David Andrews

To put it bluntly - crime and corruption is inherent in Italian culture. As Michael Corleone would say, and rightly so, "Only there, Senator?"

Paul's right - the Better Business Bureau got him.

Paul, I doubt that backing down the oil and steel interests, and the Fed, plus - the ne plus ultra - refusing war in Laos and Vietnam, were in the interests of assuaging big business. JFK did what he had to do to preserve peace and equity, and might have done more for those denied those luxuries in a second term. He was the most capital-P Progressive POTUS since FDR, and a far cry from con-men Progressives Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who served the industrialists and the bankers. (Insert Barrack Obama's name here.) He was a Progressive for the internationalist age ushered in by FDR, and on that battlefield he opposed big business where the lives of its victims could be spared.

JFK wanted to be an intellectual. He wanted, in his way, to become a World Historical Figure. He also wanted to navigate and master the American political system, and alter foreign affairs in a benign, progressive and humane way, in a USA that was only recently internationalist. Politically internationalist, I mean. Its money powers had been internationalist since the Civil War. Was he as good as his ideals? Not always, and not at first as President. In his private morals, he exercised the prerogatives assumed among his moneyed class and among common politicians. Did his family buy his way to the top? Yes, definitely. How else make the leap from a lackluster Senate career to the Executive, without tarrying for the hardscrabble villainy that got Nixon to the V-P slot. He was punished and vilified for both his caution and his audacity. He dallied on racial politics and civil rights, and then alienated many when he made hard challenges to his opponents' assumptions of impunity.. He opposed colonialism, nuclear war, needless land war. He pursued, for a time, plans created by a less forgiving administration to rid the hemisphere of the rival political system. Yet when he chose not to invade Cuba, he also rejected the military desire to conquer Southeast Asia, and the desire of the Eastern Establishment to profit from it He betrayed his class and his backers by refusing to bend to the powers of the steel industry, the oil industry, and the Federal Reserve. He betrayed the gangsters his father employed to get out the vote for him. In the end, he refused war, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of this country’s honor. He wanted to set an example, and he distrusted the influences that argued for setting a different example. In the end, his accumulated enemies killed him for it, and those enemies were among his class, among his advisors, and among those who should have been subordinate to the powers of the presidency.

Same video as this on YouTube? (Also linked to on previous thread here.)

Trujillo was ambushed by close-range rifle fire on a Dominican highway. You're thinking of the anti-Trujillo professor whom Trujillo allegedly had kidnapped from New York and allegedly brought back to Santo Domingo to endure that alleged torture and death. There are no reliable witnesses to the rumored fate.

Actually, Arbenz and his family went into exile in Europe, then lived in South America. His daughter got into drugs and died, more than a decade after the coup. Sixteen years after the coup, Arbenz sickened and died under circumstances not fully explained. It was the great feather in CIA's cap that it had gotten Arbenz to flee Guatemala using only the smoke-and-mirrors threat of an armed overthrow. Howard Hunt later encountered Arbenz in a swank restaurant and gloated over his ruin.

Jason - you have no idea of the entitlement felt and fostered at CIA. Ted Shackley is quoted as sneering at JFK after his death because JFK - who was only the POTUS - demanded photographic proof that there were Russian missiles in Cuba. Dulles, who as an attorney worked for the Eastern money establishment, and for corporations like United Fruit that overthrew Central American republics, was not going to be dissuaded by a firing, when he could run an assassination plot from his home and from access permitted him to The Farm. No one at CIA shut him out. And the assassination was in the interests of the money powers Dulles had worked for since his youth.

Looking at the 1908 ad above, and at pictures of the TSBD, makes me curious. How do the five arched windows in the middle of the sixth floor open? Do they have bottom sashes that slide up, as on the east and west rectangular windows? If not, this would put a "second" sixth-floor shooter at the west window out of necessity.

OK, Tom -- Seeing the cut-down where you cited: "Before the .38 pistols were sold to the public several modifications were made by gunsmith M.L. Johnson of 13440 Burbank Blvd. in Van Nuys, California. The hand grips were changed, the swivel hole in the butt of the gun was filled, the gun was re-chambered to a .38 Special (the cylinder chambers were lengthened to accommodate the longer .38 Special cartridge as was the front of the cylinder where the tip of the cartridge fit into the cylinder), the words "CAL. . 38 Special" were stamped on the left side of the frame, the barrel was shortened from 5-inch to 2 1/4-inch, and a front sight was added. In addition to regular .38 ammunition the gun could now fire the longer (.35" longer) and smaller diameter .38 Special cartridge." It's why the grips are not standard S & W Commando. Seems like a great deal of work in converting a lot of pistols selling at $29.99, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

The Seaport Traders pistol purchase form allegedly filled out by Oswald specifies a ".38 St. W. 2" Bbl." The WCR Appendix XII, p.653, specifies "Oswald's pistol was a small one with the barrel cut down to 2 1/4 inches." How did a 2-inch barrel grow 1/4 inch in the "cut down" process? Cut down, presumably with a new front sight fabricated? More WCR elusiveness.

One of the things that made [G]roody initially suspicious was the cracked vault, but my research showed that it was a fairly common occurrence often caused by heavy digging equipment. Did they dig near Oswald's vault? The plot on his left hand is still empty, and will stay that way, since in 1996 an obscure comedian named "Nick Beef" ghoulishly purchased the empty plot and put a grave marker with his own stage name on it. Much call among Texans to buried near Oz? I'm thinking that even "Nick Beef" will pick elsewhere. Apparently Marina also. Definition of a "lonely grave." https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/how-nick-beef-became-lee-harvey-oswalds-neighbor/312295/

We've been busy.

There have long been stories that the assassination was known among the plotters as "The Christmas Present" ("or "Package") because it was to be scheduled for Xmas or Thanksgiving, so as to confound the public more by casting a pall over a holiday. November 28 was Thanksgiving Day in 1963. Would be worth reading Stars & Stripes and the Hearst papers for 1963, to see what "psychological sets" Dinkin could have teased the Christmas/Thanksgiving date out of (especially in connection with a "godless communist" assassin). Or was it intel cable traffic?

but this even-handed approach fails to arrive at the fundamental truth about the war. "Even-handed" = "Good to those who hold the winning hand." I'll repeat what I said in an earlier post: this series desperately needed the deep clarity of a Daniel Ellsberg or a Tom Hayden. Instead we see only their ghosts, in fleeting clips. This business of showing photos of Lansdale, Ellsberg, Kerry, et alia., without discussing them, is a documentarian's trick of equivocation without validation. In other words, a thrown sop to "those in the know." "We did our bit for you, objectors. We are blameless, immaculate. We challenged Bank of America for you." Aw, thanks.

If "spy in his own mind" is another way of saying "desperate loner, wannabe-political hero," this is belied by Oswald's connections and contacts, which are remarkable for a 24-year-old with no money or influence.

The point is, the MSM line is anti-holocaust denier, and anti-JFK assassination conspiracy. And the MSM don't play nice. I'm out of this now. Everybody carry on.

You're not the only guy who's compared denying a JFK conspiracy issue to holocaust denying lately. I'm out.

Good grab, Doug - thanks.

Good grab, Doug - thanks.

I have to point out that the recent hyperbolic trend of comparing JFK/Oswald situations denial to holocaust denial may someday be seen to have done the research community no favors. Let's not let the MSM pick up on this and run with it, hey? Things are always dicey when I'm the voice of caution....

Numerically and morally - I have to go with holocaust denial. More witnesses also.

When you were seven years old in 1965, adults ran the library equipment for you, if that matters. The pages I'm referring to were not purple mimeo, but solid black or brown (depending on the machine) inked pages, with type and other dark images reversed as white.

Do the research on Nagell, Michael - as someone like Larry Hancock has - and you'll find out why Nagell had enemies. It wasn't because he was a poseur. He played games, but some people in highly dangerous situations respond that way.

I remember from my childhood, maybe around 1965 (but this could have predated 1963), that there were xerography machines that produced page copies - such as from a book or a legal document - in negative. Meaning that in the copy, white space was dark, and print and dark space in pictures were white. I many times got adults at our small-town library to make such copies for me. Does anyone remember this type of xerography? Could it have affected Nagell's copy of Oswald's ID?