Anthony Thorne
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Posts posted by Anthony Thorne
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Douglas Valentine has written on Facebook that Albarelli has passed away in Florida. Very sad news. It’s not known what will happen with his forthcoming JFK book COUP IN DALLAS, which is currently scheduled for November.
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Poor phrasing on my part. It's the 1967 stuff that appears new, and I suppose the author Willan is quoting is the guy who broke the story, but Willan looks like the first one to bother reporting it in English for the rest of us.
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Philip Willan broke the story a couple of months back. He's the author of the Gladio history THE PUPPETMASTERS, which I recommended in another thread here. He's also a correspondent for the Times and the Guardian in the UK. His Times story is paywalled, but The Australian reprinted it. Emphasis in article added by me.
I found useful tidbits in what I read of both the Piper and Laurent Guyenot books - mostly the latter - but both eventually go off the rails. I found Piper to be largely misguided with a couple of bits and pieces of interest, and Guyenot to have a reasonable amount of decent writing in his articles and books but with totally off-base suppositions crammed into the material ruining his work. With Guyenot it's both the Israel-did-it and LBJ-did-it stuff that I was shaking my head at.
QuoteEX-NAZIS WARNED ISRAEL OF EGYPT'S PLANS FOR WAR
by Philip Willan, March 18th 2019
Israel was able to launch its surprise attack against Egypt and Syria at the beginning of the Six- Day War thanks to information provided to Mossad by an intelligence network of former Nazis, according to a book by an Italian who claims to have played a role.
Adriano Monti fought, aged 15, in the international division of the German SS at the end of World War II and was recruited into a post-war intelligence organisation founded by general Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had run German army espionage efforts against Eastern Europe during the war and worked closely with the CIA after it. His “Gehlen Organisation” became the backbone of West Germany’s foreign intelligence organisation, the BND.
In his book, Dr Monti, 89, claims to have travelled to Cairo shortly before the outbreak of the war between Israel and its Arab neighbours in 1967 to meet one of his network’s contacts, an escort called Marguerite. She was in contact with two East German military advisers to the Egyptian president, Abdel Nasser, who knew of Egypt’s war plans.
In the book, Codename Siegfried 2: Discreet Services, Mr Monti describes meeting Marguerite at a bar in Cairo. “After the usual small talk she whispered in French, ‘June 5, 8.15.’ ”
The date was less than a week away. The information was relayed to Otto Skorzeny, a former SS commando leader, and on to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, enabling Israel to destroy a large part of the Egyptian and Syrian air forces with a pre-emptive strike and secure victory.
Skorzeny was recruited by Mossad in 1963 to help the Israelis find German scientists working on the Egyptian missile program. He had recruited Nasser’s two East German advisers for the Gehlen Organisation.
The former Wehrmacht officers had disavowed Nazism in Siberia after the war, and were picked to serve in Egypt because they spoke Arabic, Dr Monti said. “The denazification was considered sufficient to make them friends of the East rather than of the West, but they remained much attached to their past,” he said.
At the time, Dr Monti was a medical officer with the World Health Organisation and had ready access to a wide range of contacts, although he never met the East German military advisers directly. He had no idea that Skorzeny was working for the Gehlen network or that his crucial information from Cairo would be forwarded to Mossad, he said.
Dr Monti said that solidarity among former SS soldiers was the basis for an intelligence network that was ultimately working for the CIA. It led to the recruitment of Abu Omar, a Palestinian from Lebanon who fought in the SS Charlemagne Division in its defence of Berlin in 1945.
Omar was a close aide to Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
“He kept us informed of everything that happened in Arafat’s court,” Dr Monti said.
Salvatore Sechi, a history professor from the University of Bologna, said that Western intelligence organisations had recruited right wing extremists after the war because of their experience in working against the new enemy: Soviet-backed communism.
All that said, as reliable as Willan is, where's the book he's talking about? Adriano Monti's earlier NOME IN CODICE SIEGFRIED is on Amazon Italy and a few other sites. I can't find the new Monti volume mentioned by Willan. Maybe Willan was granted a preview copy.
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Nome_in_codice_Siegfried.html?id=S6XbjwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
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In Melbourne over a decade ago, in different years, I met Jim Van Bebber and William Lustig, the former the director of CHARLIE'S FAMILY, and the latter the director of the grim horror film MANIAC. That one is for genre fans only, though the DVD has an appreciation by William Friedkin. Both Lustig and Van Bebber were nice guys, Van Bebber a little bit nuts, and Lustig very jovial and garrulous.
Over drinks in a restaurant Bill Lustig discussed Van Bebber's movie. He said he didn't think it was that good, but he'd strongly thought of buying the rights to the film for his Blue Underground video label (kind of the Criterion Collection of cult home video releases back then). Lustig said he had a good friend in the Justice Department, and had come close - this was the story he told us - to getting Manson to record a commentary audio track for CHARLIE'S FAMILY, "..and if we'd done that, even though the movie isn't that great, we would have sold a million copies".
Mae Brussell's commentary on the event is striking. There are seemingly hundreds of hours of her radio show online, and only a small number of them have ever been transcribed. Listening to a few of them, I heard her make intriguing observations about both the Manson event, and Jonestown.
In April 2013, Wikileaks released over a million diplomatic records, many reprinting cables between Embassies and intelligence agencies. This September 1975 cable - REPORT OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AGAINST PRESIDENT - was quite something. The plotters, including two women, claimed solidarity with Charles Manson.
https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975MONTRE01596_b.html
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I was a bit disappointed with the book at the time, and am hoping that Albarelli's new volume, out at the end of the year, is better.
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The most recent (2014) edition of Gibson's book is this one. A nicer cover I think.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1615779639/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
And a Kindle version of Gibson's book is here, really cheap. It's basically the cost of a cup of coffee.
Anyone wanting that new edition of Gibson's book should grab it sooner rather than later. I've just noticed that the same publisher's reprint of BATTLING WALL STREET, which came out the same year, is now only available from secondhand buyers, so the COVER UP book might go the same way eventually too.
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I think the most recent run through by Walt as to ‘whodunnit’ is at the end of his main JFK chronology (that ebook is called ‘Discovery’ but I’d again recommend people just grab the Word doc package direct from Walt on CD as it makes things far easier in terms of reading, having stuff to print out, making PDF’s and so on.). Walt has a nearly 200 page section where he gives an overview and answers questions, and it’s a solid read. Walt does feel that the DPD played a role in events of the day, but the key mover he places higher up the chain is Army Intelligence.
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That whole series looks like selected excerpts from Walt's chronology. The stuff he has in it on Baker would indeed fill a book so it should be useful to quite a few people that he's reordered the material into subject-specific collections.
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I have this. It’s a decent and concise run through of Walt’s current views, nicely written (and printed a couple of years ago), but I’d put the CD that Walt sells of his complete master chronology in Word doc form as a higher priority if any readers in this thread don’t already have it. You get a few chapters of new stuff in the former, and about twenty books worth of Walt content in the latter.
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Not sure if you’ve seen this, which just turned up in my news feed this morning. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-05-02/battle-letters-1963-john-f-kennedy-david-ben-gurion-levi-eshkol-us-inspections-dimona
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Added by John in a comments thread, in response to a question by Dawn Meredith. 'AV' is Veciana.
QuoteIt gets much worse than the two chapters (9 and 11) on Veciana in "Into the Storm." I suggest--if you want to catch up to where this all (not just AV) is going--carefully absorbing those two chapters to prepare for what is coming. SNEAK PREVIEW: The entire story we were fed like Pavlov dogs was made up in 1976 in a deal for early release from a prison (it was a cocaine conviction whether or not it was trumped up) and used to draw our attention away from a key part of this case. The problem AV had, as a result, was to manufacture a role for himself as a "CIA agent," not just in 1963, but before and after that. He hated the CIA. He was a Pentagon--and particularly an Army--asset. There is a lot more we will need to unlearn to get back onto the real playing field. It has been a great disappointment for me to see how many people were hurt in the process of the Veciana saga; but there is also the handiwork of Halpern and Nosenko which have led us down more time-wasting dead-end allies.
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Also mentioned by John this morning. He believes the series is looking like it will run for six books.
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Book (and probably the Kindle version) ships later this month I believe.
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Mal Hyman’s book on the JFK assassination and the media is out shortly, and you can read a fair amount of it right here. It looks pretty good.
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The Courtney Love stuff in the book has little if anything to do with Cobain’s death.
And Potash’s stuff is very different from McGowan’s. I don’t care for the latter’s writing.
If you’re done with Potash, fine. Stop asking me questions about him.
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Potash’s book struck me as detailed, fact based and well-sourced when I read it a year or so ago. It had footnotes and citations and felt like it belonged in the upper tier of Trine Day titles, one of their good ones rather than a dopey moneymaker. That said, I read a lot of it wide-eyed as many of the details in the volume are startling. I don’t unfortunately - sadly - have time to go back beyond that and spend a morning fleshing out an answer to your query - that big John Connally ebook that was posted a week or two back is tapping its feet and I also have a ridiculous haul of (US) westerns and film noirs I urgently want to watch. Plus also less fun stuff than that.
The Kindle version wasn’t too expensive. I’d suggest checking the ebook rather than print version out if you’re curious. That said, if you find Potash’s stuff truly not your cup of tea there’s really no shame or dishonour in skipping it with a shrug and moving on to some other subtopic that feels more worthwhile to research.
If you do eventually check out Potash’s book, the Courtney Love material is jaw dropping. She’s like the rock version of David Ferrie, linked (not just from Cobain’s death) to one bizarre and ominous incident after another.
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I’ve read Potash’s book, DRUGS AS WEAPONS AGAINST US, which is very good. A common theme of the book is anti-war activists during the Vietnam war era being targeted by CIA-linked folk who would turn up at gatherings with free drugs suggesting everyone get stoned. Potash runs through dozens of accounts that remind the reader how great it was for the authorities if anti-war demonstrators tuned out, dropped out and stopped protesting the war machine.
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I've downloaded this in Australia (Melbourne) with no problems. VLC is mainly a media/video player, and probably isn't suitable to read these books. Open these files with whatever you'd usually open Word or PDF documents with and you will be fine.
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Fascinating stuff from all in this thread.
Also from John on Facebook -
Quote[In response to a question from Jack Kaninberg about Angleton's role] - Given the dam that broke at the end of Volume III (Chapters 14-15) all bets are off on where things ultimately lead. But let me add here that, at this point, I see no reason to change my view on the role Angleton played in the coverup.
I just posted this on Ted Rubinstein's thread:
Lansdale knew exactly what Veciana was up to--sinking Soviet ships to push JFK into a war. And Lansdale hid what Veciana was up to from the CIA and everyone else except who he (Lansdale) was really working for--General Lemnitzer, JCS Chairman. See Chapter Fourteen in Into the Storm.
It's also on twitter--on which Vol III has been going viral for the last 48 hours. Several threads going on there at the same time. If you are on twitter check it out. Basically, the Veciana story is breaking now. We are still awaiting the second Veciana installment on WHOWHATWHY.
[[The funny thing is that 90% of what I used on Veciana in Into the Storm has been available for twenty-five years. Veciana certainly did NOT work for the CIA in 1963; not in 1962 either, nor in 1964, 1965, and 1966. He worked exclusively with the Army. In fact, and his activity with the Army before and during the 1962 Missile Crisis was under the prevue of General Lansdale. I deal with these matters in great detail in Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen in Into the Storm. When Veciana got out of jail in February 1974 and told Gaeton the 1963 "Bishop"-Oswald story, he, Veciana, was desperate to concoct a false story that he was a "CIA agent" at that time and get Castro to back it up! To achieve this, Veciana arranged a caper through his best friend, Felix Zabala, whose sister was married to the Cuban interior minister. All of this and much more is fully documented in Into the Storm. Veciana had a pretty good idea about how we (the JFK researchers) would fall for this caper--hook, line and sinker.]]
[In response to a question as to who shot Veciana} - Good question. One that needs a closer look BEFORE we finish up the 1963 business--Because it all started at the end--when Veciana got out of jail in February 1973 and talked to Fonzi a couple weeks later. Those weeks and the hit on AV you mention are pregnant with implications for how we understand all of the changes in Veciana's story over the past 40 years.
[In response to a link provided by David Boylan, with the note 'I'm not sure what is going on in this, it was an NSA intercept. John, can you help us out']
http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-Oct2017/NARA-Nov9-2017/144-10001-10172.pdf
Interesting. A month after the Missile Crisis. NSA intercept of someone who wants Veciana dead. I'll have to look at this for Volume IV. Thank you.
Lansdale knew exactly what Veciana was up to--sinking Soviet ships to push JFK into a war. Lansdale hid what Veciana was up to from the CIA and everyone else except who he (Lansdale) was really working for--General Lemnitzer, JCS Chairman. See Chapter Fourteen in Into the Storm. Once Dulles was fired in December 1961, Lansdale cast his lot with the Joint Chiefs, headed by Lemnitzer. Dulles was no longer around to protect Lansdale; Lansdale refused to let the CIA know how the Veciana was working with the Army and Navy to push JFK and RFK into war.
In Chapter Fourteen of Into the Storm it is clear that Lansdale was the stalking horse for Lemnitzer's Operation Northwoods. Lemnitzer chose Lansdale for this role because JFK and RFK had chosen Lansdale as the Mongoose Operations Chief. As the Missile Crisis approached, JFK fired Lemnitzer on 1 October 1962; a few weeks earlier, JFK and RFK kneecapped Lansdale because they discovered he was in cohoots with Lemnitzer. Lansdale would retire in 1963 and then head to Dallas. In Chapter Fourteen of Into the Storm, I show the documents proving that Lansdale's 28 Janaury 62 proposed Mongoose actions were exactly what Lemnitzer would put in front of JFK on 13 March--Operation Northwoods.
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John posted this on Facebook today.
QuoteIn Volume III (“Into the Storm”) I deconstructed CIA officer Samuel Halpern’s four-decades long campaign to convince the world that Attorney General Robert Kennedy ran a super-secret operation (unknown to Harvey and the rest of the CIA leadership) to use the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro—and that RFK used another CIA officer, Charles Ford, as his liaison to the mob to achieve that nefarious objective. Halpern’s RFK-Mafia myth has played a significant role in the continuing use of the old canard that Castro (with a KGB assist) was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. That canard lies at the heart at the successful coverup of the murder of JFK. For these reasons, Chapter Seven of Volume III opens with an essay addressing the strategy and tactics of the coverup. I have accepted a request to share that short essay with my FB friends:
THE JFK ASSASSINATION—A TAXONOMY OF THE COVERUP
The coverup of the president’s murder was carefully prepared well before the event itself. In the days immediately following the shooting in Dealey Plaza, both overt and covert components of the coverup were put into play. Overt is what the public sees; covert is what people with appropriate security clearances see. The overt component created a calming public spectacle by framing Oswald as a crazy lone nut with communist sympathies but no direct connection to a larger conspiracy. The covert component created a threatening top-secret crisis by framing Oswald as a witting agent of an international communist conspiracy.
The overt component was a messy but straight-forward public exhibition of fabricated evidence in Dealey Plaza. The covert component was an intricate secret “need-to-know” exhibition of fabricated evidence in Oswald’s top-secret government files. The fabricated top-secret evidence was weaponized to create a frightening impression of an impending crisis: The U.S. was facing a possible nuclear war with the USSR because the FBI and CIA had failed to connect the dots in their secret files on Oswald. In this manner, our national security institutions were incentivized to cooperate in the unfolding coverup.
The symbiotic relationship of these false conspiracies in the overt and covert components of the coverup was an ingenious fit. The calming effect of the lone nut non-conspiratorial overt scenario—itself part of the true conspiracy—was the antidote for the false conspiratorial crisis scenario unfolding inside of the government. The key to the long-term success of the coverup was the continuing survival of the covert component of the plan. As long as the covert communist conspiratorial scenario remained viable, the feasibility of the overt lone nut (apparently) non-conspiratorial component became less important over time.
The importance of the role that these discrete conspiracies played in the hierarchy of false conspiracies cannot be overemphasized. In the long run, it didn’t matter how many holes were poked in the Dealey Plaza scenario. The coverup of the true conspiracy—the Wizard of Oz cabal behind the curtain—was dependent on a continuing staunch defense of the covertly engineered false conspiracy: especially the RFK-Mafia myth. The permanence of that covert false conspiracy permitted the dismissal of the less important fabricated evidence in Dealey Plaza as a benign conspiracy to save America.
How that plan was accomplished is the subject of this chapter and Chapters Nine, Ten, and Fifteen. In a nutshell, this was the plan: An international communist conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was the result of the Kennedy brothers’ collusion in a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. The key element in the plan was this ominous false scenario: Robert Kennedy got his brother killed and almost started World War III. A secret RFK-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro was turned around by Fidel and—with an assist by the KGB—used to assassinate President Kennedy instead.
The alleged involvement of the Kennedy brothers’ collusion in Castro assassination plotting is the indispensable and inseparable foundation for the false international communist conspiracy scenario. To prevent the deaths of forty million Americans in a thermonuclear war, the apparent Castro-Kremlin role in the Kennedy assassination had to be suppressed by Chief Justice Earl Warren at the secret level. Today, this permits the CIA to characterize that suppression by the Warren Commission as a benign but necessary conspiracy to save us all.
Therefore, as these complicated components of the hierarchy of false conspiracies evolved over the last fifty years, it is not at all surprising that the Kennedy brothers’ alleged participation in Castro assassination plotting has become even more important than the issue of whether the manufactured evidence in Dealey Plaza points to a conspiracy.
So, in recent years, a peculiar new paradigm of benign conspiracy has emerged. That paradigm goes something like this: If the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, then the Kennedy brothers were themselves to blame. And so, today, many mainstream observers, researchers, and authors have become inescapably attracted to the view that a Kennedy involvement in Castro assassination plots is the reason that President Kennedy was assassinated.
However, the Kennedy collusion subterfuge brought an element of risk with it. Baking Kennedy collusion into Castro assassination plotting left this otherwise cunning coverup with an Achilles heel: The demonstrably false RFK narrative had to be left in the open. Take it away and the role of both brothers vanishes with it, the nakedness of the emperor is exposed, and the light of truth illuminates one of the worst disasters ever to befall the American republic.
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Good work John, I’ll have a read.
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The Kindle version is now available. It’s here.
Amazon has stupidly put the ebook version on a different page to the paperback and John is still getting that fixed.
The comments below are also from John today on Facebook.
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“Pertinent to the above thread: Houston also told the committee that during the briefing Robert Kennedy was told that the Mafia assassination attempt against Castro had been dropped:
Senator Mondale: Would the attorney general have gotten a clear understanding as it appears to be reflected in this memo that this was an attempt that was over?
Mr. Houston: My recollection is that we told him the activity had been terminated as of that time.
Senator Mondale: Now, were you speaking in terms of the attempt through the Mafia?
Mr. Houston: That’s correct, sir.
Senator Mondale: Or were you talking in terms of all attempts?
Mr. Houston: I knew of no other.
Senator Mondale: So, he would have had the clear impression that this was the only attempt, that there was none other, and that it had been dropped. That’s your opinion?
Mr. Houston: That was certainly my feeling at the time, and I thought that’s what we were telling him.
However, we can be certain that was a lie. According to the IG report, at the time of the 7 May 1962 briefing for RFK, Harvey had just been introduced—on 8 April—to Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli and Cuban exile leader Manuel Varona, whose team had been given the lethal pills, arms, and related support equipment in late April:
The attorney general was not told that the gambling syndicate operation had already been reactivated, nor, as far as we know, was he ever told that CIA had a continuing involvement with U.S. gangster elements. When the attorney general was briefed on 7 May, Edwards knew that Harvey had been introduced to Roselli. He must also have known that his subordinate, James O’Connell, was in Miami [with Harvey] and roughly for what purpose (although he does not now recall this). [Emphasis added]
The Church Committee’s Interim Report—Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders—found “implausible” the above statement by Edwards that he was unaware of the continuing Mafia operation.
Incredibly, Harvey testified that Edwards not only knew the Mafia operation was still ongoing but also that Edwards told him about the briefing for the attorney general afterward. According to Harvey, Edwards confirmed that he had made a false statement in a 14 May memorandum—that he (Harvey) had dropped the operation. Edwards did this, Harvey explained, so that the record would incorrectly show that the Mafia assassination operation had been terminated.
In an interview with Hersh, Halpern speculated that “Bobby Kennedy’s primary purpose in dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing—finding someone to assassinate Fidel Castro.” Fate was cruel to Halpern. He did not learn the truth about the CIA-Mafia assassination plot until his RFK charade had become baked into the fabric of the Kennedy assassination coverup. When Halpern died, on 7 March 2005, his undying coat of arms, awarded by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, was his RFK chimera.Allen Lowe — Unfortunately, RFK never left us a memo about what he knew or didn't know. As such, and as controversial as this subject is, especially given the four decades of lies by Halpern on this subject (which I detailed very carefully in the book), I thought it best to stick to the facts and leave you to your own counsel at this point. I will have more to say about this in volume IV, but only after much more research and careful analysis. It's the best I can do for the moment.
For all who have been watching the above thread, I will leave one impression of mine on the table before moving on today to new business: If RFK really had been involved in a separate plot of his own, behind everyone else's back, both Lansdale and Harvey, who hated RFK would have glommed onto to it lies flies on sh*t. But they didn't; not under oath, and not privately to their biographers. The trail of crumbs Halpern laid down implicating RFK in a plot of his own to assassinate Castro leads nowhere. That is just my impression.
In fact, that's why I pulled down the curtain early in Volume III, ended with an "Intermission" instead of a concluding chapter, and backed out until I have Volume IV ready; volume IV will be revisiting the Mongoose/Northwoods/Castro plots etc. very closely--probably 200-plus pages before proceeding further into late 1962. I prefer to move slowly rather than talk about things I am still working on. I didn't plan for this work to take this long; but then, I did not anticipate how much deception I would have to untangle first.”
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There's a Dealey Plaza witness breakdown included as one of Walt Brown's ebooks from his JFK chronology, and it runs hundreds of pages with quotes, analysis and commentary. I'm yet to really dig into it. The Kindle version is linked below.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4G0E1E
June/July issue of garrison
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Looks like a good issue. Any links to where we can get this?