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John Simkin

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    Earlene Roberts

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    This article by David Welsh appeared in Ramparts Magazine in November, 1966:

    Mrs. Roberts, the plump widow who managed the rooming house where Oswald was living under the name O.H. Lee, was one of the key witnesses before the Warren Commission. She testified that "around 1 o'clock, or maybe a little after" on November 22, Oswald rushed into the rooming house, stayed in his room for "not over 3 or 4 minutes" and walked out zipping on a light-weight jacket. The last she saw of him he was waiting at a nearby bus stop. A few minutes later, one mile away, Officer Tippit was shot dead; Oswald was accused of the crime.

    Mrs. Roberts also testified that during the brief time Oswald was in his room, a police car with two uniformed cops in it pulled up in front of the rooming house, and that she did not recognize either the car or the policemen. She heard the horn honk, "just kind of 'tit-tit'... twice," and after a moment saw the police car move off down the street. Moments later Oswald left the house.

    The police department issued a report saying all patrol cars in the area (except Officer Tippit's) were accounted for. The Warren Commission let it go at that. It did not seek to resolve the question: what were policemen doing honking the horn outside Oswald's rooming house 30 minutes after a Presidential assassination? Their swift departure would indicate they certainly were not coming to apprehend him. It is perhaps too far fetched to imagine that they were giving Oswald some kind of signal, although it seems as plausible as any other explanation of this bizarre incident.

    After testifying in Dallas in April of 1964, Mrs. Roberts was subjected to intensive police harassment. They visited her at all hours of the day and night, contacted her employers and identified her as the Oswald rooming house lady. As a result she was dismissed from three housekeeping and nursing jobs in April, May and June of 1964 alone; no telling how many jobs she lost after that. Relatives report that right up until her death a year and a half later, Earlene complained of being "worried to death" by the police.

    Mrs. Roberts died January 9, 1966, in Parkland Hospital. Police said she suffered a heart attack in her home. No autopsy was performed.

    Carl Oglesby

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Godfrey Hodgson points out that in his 1967 essay Vietnamese Crucible, Oglesby rejected the "socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal" and "challenged the new left to embrace American democratic populism and the American libertarian right." Hodgson adds: "Oglesby was essentially an autodidact and developed a hybrid political philosophy of his own. He made himself unpopular with some by insisting that the men who led the US into the war were not bad people as individuals, and that the war was the product of systemic faults in American society. He came under the influence of the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard and even aspired to a kind of fusion between the old right, in which he included such conservative figures as General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Robert Taft, and the new left." Did he ever reject this strange philosophy?

    Rupert Murdoch and the Corruption of the British Media

    in Political Conspiracies

    Posted

    Phone hacking: Met use Official Secrets Act to force Guardian to reveal sources

    Unprecedented move sees Scotland Yard use the Official Secrets Act to demand the paper hands over information

    By David Leigh

    guardian.co.uk,

    Friday 16 September 2011 10.40 EDT

    The Metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters disclose their confidential sources about the phone-hacking scandal.

    In an unprecedented legal attack on journalists' sources, Scotland Yard officers claim the act, which has special powers usually aimed at espionage, could have been breached in July when reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. They are demanding source information be handed over.

    The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, said on Friday: "We shall resist this extraordinary demand to the utmost".

    Tom Watson, the former Labour minister who has been prominent in exposing hacking by the News of the World, said: "It is an outrageous abuse and completely unacceptable that, having failed to investigate serious wrongdoing at the News of the World for more than a decade, the police should now be trying to move against the Guardian. It was the Guardian who first exposed this scandal."

    All part of the plan to cover-up the story. Undermines the idea that the police are really interested in exposing the truth this time.

    Richard Ober, Operation Chaos, JFK Assassination and Watergate

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Angus Mackenzie points out in his excellent book, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home (1998): "Richard Ober's name is curiously absent from indexes of books about political spying of his era. Ober managed to keep in the shadows - a force behind the scenes, a man careful to say nothing that would reveal his true role. Few of his associates would even admit to knowing him. It was a breach of the code when one associate gave me a rough description of Ober as a big man with reddish skin and hair."

    Ober does not even appear in Daniel Brandt's comprehensive Namebase website. Well, who was he and why is he important?

    Richard Ober was born in about 1921. He studied at Harvard University with Ben Bradlee and after graduating in 1943 he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Ober became a liaison with the anti-Fascist underground in Nazi-occupied Europe. After the war Ober joined the Central Intelligence Agency. For over 20 years he served under James Angleton as his chief counter-intelligence deputy. According to Angus Mackenzie, Ober was a senior figure in the special operations branch, that "carried out wiretaps, break-ins, and burglaries as authorized by their superiors". The liaison between the special operations unit and Richard Helms, director of the CIA, was Ober. Mackenzie quotes one senior CIA source as saying: “Ober had unique and very confidential access to Helms. I always assumed he was mucking about with Americans who were abroad and then would come back, people like the Black Panthers.”

    If the CIA were involved in the assassination of JFK, then Ober would probably have been involved in the organisation and cover-up of the killing.

    In June 1970, Richard Nixon held a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms and the heads of army and navy intelligence. Nixon wanted better intelligence on “revolutionary activism”. The result was Operation Chaos. Ober was put in charge of the operation. He was given an office in the White House and worked closely with Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

    Nixon was unaware that Ober was placed in the White House to spy on his administration. In her book, Katharine the Great, Deborah Davis argued that it was during this period that Ober gathered information on Nixon’s illegal activities. Ober discovered that Nixon was trying to undermine the power of the CIA. It was therefore decided to bring him down. Ober therefore became Deep Throat and provided information to CIA assets, his old university pal, Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward.

    In February, 1973, Nixon sacked Richard Helms as director of the CIA. His deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, resigned in protest. Nixon now appointed James Schlesinger as the new director of the CIA. Schlesinger was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This he did and over the next three months over 7 per cent of CIA officers lost their jobs.

    On 9th May, 1973, James Schlesinger issued a directive to all CIA employees: “I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter”. From this investigation, Schlesinger discovered that Ober had been spying on the Nixon White House. Ober was transferred to the National Security Council. One source claims that Ober wasn’t fired because, he was “too embarrassing, too hot.” Ober was safe because he had too much information on Nixon. He was able to use this material via the Washington Post to bring Nixon down (partly in revenge for what he had done to Richard Helms and the rest of his colleagues involved in illegal activities).

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKober.htm

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKschlesingerJ.htm

    Beatles and Segregated Audience

    in Martin Luther King and Civil Rights

    Posted

    The Beatles played Atlantic City Convention Hall (now Boardwalk Hall) in late August 1964, a week after the Democratic National Convention was held in the same building - where RFK eulogized JFK and LBJ was nominated.

    They performed in the huge hall with a very small sound system and nobody could hear them but it didn't seem to matter to the screaming girls, including LBJ's daughters.

    I had the good fortune to see the Beatles in 1962, before they had their first hit record. They had just released their first single "Love Me Do" but at that time it had not reached the charts. If I remember correctly it finally reached 18th place. It was their second record, "Please Please Me", that reached number 2 in Britain. I saw them playing at the bottom of the bill at the Odeon theatre in Romford (Essex). Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee were the two main singers on the show. Orbison was amazing and made the Beatles look like amateurs. Nor were the girls screaming at the Beatles at this stage and so you could hear their limitations. However, what impressed me was the quality of their song-writing. (At that time British singers did not write their own material). I went to work the next morning and told my mates that the Beatles were going to be big stars. It is a shame that you can't buy shares in bands like you can in companies. If so, I might have made my fortune from the Beatles success.

    Irving Kupcinet and Karyn Kupcinet

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Irving Kupcinet was given his own column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Over the years, his column was distributed to more than 100 newspapers around the world. In 1952 Kupcinet became a television talk show host on CBS. Five years later he replaced Jack Parr on NBC’s America After the Dark, which eventually became The Tonight Show. He also appeared in two movies produced by Otto Preminger, Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Advise and Consent (1962). His daughter, Karyn Kupcinet, became an actress and appeared in The Ladies' Man (1961).

    Irv Kupcinet knew Jack Ruby in Chicago in the 1940s. According to W. Penn Jones Irv kept in contact with Ruby and discovered that he was involved in a plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Jones argues that Irv passed this information on to his daughter Karyn. In his book, Forgive My Grief, Jones reports that "a few days before the assassination, Karyn Kupcinet, 23, was trying to place a long distance telephone call from the Los Angeles area. According to reports, the long distance operator heard Miss Kupcinet scream into the telephone that President Kennedy was going to be killed."

    Karyn Kupcinet's body was discovered on 30th November, 1963. Police estimated that she had been dead for two days. The New York Times reported that she had been strangled. Her actor boyfriend, Andrew Prine was the main suspect but he was never charged with the murder and the crime remains unsolved.

    Some researchers claimed that there was a link between the death of Kupcinet and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was argued that the conspirators were trying to frighten off Kupcinet from telling what he knew. Kupcinet rejected this idea. He wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times (9th November, 1992): "The NBC Today Show on Friday carried a list of people who died violently in 1963 shortly after the death of President John F. Kennedy and may have had some link to the assassination. The first name on the list was Karyn Kupcinet, my daughter. That is an atrocious outrage. She did die violently in a Hollywood murder case still unsolved. That same list was published in a book years ago with no justification or verification. The book left the impression that some on the list may have been killed to silence them because of knowledge of the assassination. Nothing could be further from the truth in my daughter's case."

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKkupcinet.htm

    Jack Anderson

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Jack Anderson served with O.S.S. Detachment # 202 in China. He served under Col. Paul Helliwell, who as a CIA asset attorney, helped set up the "Castle Bank Operation" in Nassau, The Bahamas.

    [One of my assets, Norman Casper, Key Biscayne, FL -- penetrated this operation for the I.R.S. Intelligence Division, which was the agency I worked under, while liaising with the So. Fla. Drug Interdiction Task Force. The title was changed to the "Vice Prez's TF" when Bush #41 opted to take cxontrol !! (Drug Interdiction Ops

    - 1970s - 1980s)]

    While the O.S.S. "Europe" teams were recruited into Wisner's O.P.C., the WWII veterans who later became ("in the the majority") the CIA's "Clandestine Service" -- were recruited from O.S.S. Detachment # 101 ("Behind the Burma Road"). The JM/ATE "BOP" boss, Jake Esterline was a Captain in Det. #101 for 2+ years.

    Jack Anderson served alongside Capt. John Birch, Capt. Mitchell L. WerBell III, S/Sgt. Robert Emmett Johnson, USMC, Major John Singlaub, Lt. Roger Hillsman, et al. !!

    Chairs,

    GPH

    Others working in China at the time included Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Hawkins, Lucien Conein, Philip Graham, Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley. These men were later to become very important to Anderson in his journalistic career.

    In an article published in the Washington Post on 18th December, 2005, it was admitted that he did not publish a scoop about President Reagan's arms-for-hostages swap. I wonder why? Could it have been that those Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operatives that he met in China were now senior officers in the CIA who were involved in the Iran-Contra operation.

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAandersonJ.htm

    Ed Hoffman is incorrect

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Is Ed Hoffman still alive?

    Sadly, no. He passed away last year.

    Thank you. I thought I read it on the forum but could not find it. The search facility is not very good on this site. Even using Google did not bring the information up.

    John, using Google I was able to find it in about twenty seconds. First I Googled: Ed Hoffman JFK Education Forum

    This thread was the number one listing. At the bottom of the same listing was the message: More results from educationforum.ipbhost.com

    Clicking on that brought up a full page of listings. The thread you were looking for was the fourth one from the top, started by Duncan MacRae on March 25, 2010

    http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15676

    I missed out the "JFK" from the Education Forum. I will remember to do that in future. Gary Mack emailed me to say he died on 24th March, 2010.

    Carl Oglesby

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    This is considered to be one of the best speeches Carl Oglesby ever made (Washington, 27th November, 1965)

    We are here again to protest a growing war. Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the habit of thinking it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and military power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted. We must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiescence are creatures, all of them, of a Government that since 1932 has considered itself to he fundamentally liberal.

    The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war — those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.

    But so, I'm sure, are many of us who are here today in protest. To understand the war, then, it seems necessary to take a closer look at this American liberalism. Maybe we are in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.

    Not long ago I considered myself a liberal and if, someone had asked me what I meant by that, I'd perhaps have quoted Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, who first made plain our nation's unprovisional commitment to human rights. But what do you think would happen if these two heroes could sit down now for a chat with President Johnson and McGeorge Bundy?

    They would surely talk of the Vietnam war. Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution. The living liberals would hotly deny that it is one: there are troops coming in from outside, the rebels get arms from other countries, most of the people are not on their side, and they practice terror against their own. Therefore: not a revolution.

    What would our dead revolutionaries answer? They might say: "What fools and bandits, sirs, you make then of us. Outside help? Do you remember Lafayette? Or the three thousand British freighters the French navy sunk for our side? Or the arms and men, we got from France and Spain? And what's this about terror? Did you never hear what we did to our own Loyalists? Or about the thousands of rich American Tories who fled for their lives to Canada? And as for popular support, do you not know that we had less than one-third of our people with us? That, in fact, the colony of New York recruited more troops for the British than for the revolution? Should we give it all back?"

    Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. They never have. It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam is a complex and vicious war. This war is also a revolution, as honest a revolution as you can find anywhere in history. And this is a fact which all our intricate official denials will never change.

    But it doesn't make any difference to our leaders anyway. Their aim in Vietnam is really much simpler than this implies. It is to safeguard what they take to be American interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary change, which they always call Communism - as if that were that. In the case of Vietnam, this interest is, first, the principle that revolution shall not be tolerated anywhere, and second, that South Vietnam shall never sell its rice to China - or even to North Vietnam.

    There is simply no such thing now, for us, as a just revolution - never mind that for two-thirds of the world's people the Twentieth Century might as well be the Stone Age; never mind the melting poverty and hopelessness that are the basic facts of life for most modern men; and never mind that for these millions there is now an increasingly perceptible relationship between their sorrow and our contentment.

    Can we understand why the Negroes of Watts rebelled? Then why do we need a devil theory to explain the rebellion of the South Vietnamese? Can we understand the oppression in Mississippi, or the anguish that our Northern ghettoes makes epidemic? Then why can't we see that our proper human struggle is not with Communism or revolutionaries, but with the social desperation that drives good men to violence, both here and abroad?

    Jean Hill

    in JFK Assassination Debate

    Posted

    Jean Hill made a very important speech in November, 1991. It included the following passage:

    That area (of the Dealey Plaza) is sloping so when Mary reached up to take the picture, we did get a picture of the School Book Depository. We knew that, because we had a Polaroid camera, we were going to have to be quick if we wanted to take more than one picture. So what we planned was, Mary would take the picture, I would pull it out of the camera, coat it with fixative and put it in my pocket. That way we could keep shooting. When the head shot came, Mary fell down and the film (i.e., the famous photograph) was still in the camera. When the motorcade came around, there were so many voters on the other side (of Elm Street) that I knew the President was never going to look at me, so I yelled, "Hey Mr. President, I want to take your picture!" Just then his hands came up and the shots started ringing out. Then, in half the time it takes for me to tell it, I looked across the street and I saw them shooting from the knoll. I did get the impression that day that there was more than one shooter, but I had the idea that the good guys and the bad guys were shooting at each other. I guess I was a victim of too much television, because I assumed that the good guys always shot at the bad guys. Mary was on the grass shouting, "Get down! Get down! They're shooting! They're shooting!" Nobody was moving and I looked up and saw this man, moving rather quickly in front of the School Book Depository toward the railroad tracks, heading west, toward the area where I had seen the man shooting on the knoll. So, I thought to myself, "This man is getting away. I've got to do something. I've got to catch him." I jumped out into the street. One of the motorcyclists was turning his motor, looking up and all around for the shooter, and he almost ran me over. It scared me so bad, I went back to get Mary to go with me. She was still down on the ground. I couldn't get her to go, so I left her. I ran across and went up the hill. When I got there a hand came down on my shoulder, and it was a firm grip. This man said, "You're coming with me." And I said, "No, I can't come with you, I have to get this man." I'm not very good at doing what I'm told. He showed me I.D. It said Secret Service. It looked official to me. I tried to turn away from him and he said a second time, "You're going with me." At this point, a second man came and grabbed me from the other side, and they ran their hands through my pockets. They didn't say, "Do you have the picture? Which pocket?" They just ran their hands through my pockets and took it. They both held me up here (at the shoulder near the neck) someplace, where you could hurt somebody badly - and they told me, "Smile. Act like you're with your boyfriends." But I couldn't smile because it hurt too badly. And they said, "Here we go," each one holding me by a shoulder. They took me to the Records Building and we went up to a room on the fourth floor. There were two guys sitting there on the other side of a table looking out a window that overlooked "the killing zone," where you could see all of the goings on. You got the impression that they had been sitting there for a long time. They asked me what I had seen, and it became clear that they knew what I had seen. They asked me how many shots I had heard and I told them four to six. And they said, "No, you didn't. There were three shots. We have three bullets and that's all we're going to commit to now." I said, "Well, I know what I heard," and they told me, "What you heard were echoes. You would be very wise to keep your mouth shut." Well, I guess I've never been that wise. I know the difference between firecrackers, echoes, and gunshots. I'm the daughter of a game ranger, and my father took me shooting all my life.

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhillJ.htm

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