These doctors state that they are, however, unable to talk to reporters or to discuss the matter further.

But there remain other pieces of information which officials have not reconciled with the latest statement of the doctors. The first police bulletin, overheard by a reporter waiting for the President’s motorcade at a point farther along the route, was that ‘all firing appears to have come from the overpass’ – in front of the car. The first radio accounts of the assassination stated that a policeman rushed to the overpass and was seen chasing two persons on the overpass. Ominously, nothing further is ever mentioned about this report. The front windshield of the President’s car had a bullet hole in it. The Secret Service prevented reporters at the hospital from coming close enough to determine the direction of the bullet. The car was then flown back to Washington and remained in the custody of the Secret Service. Eight days later, the windshield of the car was replaced. (It is not known whether the shattered windshield was destroyed.) Finally, four reporters of the Dallas Morning News, witnesses to the assassination, who were standing between the overpass and the TSBD, all claim that the shots were fired from in front of the President’s car.

How many shots were there altogether? According to the official report three shots were fired. But there appears to be five bullets. A fragmented bullet was found in the car (this is most likely the bullet which struck the President in the head and then exited); there was the bullet that ‘struck’ the President in the throat; there was the bullet that struck Governor Connally; there was a bullet found by the Secret Service on a stretcher, presumably the President’s (although its origin is by no means definite); and there was a bullet found by a Dallas policeman in the grass at the point where the other shots struck the President and the Governor. Did Oswald now fire five shots in five and a half seconds, when rifle experts are highly sceptical that an excellent marksman could have accurately fired three shots in that time?

c) The Escape

Is it possible for Oswald to have done everything the official account attributes to him between the time of the shooting and his arrival at his apartment? The shooting took place between 12.30 and 12.31. Oswald arrived at his apartment, according to his landlady, at 12.45. Another account states he arrived at 1.0 p.m. This report also mentions ‘choked downtown traffic.’

According to the official version, Oswald’s taxi ride was about four miles. In uncongested traffic, the taxi could average twenty miles per hour, and the journey would then take twelve minutes. Thus if Oswald arrived at 12.45, he would have had two minutes to (a) hide the weapon; ( walk from the sixth floor to the second floor; © find coins and get a coke from the machine; (d) converse with a policeman; (e) leave the building and walk four blocks to a bus; (f) ride the bus several blocks; and (g) get off the bus and hail a taxi. But if the traffic were congested, a taxi could only average about ten miles per hour. Even if we allow that Oswald did not arrive in this case until 1.0 p.m., he would still have not more than five minutes to accomplish these same acts.

It does not seem too plausible that the alleged sequence of events could have taken place within the allotted time. But official reversals cast even further doubt on the validity of their interpretations. According to Wade’s first account, the taxi-driver who picked up Oswald was named Darryl Click. But when private investigation indicated that Mr. Click had never driven a taxi in Dallas, District Attorney Wade reversed his statement. The name of the taxi-driver was now given as one William Waley.

If Oswald were the assassin, what motive would he have for returning to his apartment? Was it only to pick up his jacket, which is the police account? Mrs. Kennedy complained that afternoon of the ‘sweltering heat.’ If Oswald was returning to facilitate his escape, why, then, did he leave 150 dollars in the dresser of his room? He had only thirteen dollars in his pocket when he was arrested. For a man who had supposedly planned the assassination and carried it out so successfully, he was remarkably ‘unplanned’ and chaotic in making his escape.

(d) Murder of Tippit

Oswald, it should be remembered, was first arrested for the murder of officer Tippit. This, too, was a ‘water-tight case.’ District Attorney Wade claimed that he had sent twenty-three men to the electric chair on less evidence than that which he had against Oswald. After making several conflicting statements about where Tippit was shot, Wade ultimately acknowledged he didn’t know the scene of the crime. The one witness of the Tippit murder has sworn an affidavit describing the murderer as ‘short, stocky, and with bushy hair.’ I would describe Oswald, from the pictures I have seen, as slight, balding, and perhaps short. And what of the pistol with which Tippit was murdered? No statement was made by the police as to whether the pistol found on Oswald at the time of his arrest was the pistol which fired the shots killing Tippit. A strange omission in a ‘water-tight case.’ Wade did claim, however, that the police had a marked bullet which ‘mis-fired’ when Oswald supposedly tried to kill the arresting officer. The policeman himself gave a different account of the arrest, stating that he prevented Oswald from firing the pistol at all by placing his finger behind the trigger before Oswald could pull it. Confronted by this contradiction, Wade yet again changed his version to accord with that of the policeman. Thus at one moment Wade claims to have a marked bullet in his possession; the next moment he denies he has such physical evidence. In the Tippit case, as in the Kennedy case, there is distortion, a reversal of interpretations and a mishandling of crucial physical evidence.

It might be argued in defence of the investigating agencies that in the atmosphere of excitement that followed Kennedy’s assassination contradictions and imprecisions were due to ‘honest’ confusion. Granted that confusion existed, why then should the officials be continuously certain of one thing, Oswald’s guilt? Why is Oswald’s presumed guilt the constant in this sea of incomplete and conflicting evidence? Now, supposedly, the confusions have been clarified into a single consistent and convincing account. But if the case is consistent and convincing, why should witnesses refuse to comment to the press after they have been questioned by the F.B.I.? Why has Marina Oswald been held in the custody of the Secret Service since the murder of her husband, more than two months ago? She has had no direct and personal contact with any of her friends, with her mother-in-law, or with any reporter. Every communication to her, and every statement by her, first passes through the hands of a public-relations officer and a lawyer appointed ‘in her interest’ by the Secret Service. Why, if the case is so convincing, has physical evidence, such as the windshield of the President’s car, been unavailable for public examination? An alternative hypothesis to that of ‘honest’ confusion is the hypothesis that the initial confusion and the present secrecy are attributable to incongruities between the presumption of Oswald’s guilt and the inadequacy and intransigence of the evidence which would validate such a presumption.

And if the evidence is ‘intransigent,’ as a critical examination of the official account seems to demonstrate, why have the Dallas police, the F.B.I. and the Secret Service been so unrelenting in their efforts to prove Oswald’s guilt? In the pressure for an arrest, did the Dallas police consider Oswald an appropriate scapegoat because he was first on their list of ‘subversives’?

The Federal agencies may have different motives. One hypothesis, which certainly cannot be conclusively demonstrated, suggests that Oswald worked for Federal investigatory agencies such as the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. This hypothesis seeks to account for otherwise unexplained incidents in Oswald’s life. While Oswald was employed he worked at minimum wages; but more frequently he was unemployed. Yet somehow he had the financial resources to travel to Mexico, to print political literature privately, and to pay a stenographer to transcribe a book critical of the Soviet Union which he was writing. The F.B.I. early acknowledged that Oswald regularly received money through the mail; but it has not yet stated the source. If the money came from a ‘left-wing’ organisation, what reason could the F.B.I. have for keeping this secret? Oswald had in his possession the private phone number and the automobile license number of the F.B.I. official in charge of ‘subversives’ in Dallas. This information is not obtainable from the telephone directory. Moreover, the agent had contacted Oswald several times before the assassination.

Passports are not quickly granted; and Cuban sympathisers have found them particularly difficult to obtain. But despite Oswald’s ‘defection’ to the Soviet Union, despite his activity in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he was able to obtain a passport ‘within a single day.’ With this passport he travelled to Mexico City to try to obtain visas to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Both countries refused him entrance.

Most striking is the fact that Oswald was not under surveillance during the President’s visit. Supposedly, the greatest security precautions ever taken to protect a President were instituted in Dallas. (The night before Kennedy’s arrival, posters were pasted which showed front and side views of the President under the caption: ‘Wanted – Dead or Alive.’) People who advocated integration of Texas schools were under surveillance, but this ‘Marxist,’ ‘defector,’ ‘pro-Castroite’ was unwatched. One is led to ask: is the F.B.I. trying to close the case in order to hide the fact that Oswald was in their employ, or in the employ of another investigatory agency?

The Warren Commission – which includes Allen Dulles, former head of the C.I.A.; John McCloy; Senator Russell of Georgia; Congressman Boggs of Louisiana; Senator Cooper of Kentucky; Congressman Ford of Michigan – might be a source of some consolation if it were probing for an answer to these worrisome questions. Ironically, the Commission provokes more questions about its own operation than it allays about the operation of other agencies. Its hearings are conducted in secret; and it appears to be restricting itself to a re-examination of the F.B.I. and Secret Service evidence. The accused’s constitutional rights to due process of the law, to public trial, to a defence attorney, to the cross-examination of prosecution evidence and witnesses – all these safeguards institutionalised in court procedure have been ignored in the hearing of this Commission. Why, one must ask, does the Warren Commission judge in camera, and by such arbitrary procedures?

*For those readers who wish to pursue these arguments further, I refer them to the following articles: ‘Defense Brief for Oswald,’ by Mark Lane (National Guardian, December 19, 1963); ‘Seeds of Doubt,’ by Jack Minnis and Staughton Lynd (New Republic, December 21, 1963); ‘Oswald and the F.B.I.,’ by Harold Feldman (Nation, January 27, 1964).

The Spectator, 3 April 1964, p.435

Editorial: Open Justice

By Iain Macleod

That justice should be seen to be done is, for democratic countries, obvious enough. Equally there are ill-defined areas concerning the operation of the security services and (more doubtfully) the ‘interests of the State’ where it may be undesirable to hold an inquiry under the spotlight of press and especially television scrutiny. For both Britain and the United States1963 brought difficult decisions in this difficult field. The cases range from Vassall to Bobby Baker, from the Ward-Profumo-Keeler circus to the stunning tragedy of the assassination of President Kennedy.

So far in Britain we have failed to find an acceptable approach. The interests of the State can only too easily become the interests of the Government or of particular Ministers: the instinctive feeling of an Opposition is always that where there is a wisp of smoke there is likely to be a forest fire. All too often the heavy artillery of the 1921 Tribunal system is in the end hauled into action. When the hearing is concluded everyone agrees that the method is hopelessly unsatisfactory and should not be used. Yet when the next case breaks, the ancient weapon is trundled out again. It is true that the worst defects of procedure, so apparent, for example, in the Belcher case, have been removed. Yet Tribunals held in public suffer from the twin disadvantages that innocent people always seem to be caught in the web, and charges made against those who are not on trial often go too long unanswered, and the refutation when at last it comes never attracts the publicity of the privileged accusation. Tribunal-type inquiries held in private, however excellent the reasons may be, always incur the charge of being a ‘cover-up’ operation by the Government.

There are, of course, cases where a Select Committee of the House of Commons could avoid some of the dangers inherent in the Tribunal procedure, but the memory of the Marconi case warns against the use of this method when political passions run high. At least 1963 saw the first real recognition by the leaders of the political parties there was a serious unresolved problem here, and saw also the first steps towards a solution.

The dilemma has been well put by Mr. Macmillan to the House of Commons. He has described with what mixed feelings he heard of the discovery of a spy in the public service. The Security Services were naturally elated: Mr. Macmillan, who knew that he must endure ordeal by Parliament, was less enthusiastic. We all know that spies exist, and the first reaction to their detection should be one of appreciation rather than scorn. The new procedures for preliminary investigation may perhaps encourage this more adult appraisal.

In the United States the approach is very different. The contract between what is debated in public and what is decided in private puzzles her friends. Perhaps the best of all advertisements for democracy was the American decision to show her space programme on television, and allow the watching world to share her triumph or her failure. Yet in the hideous tragedy of the late President’s murder the United States has seemed determined to throw open the scenes that should be veiled, and to veil the investigations that might with advantage be exposed. It was natural that the motorcade should be shown to the nation, for no one could foresee the grim curtain line that was still to be spoken. But it still seems incredible that the transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald, and so his murder, should have been shown to millions of people on television. It seems incredible that the nation and the world should have been allowed to eavesdrop on the verdict and sentence of the jury. And in the light of her tradition of open inquiry openly conducted it is bound to give rise to questions if the Warren Commission does not sit in public.

Some of these questions have been asked in the columns of the Spectator. In such a terrible moment when the whole world (except for its bigots) mourns for one man the United States should not feel offended if her many friends, and the Spectator ranks herself proudly with them, long to know the truth. In petty crimes as in great tragedies, the simplest, most obvious, answer is probably the true one. So with the Riddle of Dallas.

Only America’s enemies can gain from the unanswered questions that a discreet and private inquiry must throw up. Perhaps it is not yet too late to urge upon that the United States has herself most to gain from the full clamour of modern publicity into every corner of this tragedy.

The Spectator, 10 April 1964, pp.172-173

Waiting for the verdict on Oswald

By Murray Kempton

We are likely to wait until June before we have a report from Chief Justice Earl Warren and the seven other representative Americans whom President Johnson appointed to find for us an official and, we prayerfully hope, a definitive judgment on the circumstances of Mr. Kennedy’s assassination.

The Warren Commission has heard fifty witnesses and studied summaries of the recollections of a hundred more. It expects to spend another month listening to more testimony and a number of weeks thereafter to assemble its findings. It is our pride, of course, to think of ours as a government of laws rather than of men. But moments like these remind us how much more we are a government of laws terribly dependent upon men. Our dependence on Mr. Justice Warren amounts to a surrender of our faculties almost total. What we ask of him is a verdict we are able to accept as the truth and a truth no worse than the dreadful one we already know. We need to believe that Lee Oswald acted by himself and that what happened in Dallas was lonely and absurd and without the smallest explanation in reason. Any explanation in reason would leave us to face the condition that a number of our own citizens joined together to kill a man whom all Americans should have cherished as a person and as a symbol, and anyone who asks that asks too much of us. We seek a judgment that would both comfort and convince us.

Mr. Allen Dulles, a commission member and former director of the CIA, said last week that the mail-order rifle, assumed to be the murder weapon, ‘bore, among others, the fingerprints of Lee Oswald.’ This is a statement harder to take than anything the FBI has said about fingerprint evidence so far. Still, there is something about this case which never lays to one question to rest without raising another. Whose are the other fingerprints of whose existence Mr. Dulles incidentally informs us? Some of them at least have an obvious origin which, however innocent, is certainly unfortunate. After the rifle was found, one Dallas policeman was photographed holding it in the air with his bare hands; the next day another policeman appeared in the prints holding it carelessly by the sling. Each of these displays, offered for no reason but journalistic convenience, must have left fingerprints behind; and each was a breach of elementary police practice. The most critical piece of evidence in the most important murder in the lifetime of every American was handled like a stage prop; we depend on Mr. Justice Warren and he depends in turn for the truth on pieces of evidence picked over and mishandled by policemen.

I do not contend that Lee Oswald was innocent. Yet it is hard not to notice how glad every law enforcement was to believe that, having found Oswald, there was nowhere further to look. It seems to have become the law’s business in those early hours to keep us from asking why it could not protect Mr. Kennedy from a murder which was unthinkable by showing us how efficiently it could prevent Lee Oswald from an escape which would have been merely embarrassing. Ever since, there have remained discrepancies in the official version of Oswald’s capture which, if they are not indicative of a frame-up, can only be explained as exaggerations of the speed and efficiency with which the Dallas police reacted.

They could not have moved into the Texas Book Depository at once and in force, as their chief says they did, and still given Lee Oswald time to leave what they say was his hiding-place, dispose of what they say was his rifle, and be four flights down drinking a Coca-Cola in time to greet the first policeman to arrive. The police could not then have given Oswald time to leave and called the rest of the book depository’s employees to a formation and discovered Oswald missing and put out a perfect description as a wanted call on their radio, all in the space of one minute. And yet , when Justice Warren puzzles over these prodigies of logistics, there is no place for him to seek the answers except from the Dallas Police Department. In the same way, if he wants a full report on Lee Oswald’s relations with the FBI – both as informer and person informed upon – he can only ask Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director, and trust him to accept the consequent risks of institutional embarrassment.

To think about Justice Warren’s problem is to come to a peripheral but none the less curious mystery. That is, the role of the American reporter, who at his very good best is the most active and persistent of his breed on earth. The Kennedy murder is full of puzzles; yet our journalists look at them with a languor and an anxiety not to ask questions which has never fallen on us before. We have left the questions to amateurs and strangers; books on the plot to kill Mr. Kennedy are reported best-sellers in France and Brazil. It is possible to dismiss these things as fantasy. But there remain areas of doubt perfectly realistic and subject to workmanlike inquiry which American reporters simply refuse to engage. Mr. Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post Dispatch raised a few questions in the wake of Mr. Kennedy’s murder, but seems to fallen back discouraged since; I have seen no evidence that any American reporter is stirring with the curiosity which he would normally bring to any police case so untidy.

I do not think this neglect comes from complacency; most of what the world knows about the deficiencies of the United States was set forth for it by American journalists. I am afraid we have been rendered immobile by shock. I myself am readier than most to believe the worst about our institutions. Still, when I was in Dallas, I went to the Book Depository to look out of the window which Oswald is supposed to have used. I felt like a tourist and an intruder, and I was automatically comforted at how close the range seemed and how plausible for the powers of an ordinary marksman; I should, I am afraid, have been upset if it had seemed too far away.

We have failed in our duty, then; our excuse – and a poor one – is that we are wounded. The nature of that wound is best described in the experience of Thomas Buchanan, an expatriate American, who has composed for L’Express the most elaborate and ingenious of all the conspiracy theories – one which embraces Jack Ruby for the Mafia; some six Dallas policemen, one of whom was the real assassin; the John Birch Society for tactical planning; and an H. L. Hunt-model Texas millionaire for finance. The editor of L’Express found it all so persuasive that the sent Buchanan here to tell our Department of Justice, and Buchanan went home terribly saddened by how coldly he was treated bearing this gift of so many public pests.

But the Justice Department is captained by Mr. Kennedy’s brother and staffed with his old friends. I can imagine how terrible it would be for them to accept the idea that this could be a conspiracy. For I, a mere acquaintance, know how much I want to believe that whoever killed Mr. Kennedy acted alone; I just do not want any other American to have a piece of this thing. We blame the Continent for inventing conspiracies; yet we ourselves cling to one man almost to the point where we would need to have invented him. We are in shock and in forfeit and have lain the whole duty of our critical judgment on Mr. Justice Warren.

But have yet to explain Kansi's

- repeated confessions (even to his family apparently)

Ah, yes, that ultra-close family:

“Friends and relatives say that Kansi is not particularly close to his family. He was the only child of his father’s second wife…who died in 1984. He has six half sisters and three half brothers by his father’s first wife…,”

John Ward Anderson, “CIA suspect’s divided personality,” Washington Post, 17 February 1993, p.A1.

Mugabe, in a speech to Party manacle-manufacturers, last night reinforced Zimbabwe's claim to the moral high-ground: "At least we do our own torture," he boasted, "unlike those cowardly chaps at MI5 and MI6!"

The Foreign Office refused official comment on Mugabe's "crazed and hysterical tirade" (anonymous source), but senior figures at No 10 have conceded that a comparative study of extermination rates in Afghanistan and Iraq versus Rhodesia demonstrated beyond a doubt that US air power does make a difference. "And don't forget that BBC* poll," the source added.

*107% of the pre-teen respondents to a Blue Peter phone-in - following the special insert on "Mugabe: Beastly Black Communist" - called for the wholesale transfer of nationalised assets to leading British mineral extractors.

Is there any reason to suspect him other than the fact he scrawled anti-CIA graffiti several days later in another continent

He had "previous":

"Other records show he was convicted three years ago of illegally discharging a firearm and fined $500,"

Patricia Davis, "Graffiti suspect probed for possible links to CIA slayings," Washington Post, 4 Feb 1993, p.B1.

Kansi had no such form, either with regard to a psychotic hatred of the CIA, or with illegally discharging weapons. Moreover, the white guy much more closely resembled one of the fuller eyewitness descriptions early offered the reading public:

“Jo Anne Burka first thought the slender, curly haired man standing between two lines of stopped cars at a traffic light was a panhandler,”

D’Vera Cohn, “It wasn’t like on TV. He was just casually walking up, shooting into cars,” Washington Post, 26 January 1993, p.A1.

Paul

Paul is better positioned to answer that question. Presumably, he believes it. For most of us, I think, researching this crime is a process in which, when confronted with new or contradictory evidence, we are required to reassess our biases and make the necessary amendments to our thoughts and conclusions. What Paul believes today may change in time, as it has for me and, I submit, just about everyone else who's entered this dark labyrinth. Only those cursed with complete certitude from the outset refuse to alter their opinions in the face of new facts.

RCD,

Kind and intelligent words. You may yet save the cause of external shooters from the excesses of its own adherents. I sincerely hope not, but that’s your choice; and I have every confidence you will make the attempt with the lucidity and scruple that distinguishes your work.

And, yes, lest there be any misunderstanding, I am entirely satisfied that America’s thirty-fifth President was killed by William Greer.

Reading the spectrum of outraged responses to the very notion, I was reminded of one of my favourite political philosopher’s, the great “Red Tory” himself.

“Joan Baez and Pete Seeger titillate the status quo rather than threaten it. Dissent is built into the fabric of the modern system. We bureaucratize it as much as anything else,”

George Parkin Grant. Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995 reprint), p.99.

I must put it to you, Robert, that the external shooting orthodoxy – that confused, unsubstantiated melange comprised of one-part unexamined assumption, another of timid group-think, and the third of purest pre-planned deception – is nothing more than the Joan Baez or Pete Seeger of the JFK assassination “how.”

One witness captured the laying of the false trail to the knoll – helpfully signposted with that puff of smoke so unthinkingly beloved of generations of knollers - better than any other:

“Mr. Franzen advised he and his wife and small son were standing in the grass area west of Houston Street and south of Elm Street at the time the President’s motorcade at that location at approximately 12.30…He said he heard the sound of an explosion which appeared to him to come from the President’s car and noticed small fragments flying inside the car and immediately assumed someone had tossed a firecracker inside the automobile…He noticed men, who were presumed to be Secret Service agents, riding in the car directly behind the President’s car, unloading from the car, some with firearms in their hands, and noticed police officers and these plainclothesmen running up the grassy slope across Elm Street from his location…Because of this activity he presumed the shots…came from the shrubbery or bushes toward which these officers appeared to be running,”

Jack Franzen, 22WCH840

I urge you to rethink your most fundamental assumptions of the how, to banish the mirage of external shooters, and instead see the conduct of the Secret Service in Dallas – complete with the coup de grace on Elm – for the rational continuity that it was.

What follows is ever closely linked to what precedes; it is not a procession of isolated events, merely obeying the laws of sequence, but a rational continuity…”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4: 45

The Secret Service ignored their own ordering of the motorcade at Love Field because the attempt was "go" - they hastily cleaned the Presidential limousine post-coup because they knew its bloody contents would incriminate them. They furnished a pretext for the theft of the President's body, in defiance of state law, with the false claim that one of their own was dead; and then they stole the corpse with the power of the gun. And so on and so forth.

Paul

By happy coincidence, I took receipt yesterday of the editions of The Minority of One which more or less complete my collection.

Having a collection of books and thinking that Greer shot JFK in the head is like having money and not knowing how much each bill or coin is worth. And saying that because the assassination films don't show Greer actually shooting JFK, thus the films must be altered is like saying that all the $20 dollar bills in your possession were believed to be $100 bills, so someone must have altered them.

Bill Miller

Can't wait for the English translation. Will it be available soon?

Wouldn't we all be better served by allowing all to voice their opinions?

Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Brassey’s, Inc., 1998), p. 103:

“Propaganda thrives best if there are no competing expressions of opinion to disturb the audience.”

The grassy knollers represent the continuation of the cover-up by other, "dissident" means. The objective, and the tactics employed, necessarily remain the same: stasis; and smear.

Paul

HIDDEN EXPOSURE

Cover-Up and Intrigue in the CIA's Secret Possession of the Zapruder film

by

Philip H. Melanson

If Secret Service agents were such lions in dealing with Earl Rose, why their lamb-like behavior with Abrahan Zapruder?

One of them had the full weight of the CIA's thuggy legions behind him; the other had merely the law. No contest.

LIFE's Richard B. Stolly recalled that through all the chaos, Zapruder kept his "business sense."

But did he? See Lifton's essay Pig on a Leash for a very different truth!

Great to see this important piece of work aired on the Forum. Well done. More, please!

Paul

Any indication of why the agent was more interested in Murray than Kansi?

Murray was - still is? - white, Len:

“A 29-year-old Fairfax County man has been charged with spray painting words, including ‘CIA,’ ‘Crime,’ and ‘Police,’ in large letters on roadways surrounding Vienna and with possessing a concealed, loaded semi-automatic pistol.

Police said they are investigating whether Michael T. Murray had ‘any possible involvement in the Jan. 25 shootings outside the Langley headquarters…According to sources, there is no evidence that Murray is the gunman.

Murray, who has green eyes and sandy blond hair, does not match the description of the suspect as a white male with a dark complexion and dark brown or black medium-length hair…,”

Patricia Davis, “Graffiti suspect probed for possible links to CIA slayings,” Washington Post, 4 February 1993, p.B1.

Paul

Any indication of why the agent was more interested in Murray than Kansi?

Murray was - still is? - white, Len:

“A 29-year-old Fairfax County man has been charged with spray painting words, including ‘CIA,’ ‘Crime,’ and ‘Police,’ in large letters on roadways surrounding Vienna and with possessing a concealed, loaded semi-automatic pistol.

Police said they are investigating whether Michael T. Murray had ‘any possible involvement in the Jan. 25 shootings outside the Langley headquarters…According to sources, there is no evidence that Murray is the gunman.

Murray, who has green eyes and sandy blond hair, does not match the description of the suspect as a white male with a dark complexion and dark brown or black medium-length hair…,”

Patricia Davis, “Graffiti suspect probed for possible links to CIA slayings,” Washington Post, 4 February 1993, p.B1.

Paul

December 1963 – Number 49 (Volume 5, No 12)

M.S.Arnoni, “The Assassination,” special one-page editorial insert between pp.12-13

January 1964 – Number 50 (Volume 6, No 1)

M.S.Arnoni, “Who Killed Whom and Why,” pp.1, 12-13

Eric Norden, “The Death of a President,” pp.16-23

“From Readers’ Letters: The Assassination,” p.30: David B. Lord; Mrs. Alice G. Harris; Silas Walter Adams; & A.B.Billing.

February 1964 – Number 51 (Volume 6, No 2)

M.S.Arnoni, “Redemption through Accession,” p.4

M.S.Arnoni, “Two Widows,” pp.4-5

Bertrand Russell, “From Readers’ Letters: The Assassination,” p.22

March 1964 – Number 52 (Volume 6, No 3)

M.S.Arnoni, “Mr. Warren’s Prerogative,” p.2

“From Readers’ Letters: ‘Death of a President,’” p.22: G.A.Campbell; Frank Fodor; Harold Silverman; Robert S. Lynd; and Mrs. Betty Sobel.

April 1964 – Number 53 (Volume 6, No 4)

M.S.Arnoni, “An Open Letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren,” pp.1-2

First appeared as a paid advertisement in the NYT of 2 March 1964

M.S.Arnoni, “The Investigation,” p.4

“From Readers’ Letters: Comments on TMO’s Open Letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren,” pp.22-24: Thomas F. Stanton; Schuyler Van Rensslaer; Mortimer May; Joseph Deretchin; Richard Stephen Abrams; Zenida St. George; H. Hilton; Mrs. Jindra Barkin; Arlene Carmen; William L. Patterson; Paul Fisher; David R. Collens; Charles P. Forbes; Franklin L. Werner; Ruth E. Bassin; and Maxwell Geismar.

May 1964 – Number 54 (Volume 6, No 5)

M.S.Arnoni, “A Verdict or Propaganda?,” pp.4-5

“From Readers’ Letters: The Assassination,” p.22: C.K. Stedman; Alice Herz; Leon E. Walters; Bert Fowler; Dr. Ralph Holloway; and Howard E. Marston.

June 1964 – Number 55 (Volume 6, No 6)

M.S.Arnoni, “Ripe for the Report,” p.5

Robert E. Feir, “From Readers’ Letters: The Assassination,” p.30

Bernard E. Galitz, “From Readers’ Letters: The Assassination,” p.30

July 1964 – Number 56 (Volume 6, No 7)

M.S.Arnoni, “Awaiting the Report,” pp.4-5

Victor Harvey, “From Readers’ Letters: World Press on the Assassination,” p.23

September 1964 – Number 58 (Volume 6, No 9)

M.S.Arnoni, “How Strong is the Junta?,” pp.1, 11-15

Bertrand Russell, “16 Questions on the Assassination,” pp.6-8

October 1964 – Number 59 (Volume 6, No 10)

Cedric Belfrage, “Four Assassinations: One Pattern,” pp.18-19

November 1964 – Number 60 (Volume 6, No 11)

M.S.Arnoni, “The Report,” pp.2-3

M.S.Arnoni, “A Commentator Fights a Reporter,” p.5

Mark Lane, “The Warren Report: A First Glance,” pp.6-8

Harold Feldman & Vincent J. Salandria, “From Readers’ Letters: Considine’s Story,” p.22

James Silver, “From Readers’ Letters: Tippit’s ‘Invitation,’” p.22

December 1964 – Number 61 (Volume 6, No 12)

Mrs. J.M.Thompson, “From Readers’ Letters: Warren Commission’s Real Assignment,” p.42

A Physicist, “From Readers’ Letters: The Impossible Trajectory,” p.42

Herry E. Beller, “From Readers’ Letters: Stone’s Day of Atonement,” p.43

February 1965 – Number 63 (Volume 7, No 2)

J.R.Keisler, “From Readers’ Letters: An Assassin’s Motive,” p.22

Bernard Edwin Galitz, “From Readers’ Letters: The ‘Unfact’ of the Assassination,” p.22

March 1965 – Number 64 (Volume 7, No 3)

Harold Feldman, “Fifty-one Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll,” pp.16-25

Lillian Castellano, “From Readers’ Letters: Oswald Censored,” p.30

April 1965 – Number 65 (Volume 7, No 4)

Mark Lane, “Who is Jack Ruby?,” pp.8-11

May 1965 – Number 66 (Volume 7, No 5)

Sylvia Meagher, “Readers’ Letters: Oswald – a Patsy?,” p.31

November 1965 – Number 72 (Volume 7, No 11)

Thomas C. Fiddick, “What Ruby Did Not Tell,” pp.15-16

February 1966 – Number 75 (Volume 8, No 2)

T. Gurney, “From Readers’ Letters: Cause-and-effect,” p.29

March 1966 – Number 76 (Volume 8, No 3)

M.S.Arnoni, “Dallas Revisited,” pp.5-6

Victor J. Salandria, “The Impossible Task of One Assassination Bullet,” pp.12-18

April 1966 – Number 77 (Volume 8, No 4)

Victor J. Salandria, “The Separate Connally Shot,” pp.9-13

May 1966 – Number 78 (Volume 8, No 5)

Wm. S. Chichester, “From Readers’ Letters: Assassination Studies,” p.31

Mrs. Gene Birch, “From Readers’ Letters: Assassination Studies,” p.31

June 1966 – Number 79 (Volume 8, No 6)

Sylvia Meagher, “A Psychiatrist’s Retroactive ‘Clairvoyance,’” pp.25-27

Marguerite C. Oswald, “From Readers’ Letters: The Warren Report,” p.29

H.L.Hummel, “From Readers’ Letters: The Warren Report,” p.29

J.R.Keisler, “From Readers’ Letters: The Warren Report,” p.29

July-August 1966 – Number 80-81 (Volume 8, No 7-8)

M.S.Arnoni, “The Relevance of an Inquest,” pp.8-9

Sylvia Meagher, “On ‘Closing Doors, Not Opening Them’ or The Limits of the Warren Investigation,” pp.29-32

September 1966 – Number 82 (Volume 8, No 9)

M.S.Arnoni, “Between Two Assassinations,” p.6

Sylvia Meagher, “How Well Did the ‘Non-Driver’ Oswald Drive?,” pp.19-21

Maggie Field, “From Readers’ Letters: Research on the Assassination,” pp.38-39

October 1966 – Number 83 (Volume 8, No 10)

Sylvia Meagher, “Oswald and the State Department,” pp.22-27

Stephen Barber (Sunday Telegraph, London), “Kennedy Assassination,” p.32

December 1966 – Number 85 (Volume 8, No 12)

Harold Feldman, “The Johnson Murder Charge,” pp.21-22

January 1967 – Number 86 (Volume 9, No 1)

M.S.Arnoni, “A Dead Brother is No Brother,” p.

E. Martin Schotz, Susan Schotz, Robert Flynn, Jane Flynn, Steven Kuromiya, Gerald Herdman, Julia Hodges, Carol Goldstein, “From Readers’ Letters: Who Killed Kennedy?,” pp.30-31

J.B. Gibson, “Governor Connally and Assassination Inquiry,” p.31

February 1967 – Number 87 (Volume 9, No 2)

M.S.Arnoni, “Any Road That Leads to the White House (A tragicomic play in many acts by Robert F. Kennedy),” p.7

M.S.Arnoni, “Jack Ruby Cheats History,” p.8

D. Howard Ady, “From Readers’ Letters: Who Really Killed Kennedy – And Why?,” p.29

Margaret Juliano, “From Readers’ Letters: Robert Kennedy’s Intention,” p.30

March 1967 – Number 88 (Volume 9, No 3)

Sylvia Meagher, “Post-Assassination Credibility Chasm,” pp.21-22

April 1967 – Number 89 (Volume 9, No 4)

M.S.Arnoni, “An Assassination’s Retroactivity,” p.9

Lesley Woolf Hedley, “MacBird Flies Low,” p.26

Bernard Edwin Galitz, “From Readers’ Letters: Warren Skeptics Vindicated,” pp.28-29

Edward Schindeler, “From Readers’ Letters: The Kennedy Ethos,” p.29

Arnold S. Daniels, “From Readers’ Letters: Who Said That Jack Ruby Said?,” pp.29-30

May 1967 – Number 90 (Volume 9, No 5)

Mrs. Lee Dresh, “From Readers’ Letters: LBJ’s Supporters,” p.29

June 1967 – Number 91 (Volume 9, No 6)

Sylvia Meagher, “After the Battle, the Book,” pp.25-27

September 1967 – Number 94 (Volume 9, No 9)

Sylvia Meagher, “From Readers’ Letters: BR and TMO,” p.31

October 1967 – Number 95 (Volume 9, No 10)

M.S.Arnoni, “Garrison and Warren: Anything in Common?,” pp.11-12

November 1967 – Number 96 (Volume 9, No 11)

Jim Garrison, “From Readers’ Letters: Jim Garrison Knows Himself to be Right,” pp.22-23

December 1967 – Number 97 (Volume 9, No 12)

Connor Cruise O’Brien, “Veto by Assassination?,” pp.16-18

Harold Feldman, “From Readers’ Letters: Garrison and Warren – Anything in Common?,” p.29

Maggie Field, “From Readers’ Letters: Garrison and Warren – Anything in Common?,” p.29

Sylvia Meagher, “From Readers’ Letters: Garrison and Warren – Anything in Common?,” p.29

Penn Jones, Jr., “From Readers’ Letters: Garrison and Warren – Anything in Common?,” pp.29-30

Leo Sauvage, “From Readers’ Letters: Garrison and Warren – Anything in Common?,” p.30

March 1968 – Number 100 (Volume 10, No 3)

Ruth Jacobs, “From Readers’ Letters: Why Kennedy Went to Texas,” p.31

June 1968 – Number 103 (Volume 10, No 6)

Sylvia Meagher, “Two Assassinations,” pp.9-10

July-August 1968 – Number 104/5 (Volume 10, No 7-8)

Sylvia Meagher, “Wheels within Deals: How the Kennedy Investigation was Organised,” pp.23-27

Sylvia Meagher, “From Readers’ Letters: A Garrison Victim,” p.30

September 1968 – Number 106 (Volume 10, No 9)

M.S.Arnoni, “Of Demonologists and Eunuchs,” pp.8-9

Sylvia Meagher, “Three Assassinations,” pp.13-16

Connor Cruise O’Brien, “How Many Conspiracies?,” p.16

November 1968 – Number 108 (Volume 10, No 11)

Alfred John Ferrari, “Kennedy Assassinations and Political Detours,” pp.7-9

Griscom Morgan, “From Readers’ Letters: Between Two Kennedy Assassinations,” p.22

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html

"Now the Taliban will pay a price" vowed President George W. Bush, as American and British fighter planes unleashed missile attacks against major cities in Afghanistan. The US Administration claims that Osama bin Laden is behind the tragic events of the 11th of September. A major war supposedly "against international terrorism" has been launched, yet the evidence amply confirms that agencies of the US government have since the Cold War harbored the "Islamic Militant Network" as part of Washington's foreign policy agenda. In a bitter irony, the US Air Force is targeting the training camps established in the 1980s by the CIA.

The main justification for waging this war has been totally fabricated. The American people have been deliberately and consciously misled by their government into supporting a major military adventure which affects our collective future.

"OSAMAGATE"

by Michel Chossudovsky

Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa

Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal

Posted at globalresearch.ca 9 October 2001

Confronted with mounting evidence, the US Administration can no longer deny its links to Osama. While the CIA admits that Osama bin Laden was an "intelligence asset" during the Cold War, the relationship is said to "go way back". Most news reports consider that these Osama-CIA links belong to the "bygone era" of the Soviet-Afghan war. They are invariably viewed as "irrelevant" to an understanding of present events. Lost in the barrage of recent history, the role of the CIA in supporting and developing international terrorist organisations during the Cold war and its aftermath is casually ignored or downplayed by the Western media.

Yes, We did support Him, but "He Went Against Us"

A blatant example of media distortion is the so-called "blowback" thesis: "intelligence assets" are said to "have gone against their sponsors"; "what we've created blows back in our face" (1). In a twisted logic, the US government and the CIA are portrayed as the ill-fated victims:

The sophisticated methods taught to the Mujahideen, and the thousands of tons of arms supplied to them by the US - and Britain - are now tormenting the West in the phenomenon known as `blowback', whereby a policy strategy rebounds on its own devisers (2).

The US media, nonetheless, concedes that "the Taliban's coming to power [in 1995] is partly the outcome of the U.S. support of the Mujahideen, the radical Islamic group, in the 1980s in the war against the Soviet Union"(3). But it also readily dismisses its own factual statements and concludes in chorus, that the CIA had been tricked by a deceitful Osama. It's like "a son going against his father".

The "blowback" thesis is a fabrication. The evidence amply confirms that the CIA never severed its ties to the "Islamic Militant Network". Since the end of the Cold War, these covert intelligence links have not only been maintained, they have in become increasingly sophisticated.

New undercover initiatives financed by the Golden Crescent drug trade were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus (controlled by the CIA) essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia" (4).

Replicating the Iran Contragate Pattern

Remember Ollie North and the Nicaraguan Contras under the Reagan Administration when weapons financed by the drug trade were channeled to "freedom fighters" in Washington's covert war against the Sandinista government. The same pattern was used in the Balkans to arm and equip the Mujahideen fighting in the ranks of the Bosnian Muslim army against the Armed Forces of the Yugoslav Federation.

Throughout the 1990s, the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) was used by the CIA as a go-between -- to channel weapons and Mujahideen mercenaries to the Bosnian Muslim Army in the civil war in Yugoslavia. According to a report of the London based International Media Corporation:

"Reliable sources report that the United States is now [1994] actively participating in the arming and training of the Muslim forces of Bosnia-Herzegovina in direct contravention of the United Nations accords. US agencies have been providing weapons made in ... China (PRC), North Korea (DPRK) and Iran. The sources indicated that ... Iran, with the knowledge and agreement of the US Government, supplied the Bosnian forces with a large number of multiple rocket launchers and a large quantity of ammunition. These included 107mm and 122mm rockets from the PRC, and VBR-230 multiple rocket launchers ... made in Iran. ... It was [also] reported that 400 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) arrived in Bosnia with a large supply of arms and ammunition. It was alleged that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had full knowledge of the operation and that the CIA believed that some of the 400 had been detached for future terrorist operations in Western Europe.

During September and October [1994], there has been a stream of "Afghan" Mujahedin ... covertly landed in Ploce, Croatia (South-West of Mostar) from where they have traveled with false papers ... before deploying with the Bosnian Muslim forces in the Kupres, Zenica and Banja Luka areas. These forces have recently [late 1994] experienced a significant degree of military success. They have, according to sources in Sarajevo, been aided by the UNPROFOR Bangladesh battalion, which took over from a French battalion early in September [1994].

The Mujahedin landing at Ploce are reported to have been accompanied by US Special Forces equipped with high-tech communications equipment, ... The sources said that the mission of the US troops was to establish a command, control, communications and intelligence network to coordinate and support Bosnian Muslim offensives -- in concert with Mujahideen and Bosnian Croat forces -- in Kupres, Zenica and Banja Luka. Some offensives have recently been conducted from within the UN-established safe-havens in the Zenica and Banja Luka regions…

The US Administration has not restricted its involvement to the clandestine contravention of the UN arms embargo on the region ... It [also] committed three high-ranking delegations over the past two years [prior to 1994] in failed attempts to bring the Yugoslav Government into line with US policy. Yugoslavia is the only state in the region to have failed to acquiesce to US pressure (5).

"From the Horse's Mouth"

Ironically, the US Administration's undercover military-intelligence operations in Bosnia have been fully documented by the Republican Party. A lengthy Congressional report by the Republican Party Committee (RPC) published in 1997, largely confirms the International Media Corporation report quoted above. The RPC Congressional report accuses the Clinton administration of having "helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base" leading to the recruitment through the so-called "Militant Islamic Network," of thousands of Mujahideen from the Muslim world:

Perhaps most threatening to the SFOR mission - and more importantly, to the safety of the American personnel serving in Bosnia - is the unwillingness of the Clinton Administration to come clean with the Congress and with the American people about its complicity in the delivery of weapons from Iran to the Muslim government in Sarajevo. That policy, personally approved by Bill Clinton in April 1994 at the urging of CIA Director-designate (and then-NSC chief) Anthony Lake and the U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, has, according to the Los Angeles Times (citing classified intelligence community sources), "played a central role in the dramatic increase in Iranian influence in Bosnia…

Along with the weapons, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and VEVAK intelligence operatives entered Bosnia in large numbers, along with thousands of mujahedin ("holy warriors") from across the Muslim world. Also engaged in the effort were several other Muslim countries (including Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkey) and a number of radical Muslim organizations. For example, the role of one Sudan-based "humanitarian organization," called the Third World Relief Agency, has been well documented. The Clinton Administration's "hands-on" involvement with the Islamic network's arms pipeline included inspections of missiles from Iran by U.S. government officials... the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization ... has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. ... TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups [Washington Post, 9/22/96](6).

Complicity of the Clinton Administration

In other words, the Republican Party Committee report confirms unequivocally the complicity of the Clinton Administration with several Islamic fundamentalist organisations including Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

The Republicans wanted at the time to undermine the Clinton Administration. However, at a time when the entire country had its eyes riveted on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Republicans no doubt chose not to trigger an untimely "Iran-Bosniagate" affair, which might have unduly diverted public attention away from the Lewinsky scandal. The Republicans wanted to impeach Bill Clinton "for having lied to the American People" regarding his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. On the more substantive "foreign policy lies" regarding drug running and covert operations in the Balkans, Democrats and Republicans agreed in unison, no doubt pressured by the Pentagon and the CIA not to "spill the beans".

From Bosnia to Kosovo

The "Bosnian pattern" described in the 1997 Congressional RPC report was replicated in Kosovo. With the complicity of NATO and the US State Department. Mujahideen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO's war effort.

Confirmed by British military sources, the task of arming and training of the KLA had been entrusted in 1998 to the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Britain's Secret Intelligence Services MI6, together with "former and serving members of 22 SAS [britain's 22nd Special Air Services Regiment], as well as three British and American private security companies" (7).

The US DIA approached MI6 to arrange a training programme for the KLA, said a senior British military source. `MI6 then sub-contracted the operation to two British security companies, who in turn approached a number of former members of the (22 SAS) regiment. Lists were then drawn up of weapons and equipment needed by the KLA.' While these covert operations were continuing, serving members of 22 SAS Regiment, mostly from the unit's D Squadron, were first deployed in Kosovo before the beginning of the bombing campaign in March (8).

While British SAS Special Forces in bases in Northern Albania were training the KLA, military instructors from Turkey and Afghanistan financed by the "Islamic jihad" were collaborating in training the KLA in guerilla and diversion tactics (9):

Bin Laden had visited Albania himself. He was one of several fundamentalist groups that had sent units to fight in Kosovo, ... Bin Laden is believed to have established an operation in Albania in 1994 ... Albanian sources say Sali Berisha, who was then president, had links with some groups that later proved to be extreme fundamentalists (10).

Congressional Testimonies on KLA-Osama links

According to Frank Ciluffo of the Globalized Organised Crime Program, in a testimony presented to the House of Representatives Judicial Committee:

What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics. Albania and Kosovo lie at the heart of the "Balkan Route" that links the "Golden Crescent" of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the drug markets of Europe. This route is worth an estimated $400 billion a year and handles 80 percent of heroin destined for Europe (11).

According to Ralf Mutschke of Interpol's Criminal Intelligence division also in a testimony to the House Judicial Committee:

The U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden" . Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Jihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict (12).

Madeleine Albright Covets the KLA

These KLA links to international terrorism and organised crime documented by the US Congress were totally ignored by the Clinton Administration. In fact, in the months preceding the bombing of Yugoslavia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was busy building a "political legitimacy" for the KLA. The paramilitary army had --from one day to the next-- been elevated to the status of a bona fide "democratic" force in Kosovo. In turn, Madeleine Albright has forced the pace of international diplomacy: the KLA had been spearheaded into playing a central role in the failed "peace negotiations" at Rambouiillet in early 1999.

The Senate and the House tacitly endorse State Terrorism

While the various Congressional reports confirmed that the US government had been working hand in glove with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, this did not prevent the Clinton and later the Bush Administration from arming and equipping the KLA. The Congressional documents also confirm that members of the Senate and the House knew the relationship of the Administration to international terrorism. To quote the statement of Rep. John Kasich of the House Armed Services Committee: "We connected ourselves [in 1998-99] with the KLA, which was the staging point for bin Laden..." (13)

In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, Republicans and Democrats in unison have given their full support to the President to "wage war on Osama".

In 1999, Senator Jo Lieberman had stated authoritatively that "Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." In the hours following the October 7 missile attacks on Afghanistan, the same Jo Lieberman called for punitive air strikes against Iraq: "We're in a war against terrorism... We can't stop with bin Laden and the Taliban." Yet Senator Jo Lieberman, as member of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate had access to all the Congressional documents pertaining to "KLA-Osama" links. In making this statement, he was fully aware that that agencies of the US government as well as NATO were supporting international terrorism.

The War in Macedonia

In the wake of the 1999 war in Yugoslavia, the terrorist activities of the KLA were extended into Southern Serbia and Macedonia. Meanwhile, the KLA --renamed the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC)-- was elevated to United Nations status, implying the granting of "legitimate" sources of funding through United Nations as well as through bilateral channels, including direct US military aid.

And barely two months after the official inauguration of the KPC under UN auspices (September 1999), KPC-KLA commanders - using UN resources and equipment - were already preparing the assaults into Macedonia, as a logical follow-up to their terrorist activities in Kosovo. According to the Skopje daily Dnevnik, the KPC had established a "sixth operation zone" in Southern Serbia and Macedonia:

Sources, who insist on anonymity, claim that the headquarters of the Kosovo protection brigades [i.e. linked to the UN sponsored KPC] have [March 2000] already been formed in Tetovo, Gostivar and Skopje. They are being prepared in Debar and Struga [on the border with Albania] as well, and their members have defined codes (14).

According to the BBC, "Western special forces were still training the guerrillas" meaning that they were assisting the KLA in opening up "a sixth operation zone" in Southern Serbia and Macedonia (15).

"The Islamic Militant Network" and NATO join hands in Macedonia

Among the foreign mercenaries now fighting in Macedonia (October 2001) in the ranks of self-proclaimed National Liberation Army (NLA), are Mujahideen from the Middle East and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Also within the KLA's proxy force in Macedonia are senior US military advisers from a private mercenary outfit on contract to the Pentagon as well as "soldiers of fortune" from Britain, Holland and Germany. Some of these Western mercenaries had previously fought with the KLA and the Bosnian Muslim Army (16).

Extensively documented by the Macedonian press and statements of the Macedonian authorities, the US government and the "Islamic Militant Network" are working hand in glove in supporting and financing the self-proclaimed National Liberation Army (NLA), involved in the terrorist attacks in Macedonia. The NLA is a proxy of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In turn the KLA and the UN sponsored Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) are identical institutions with the same commanders and military personnel. KPC Commanders on UN salaries are fighting in the NLA together with the Mujahideen.

In a bitter twist, while supported and financed by Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, the KLA-NLA is also supported by NATO and the United Nations mission to Kosovo (UNMIK). In fact, the "Islamic Militant Network" --also using Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) as the CIA's go-between-- still constitutes an integral part of Washington's covert military-intelligence operations in Macedonia and Southern Serbia.

The KLA-NLA terrorists are funded from US military aid, the United Nations peace-keeping budget as well as by several Islamic organisations including Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. Drug money is also being used to finance the terrorists with the complicity of the US government. The recruitment of Mujahideen to fight in the ranks of the NLA in Macedonia is implemented through various Islamic groups.

US military advisers mingle with Mujahideen within the same paramilitary force, Western mercenaries from NATO countries fight alongside Mujahideen recruited in the Middle East and Central Asia. And the US media calls this a "blowback" where so-called "intelligence assets" have gone against their sponsors!

But this did not happen during the Cold war! It is happening right now in Macedonia. And it is confirmed by numerous press reports, eyewitness accounts, photographic evidence as well as official statements by the Macedonian Prime Minister, who has accused the Western military alliance of supporting the terrorists. Moreover, the official Macedonian New Agency (MIA) has pointed to the complicity between Washington's envoy Ambassador James Pardew and the NLA terrorists (17). In other words, the so-called "intelligence assets" are still serving the interests of their US sponsors.

Pardew's background is revealing in this regard. He started his Balkans career in 1993 as a senior intelligence officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff responsible for channeling US aid to the Bosnian Muslim Army. Colonel Pardew had been put in charge of arranging the "air-drops" of supplies to Bosnian forces. At the time, these "air drops" were tagged as "civilian aid". It later transpired --confirmed by the RPC Congressional report-- that the US had violated the arms embargo. And James Pardew played an important role as part of the team of intelligence officials working closely with the Chairman of the National Security Council Anthony Lake.

Pardew was later involved in the Dayton negotiations (1995) on behalf of the US Defence Department. In 1999, prior to the bombing of Yugoslavia, he was appointed "Special Representative for Military Stabilisation and Kosovo Implementation" by President Clinton. One of his tasks was to channel support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which at the time was also being supported by Osama bin Laden. Pardew was in this regard instrumental in replicating the "Bosnian pattern" in Kosovo and subsequently in Macedonia...

Justification for Waging War

The Bush Administration has stated that it has proof that Osama bin Laden is behind the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. In the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair: "I have seen absolutely powerful and incontrovertible evidence of his [Osama] link to the events of the 11th of September" (18). What Tony Blair fails to mention is that agencies of the US government including the CIA continue to "harbor" Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

A major war supposedly "against international terrorism" has been launched by a government which is harboring international terrorism as part of its foreign policy agenda. In other words, the main justification for waging war has been totally fabricated. The American people have been deliberately and consciously misled by their government into supporting a major military adventure which affects our collective future.

This decision to mislead the American people was taken barely a few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. Without supporting evidence, Osama had already been tagged as the "prime suspect." Two days later on Thursday the 13th of September --while the FBI investigations had barely commenced-- President Bush pledged to "lead the world to victory". The Administration confirmed its intention to embark on "a sustained military campaign rather than a single dramatic action" directed against Osama bin Laden (19). In addition to Afghanistan, a number of countries in the Middle East were mentioned as possible targets including Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Sudan. And several prominent US political figures and media pundits have demanded that the air strikes be extended to other countries "which harbour international terrorism." According to intelligence sources, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda has operations in some 50 to 60 countries providing ample pretext to intervene in several "rogue states" in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Moreover, the entire US Legislature --with only one honest and courageous dissenting voice in the House of Representatives-- has tacitly endorsed the Administration's decision to go war. Members of the House and the Senate have access through the various committees to official confidential reports and intelligence documents which prove beyond doubt that agencies of the US government have ties to international terrorism. They cannot say "we did not know". In fact, most of this evidence is in the public domain.

Under the historical resolution of the US Congress adopted by both the House and the Senate on the 14th of September:

The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Whereas there is no evidence that agencies of the US government "aided the terrorist attacks" on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, there is ample and detailed evidence that agencies of the US government as well as NATO, have since the end of the Cold War continued to "harbor such organizations".

Patriotism cannot be based on a falsehood, particularly when it constitutes a pretext for waging war and killing innocent civilians.

Ironically, the text of the Congressional resolution also constitutes a "blowback" against the US sponsors of international terrorism. The resolution does not exclude the conduct of an "Osamagate" inquiry, as well as appropriate actions against agencies and/or individuals of the US government, who may have collaborated with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. And the evidence indelibly points directly to the Bush Administration.

Endnotes

(1) United Press International (UPI), 15 September 2001.

(2) The Guardian, London, 15 September 2001.

(3) UPI, op cit.

(4) For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden, Centre for Research on Globalisation, 12 September 2001, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html.

(5) International Media Corporation Defense and Strategy Policy, US Commits Forces, Weapons to Bosnia, London, 31 October 1994.

(6) Congressional Press Release, Republican Party Committee (RPC), US Congress, Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base, 16 January 1997, available on the website of the Centre of Research on Globalisation (CRG) at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DCH109A.html. The original document is on the website of the US Senate Republican Party Committee (Senator Larry Craig), at http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1997/iran.htm)

(7) The Scotsman, Glasgow, 29 August 1999.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Truth in Media, Kosovo in Crisis, Phoenix, Arizona, 2 April 1999.

(10) Sunday Times, London, 29 November 1998.

(11) US Congress, Testimony of Frank J. Cilluffo , Deputy Director, Global Organized Crime, Program director to the House Judiciary Committee, 13 December 2000.

(12) US Congress, Testimony of Ralf Mutschke of Interpol's Criminal Intelligence Division, to the House Judicial Committee, 13 December 2000.

(13) US Congress, Transcripts of the House Armed Services Committee, 5 October 1999.

(14) Macedonian Information Centre Newsletter, Skopje, 21 March 2000, published by BBC Summary of World Broadcast, 24 March 2000.

(15) BBC, 29 January 2001, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/eur...00/1142478.stm)

(16) Scotland on Sunday, Glasgow, 15 June 2001 at http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/text_only.cfm?id=SS01025960, see also UPI, 9 July 2001. For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Washington behind Terrorist Assaults in Macedonia, Centre for Research on Globalisation, August 2001, at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO108B.html.)

(17) Macedonian Information Agency (MIA), 26 September 2001, available at the Centre for Research on Globalisation at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MNA110A.html

(18) Quoted in The Daily Telegraph, London, 1 October 2001.

(19) Statement by official following the speech by President George Bush on 14 September 2001 quoted in the International Herald Tribune, Paris, 14 September 2001.

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html

Copyright, Michel Chossudovsky, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), October 2001. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to post this text on non-commercial community internet sites, provided the source and the URL are indicated, the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To publish this text in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG) at editor@globalresearch.ca, fax 1-514-4256224.

Even his brothers said he did it...

They were eyewitnesses? Is there something you're not telling us, Len?

...find me one person other than you who thinks he didn’t.

Andy Boehm, "Late for work: The Mysterious Massacre at the CIA," Prevailing Winds, Premiere Issue, (undated, but circa 1993), pp.15-27.

Try p. 27 for a sceptical BATF agent:

"Which brings us back to David Fischer, the gun dealer who identified Kansi...Fischer had shown the BATF agent...federal and state gun purchase documents which Kansi had signed with his correct name. Yet Fischer says that the underwhelmed agent 'blew me away.' Why? Because, said the Post [Washington], Fischer claimed the agent wanted to find 'records that would show that Michael Murray, a Vienna man accused of painting anti-CIA graffitti on streets there, had purchased a gun.'"

NB:Boehm promised a follow-up piece in the next edition of Prevailing Winds, one designed to "wrap up 20 or 30 loose ends." If I have it, I'm damned if I can find it.

Glad to have assisted in your quest for another sceptic.

Paul