Important New Jefferson Morley Article

[Tim Gratz]

http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/jfk/jfk-page01.html

[Tim Gratz]

In the article Mr. Morley states:

The new JFK forensic science, in short, has narrowed the limits of plausible conjecture by eliminating the single bullet theory as an explanation of Kennedy and Connally's wounds and by not eliminating the possibility that the fatal shot was fired from the grassy knoll.

The best minds in forensic science might be able to clarify things, Pat Grant told me in an e-mail following our interview. Grant admitted that he and probably most other experts in the most advanced forensic techniques are not up to date on the acoustic evidence and other JFK evidentiary specimens.

"The evidence should be viewed and examined by a select group of forensic scientists, by invitation only, that best represents the most advanced forensic methods possible today," Grant wrote, adding, "These cannot be encompassed solely by the practices of today's criminalistics labs." He proposed these scientists prepare "a summary report detailing prioritized recommendations for ensuing analyses, their estimations for success of each recommended analysis and the anticipated information to be gained from each."

Two points here. I may be wrong, and I await clarification from others, but I do not believe the destruction of the premises of the NAA eliminates the single bullet theory. I believe of course there are other significant reasons rendering the SBT if not impossible at least highly, highly improbable. But as I understand it the NAA was a "linchpin" for the SBT in that it "proved" that the bullet fragments from Conally came from CE399. The failure of the NAA did not PROVE that there is evidence of three or more bullets, it only means that the NAA does not prove the opposite. When the NAA was destroyed, it simply makes the SBT far, far less likely.

Re Pat Grant's proposal, that is exactly what I think ought to be done although of course the HSCA expert panels proved conclusively that experts could be wrong. The key would be obtaining independent experts willing to give honest opinions. And there may be the need for further forensic testing.

Edited November 20, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[William Kelly]

http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/jfk/jfk-page01.html

Thanks for calling attention to that Tim.

Jeff Morley is a very focused and determined reporter who choses his words carefully.

The three issues he discusses are indeed important and potentionally significant.

It's good to see Playboy publishing such articles once again.

There's certainly some important new information in there. I especially find fascinating the "press release" put out by Carlos Bringuier in August, 1963, calling for Congress to investigate Oswald.

Certainly Joannides must have read that, as he probably paid for it.

BK

[Tim Gratz]

As I said in another thread, I think Mr. Morley's discovery of who George Joannides was was one of the most important discoveries in assassination research and we do not yet know what other discoveries it may lead to. Fingers crossed. Look at what Moreley's discovery did to Prof Blakey's view of the CIA.

Someday, hopefully, we shall know the truth!

Edited November 20, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Amazon is preordering the book. Its publication date is March 11, 2008.

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Man-Mexico-Winst...0163&sr=1-3

[Ron Ecker]

I wonder if Morley left the Washington Post voluntarily. The mainstream media is no place for investigative journalism on the JFK case.

[John Simkin]

I wonder if Morley left the Washington Post voluntarily. The mainstream media is no place for investigative journalism on the JFK case.

Probably not asked to go but he definitely has more freedom now. The Washington Post has always been an important part of Operation Mockingbird (especially over the Watergate case).

[William Kelly]

I wonder if Morley left the Washington Post voluntarily. The mainstream media is no place for investigative journalism on the JFK case.

Probably not asked to go but he definitely has more freedom now. The Washington Post has always been an important part of Operation Mockingbird (especially over the Watergate case).

Jeff is now working with the Center for Independent Media and Newjournalist.org, a non-profit attempting to establish a national network of political bloggers. They are apparently already up and running in Minnessotta, Colorado, Iowa and Michigan, with Jeff setting up the DC end of their operations. - BK

http://newjournalist.org/about/

http://it.sys-con.com/read/443516.htm

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Jefferson Morley, a 15-year veteran at the Washington Post, has joined the Center for Independent Media as its National Editorial Director, with overall responsibility for guiding the Center's fast-growing network of 40 journalists, and overseeing the launch of a new Washington DC-based online news site with 10 reporters in late 2007.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20071015/DCM011)

"After a thorough and intensive search, we are honored to have Jeff Morley join our team," said David S. Bennahum, the Center's President & CEO. "With Jeff's magazine experience from the Nation and New Republic, daily newspaper experience from the Washington Post, and track record as an editor of the Post's web site, Jeff is ideally suited to help lead the way to the 21st century newsroom," Bennahum said.

"The news business is in rapid transformation as the Internet becomes the dominant medium for getting news. The Center is pioneering the way news works online by producing a new form of journalism that embraces the speed and intimacy of blogging with the standards and accuracy of traditional journalism," Bennahum said. The Center currently operates in four states: Colorado (http://www.coloradoconfidential.com/), Iowa (http://www.iowaindependent.com/), Michigan (http://www.michiganmessenger.com/), and Minnesota (http://www.minnesotamonitor.com/)

"The Center's national news network offers an exciting new model for building independent online journalism," Morley said. "My goal is to combine old-fashioned fact gathering and fairness with attitude, and Internet-era values of interactivity and transparency."

Jefferson Morley served as assistant editor for the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post and as world news editor for washingtonpost.com while launching the World Opinion Roundup column. He is the author of the forthcoming book, "Our Man in Mexico," a biography of CIA spy Winston Scott, to be published in spring 2008 by the University Press of Kansas.

The Center for Independent Media, founded in May 2006, is a nonprofit organization that fosters diversity of ideas in the national debate. The Center's reporters are the winners of numerous awards for journalistic excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and adhere to the SPJ's code of ethics. The Center's sites have garnered over 4 million visits since launch in July 2006, and the Center's Fellows have broken numerous stories of importance, triggering extensive coverage in print and broadcast media. Additional information on the Center and its programs can be found at http://www.newjournalist.org/.

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Edited November 21, 2007 by William Kelly

[John Simkin]

In my opinion Jeff's article is the most important on the JFK assassination for many years. In the past Jeff has been criticised for being "too moderate" in his approach. However, it is a great advantage if you are working via the mainstream media. A very good summary of where we are in 2007. My only criticism is that I would have liked him to include some of the new information that appeared in the second edition of "Someone Would Have Talked".

[Tim Gratz]

I also agree it is a very good assessment of the current state of the evidence (probably the best now available). The presentation of the controversy over the acoustic test is well-balanced.

My only criticism as noted above is I think it over-states the case that the debunking of the NAA disproves the SBT. The NAA probably offerered the strongest support for the SBT as contrasted to very strong evidence demonstrating that it was at best highly improbable if not impossible.

I think it would be good to send a copy of the article to every member of Congress and the presidential candidates.

[John Simkin]

The article The Man Who Did Not Talk includes the following:

http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/jfk/jfk-page02.html

Perhaps the single most intriguing story to emerge from the JFK files concerns a career CIA officer named George Joannides. He died in 1990 at age 67, taking his JFK secrets to the grave in suburban Washington. His role in the events leading up to Kennedy's death and its confused investigatory aftermath goes utterly unmentioned in the vast literature of JFK's assassination. Vincent Bugliosi's otherwise impressive 1,600 page book debunking every JFK conspiracy theory known to man mentions him only in an inaccurate footnote. In 1998, the Agency declassified a handful of annual personnel evaluations that revealed Joannides was involved in the JFK assassination story, both before and after the event.

In November 1963, Joannides was serving as the chief of psychological warfare operations in the CIA's Miami station. The purpose of psychological warfare, as authorized by U.S. policymakers, was to confuse and confound the government of Fidel Castro, so to hasten its replacement by a government more congenial to Washington. The first revelation was that Joannides had agents in a leading Cuban student exile group, an operation code-named AMSPELL in CIA files. These agents had a series of close encounters with Oswald three months before JFK was killed.

The second revelation was that the CIA's Miami assets helped shape the public's understanding of Kennedy's assassination by identifying the suspected assassin as a Castro supporter right from the start.

The third revelation, the one that is most shocking, is that when Congress reopened the JFK probe in 1978, Joannides served as the CIA's liaison to the investigators. His job was to provide files and information to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But far from being a helpful source and conduit, Joannides stonewalled. He did not disclose his role in the events of 1963, even when asked direct questions about the AMSPELL operation he handled.

When the story of the Joannides file emerged, former HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey was stunned by the audacity of Joannides's deception. Blakey, a former federal prosecutor, thought the Agency had cooperated with Congress's effort to look into JFK's murder. Twenty-three years later he learned that the CIA bureaucrat ostensibly assisting his staff was actually a material witness in the investigation. "The Agency set me up," reported the Washington Post.

Blakey, now a law professor at Notre Dame, says Joannides's actions were "little short of outrageous. You could make a prima facie case that it amounted to obstruction of Congress, which is a felony."

Blakey has long argued that organized crime figures orchestrated Kennedy's assassination. The revelation of Joannides's unknown role has given him second thoughts about the CIA's credibility.

"You can't really infer from the Joannides story that they [the CIA] did it," he says. "Maybe he was hiding something that is not complicitous in a plot but merely embarrassing. It certainly undermines everything that they have said about JFK's assassination."

[Michael Hogan]

What JFK Conspiracy Bashers Get Wrong

by Jefferson Morley

November 21, 2007

As the 44th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy approaches, you may get caught up in an eruption of the perennial and sometimes tedious conspiracy debate. You want to keep an open mind and make sure you don't fall for any JFK assassination myths. You can, for example, say with confidence that a lot of the crazy JFK conspiracy scenarios have been debunked over the years. No, neither the KGB, the Masons, the Mossad, nor the Red Chinese were behind the gunfire that killed the liberal statesman. No, Abraham Zapruder's famous home movie assassination was not secretly altered to hide evidence of a conspiracy. And, no, the legendary three tramps photographed that day did not whack Jack. They were just a trio of homeless guys in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But no sooner were these fables dispatched by scrupulous JFK researchers, than public discourse on the JFK story was engulfed by a new set of assertions imbued with an anti-conspiratorial animus that is also unhinged from the historical record. These too need the truth squad....

Full article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jefferson-mo...he_b_73722.html

In the above article Morley plugs this forthcoming book:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KAIASS.html

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Dallas-Assassin...4859&sr=1-1

[Charles Drago]

Don't get your hopes up.

It seems that the Scheim/Davis/Blakey-Billings/Waldron-Hartmann disinformation chain/cover-up is set to continue.

From Harvard's website description of the forthcoming Kaiser book:

"The conspiracy to kill JFK took shape in response to Robert Kennedy’s relentless attacks on organized crime—legal vendettas that often went well beyond the normal practices of law enforcement. Pushed to the wall, mob leaders merely had to look to the networks already in place for a solution. They found it in Lee Harvey Oswald—the ideal character to enact their desperate revenge against the Kennedys."

Sad in advance,

Charles

[John Simkin]

Don't get your hopes up.

It seems that the Scheim/Davis/Blakey-Billings/Waldron-Hartmann disinformation chain/cover-up is set to continue.

From Harvard's website description of the forthcoming Kaiser book:

"The conspiracy to kill JFK took shape in response to Robert Kennedy’s relentless attacks on organized crime—legal vendettas that often went well beyond the normal practices of law enforcement. Pushed to the wall, mob leaders merely had to look to the networks already in place for a solution. They found it in Lee Harvey Oswald—the ideal character to enact their desperate revenge against the Kennedys."

Sad in advance,

Charles

When I spoke to David Kaiser in Dallas a couple of years ago he told me that he was fairly certain that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman.

[Michael Hogan]

Don't get your hopes up.

It seems that the Scheim/Davis/Blakey-Billings/Waldron-Hartmann disinformation chain/cover-up is set to continue.

From Harvard's website description of the forthcoming Kaiser book:

"The conspiracy to kill JFK took shape in response to Robert Kennedy’s relentless attacks on organized crime—legal vendettas that often went well beyond the normal practices of law enforcement. Pushed to the wall, mob leaders merely had to look to the networks already in place for a solution. They found it in Lee Harvey Oswald—the ideal character to enact their desperate revenge against the Kennedys."

Sad in advance,

Charles

Hopes for what? Can I at least hope I might learn something? A book does not necessarily need to be prejudged based on the author's stated conclusions. I would rather judge it by the quality of research contained therein. Even the books Charles listed provoked discussion and further research by others, and had a certain value or interest.

I've long since given up hope that any book by any author will solve this mystery completely.

David Kaiser is a member of The Education Forum: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...art=#entry67344

His previous book on Kennedy, Johnson and the Vietnam War entitled American Tragedy was generally well-received.

I intend to buy Kaiser's new book when it is published, read it - and listen to the opinions of others. Then, and not until then will I make up my mind whether the author had anything of value to share.

Morley had this to say about his friend's book:

....I know of four tenured academic historians who have written directly on the JFK assassination in the past five years. Three of them (Gerald McKnight of Hood College, David Wrone of the University of Wisconsin-Steven Points, Michael Kurtz of Southeast Louisiana University) came to conspiratorial conclusions, while one (Robert Dallek of UCLA) vouched for the lone gunman theory. A forthcoming book by Naval War College historian David Kaiser on Kennedy's Cuba policy and the assassination, to be published by Harvard University Press next year, is likely to demolish this myth once and for all. (Full disclosure: Kaiser is a friend and the book will cite my JFK reporting.)