Was Oliver Stone's JFK accurate or credible?

[David Von Pein]

Vince, of course, is full of xxxx (after his 21-year journey through the JFK universe), when he said this--right, Jim/Mike?:

"Three things are very clear: First, after an unprecedented and historic four-year scavenger hunt by the ARRB for all documents “reasonably related” to the assassination, no smoking gun or even a smoldering ember of conspiracy was found. The reason is that no such smoking gun or ember ever existed. Second, if it did exist, it would never have been left in any file for discovery. And finally, assassination researchers and conspiracy theorists will never be satisfied, not even when the cows come home." -- Vincent Bugliosi; Page 149 of "Reclaiming History" (Endnotes)

[Michael Hogan]

Vince, of course, is full of s____ (after his 21-year journey through the JFK universe), when he said this--right, Jim/Mike?:

Finally David, you've written something I can agree with.

[Harry J.Dean]

Aren't you glad that the ARRB got so many files released?

Yeah, that's nice. But where has it taken "conspiracy" researchers?

Jim DiEugenio wants to pretend that the ARRB released documents that totally shatter to bits the lone-assassin conclusion reached by the Warren Commission.

But WHICH documents did this shattering?

IOW, WHERE is the "smoking gun" amongst the stuff released by the Assassination Records Review Board?

-------------------------------

"Three things are very clear: First, after an unprecedented and historic four-year scavenger hunt by the ARRB for all documents “reasonably related” to the assassination, no smoking gun or even a smoldering ember of conspiracy was found. The reason is that no such smoking gun or ember ever existed. Second, if it did exist, it would never have been left in any file for discovery. And finally, assassination researchers and conspiracy theorists will never be satisfied, not even when the cows come home." -- Vincent Bugliosi; Page 149 of "Reclaiming History" (Endnotes)

-------------------------------

http://DVP-Potpourri.blogspot.com/2010/01/anna-nelson-of-arrb-october-1998.html

The smoking gun lay cold when the "New Americanist five year plan" succeeded

by subversion leading to assassination and successful takeover of total

United States Government political apparatus.

"Who then would ever be tried and convicted for the awful crime when these

guilty control all legal and moral judgments, and dictate their own version of

history"

{from the 1990 manuscript/book CROSSTRAILS}

[Pat Speer]

Pat:

Mantik talked about these three outside consultants during his presentation. ANd he quoted them.

Secondly, he has a video on You Tube in which he addresses their findings.

Third: WHen you say that Mantik made a derogatory remark about your work at Lancer, again, I must have missed this. I sat through his whole presentation. He brought you up on two instances of disagreement. The first time he did, he actually said that he liked most of your stuff. But not on the 6.5 mm fragment.

And I should say, that he is not the only one who feels that way. So does Milicent Cranor. Except she is even more vituperative about you on this point than he is.

It seems to me you are being kind of thin skinned about this. To me, it comes with the territory.

Not that we haven't beat this horse to death, but you've reinforced my point. Mantik had access to Horne's book and the ARRB reports on the consultants before anyone else, and discussed the findings of these consultants during his presentation. He stressed a few points where they agreed with him, and said at one point that "the buck stops" with the opinion of the forensic radiologist Fitzpatrick. He also discussed my research on several points, and said he disagreed, etc. But what he didn't tell his audience was that what he called "Speer's theory"--the belief the "white patch" represents overlying bone, and that the "dark spot" represents missing bone, was not the theory of a layman--ME--but also the theory of Fitzpatrick--a forensic radiologist with far better credentials than Mantik--long before I'd ever dreamt of such a thing. (It was also the theory of one of the radiology techs present at Kennedy's autopsy, Edward Reed.) It's hard to see how this was an oversight.

As far as the 6.5mm fragment, it is a fact that basically all the witnesses to the removal of the large fragment claimed it was removed from behind the eye, and it is also a fact that Mantik regularly tells his audience and readers that the club-shaped fragment in the middle of the forehead was the fragment removed at autopsy...even though he has also concluded the club-shaped fragment is NOT the fragment entered into evidence...

Hmmm...so let's think here... where did the fragment entered into evidence come from... Hmmm, maybe where every witness said it came from--from behind the right eye...

But no, that makes too much sense.

No, instead, we have Mantik and Horne, and many many others, claiming that Russell Morgan, one of the Clark Panel ringleaders tasked with re-interpreting the head wound and cooking up evidence the shots came from behind, was absolutely right on this issue, and that the 6.5mm fragment actually is on the back of the head on the A-P x-ray...even though they ALL agree it can't be seen on the lateral x-ray...

This is silly in the extreme. If it's not on the back of the head on the lateral x-ray, then hmmm....maybe we should look for it where everyone at the autopsy from Humes down to Sibert and O'Neil said it was--behind the right eye.

But uhh, if we did that, we'd have to let go of some of our most cherished beliefs...such as the belief the fragment was added to the A-P x-ray after the autopsy..

Too bad. I don't call my webpage, or online book, whatever you want to call it, a "New Perspective," because I thought it was a catchy title. I did it because it's true.

There's mucho crudola on both sides of the fence, IMO. And I don't see how pretending Lattimer or Myers or McAdams or Fetzer or Mantik or Thomas are infallible, when they so clearly are not, gets us anywhere.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Pat Speer

[Pat Speer]

As far as your propping up of Mantik as a "genuine medical expert"...please. Radiation oncologists are no more experts in forensic pathology and wound ballistics than orthodontists and podiatrists...

There you go twisting the words of others again - just like you did with Clint Hill. And Dr. Finck.

Of course anyone reading this can see that I never said Mantik was an expert in forensic pathology. Or is it your contention that radiation oncologists have no medical expertise?

Anyway, surely you've come up with an answer for my questions by now, Pat?

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17031&view=findpost&p=213801

My point was that the word "medical expert" means almost nothing in this instance. Dr. Lattimer was a "Medical expert," but that didn't stop him from concluding that Kennedy was a hunchback, and that his back wound was inches above his throat wound.

Mantik's expertise, if you will, comes not from his professional experience, but from his study of the case and his obvious intellect.

As far as my twisting Hill's words... Hill has repeatedly claimed that the large wound he saw was the size of his palm, and was above Kennedy's ear. He originally made statements saying it was on the posterior skull. In his recent statements he has sometimes said things such as "to the rear," indicating he thought the wound was centered to the back of the head. This suggests to me that, to his recollection, the wound was an inch or two further back than it is shown in the autopsy photos and x-rays.

But will this stop CTs from claiming Hill said it was on the back of the head, and that this supports the speculation the Harper fragment was occipital bone? Of course not. Many if not most CTs are stuck on this factoid, just as many if not most LNs are stuck on the factoid Kennedy and Connally are perfectly aligned for the single-bullet theory at Z-224. They've been lied to, and they just can't admit it to themselves.

Here are a few examples of the kind of lies we've been told:

Robert Groden held in his best-selling and highly-influential book High Treason that the wound location depicted in "McClelland" drawing "was verified by every doctor, nurse, and eyewitness as accurate," and that these witnesses described an "exit wound... almost squarely in the back of the head (the occiput)." He continues to claim, as recently as his 11-18-10 appearance on Black Op Radio, that he'd interviewed about 20 Dallas doctors, and that "every single one of them, without exception, said that the shot that killed the President--the fatal shot--came from the right front--entered the right temporal area--and blew out the back of his head."

Similarly, in 2006, In The JFK Assassination Debates, Michael Kurtz wrote:

"Every physician and nurse at Parkland Hospital who examined the President's head wounds described a large wound in the right rear of the head. In other words, they described a bullet wound of exit in the back of the head, which meant that the bullet came from in front of Kennedy because he faced forward. In their original descriptions of the wound in Kennedy's head, Dr.s Malcolm Perry, James Carrico, Robert McClelland, Paul Peters, Ronald Jones, and others clearly described a large wound of exit in the occipital region. In addition, they observed both cerebral and cerebellar tissue coming from the wound."

Well, this is absolute nonsense, Martin. Both Groden and Kurtz have misrepresented the unanimity of these witnesses, shifted the wound described by these witnesses further to the back of the head, and misrepresented their belief the shot came from in front of Kennedy and entered on the front of his head.

NONE of the Parkland witnesses thought the large wound was an exit for a bullet entering the right front of Kennedy's head, and its time people stop pretending so.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Pat Speer

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Many, many of the witnesses at Parkland described a large, gaping wound in the BACK of Kennedy's head. I pretty much think the whole right side of JFK's head was SPLIT OPEN and culminating in a BLOW OUT WOUND in the back of the head.

Just because these witnesses did not directly SAY they thought the large, gaping back of the head wound was an EXIT wound ... does not mean that in fact it was a not a large EXIT wound smashing through the occiput.

They key point is many Parkland witnesses and Bethesda witnesses describe a large gaping wound in the BACK of John Kennedy's head. Draw what conclusions you like ... mine is that it was an obvious EXIT wound.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Robert Morrow

[Pat Speer]

Many, many of the witnesses at Parkland described a large, gaping wound in the BACK of Kennedy's head. I pretty much think the whole right side of JFK's head was SPLIT OPEN and culminating in a BLOW OUT WOUND in the back of the head.

Just because these witnesses did not directly SAY they thought the large, gaping back of the head wound was an EXIT wound ... does not mean that in fact it was a not a large EXIT wound smashing through the occiput.

They key point is many Parkland witnesses and Bethesda witnesses describe a large gaping wound in the BACK of John Kennedy's head. Draw what conclusions you like ... mine is that it was an obvious EXIT wound.

Fine. You are not at odds with the facts to say a lot of witnesses described a large wound toward the back of JFK's head. But, when you read THEIR words, and not words written by conspiracy theorists summarizing their words, it's clear that 1) they were not all consistent in their appraisal; 2) the key Parkland witnesses initially believed the wound was either a wound of entrance and exit, OR an exit for the bullet creating the throat wound, and 3) the wound most described was on the upper right part of the back of the head, and NOT a wound centered in the middle of the back of the head.

This means that 1) it is misleading to claim these witnesses said they believed the head shot came from the front, and 2) it is misleading to claim the statements of these witnesses support that the Harper fragment was occipital bone. Their statements, in fact, are clear. They saw NO entrance on the front of the head. They saw one wound on the head, and it didn't stretch down to the middle of the occipital bone on the lower back of the head.

In other words, if one is truly to use the statements of these witnesses as a guidepost, one should readily admit that the Harper fragment was NOT occipital bone. So why do so few CTs acknowledge as much?

Because they want it both ways. They want to use the statements of the witnesses to discredit the official story, and then replace it not with what these witnesses said, but with whatever the heck they want them to say.

That's bs. If one is gonna readily ignore the statements of these witnesses to say there was a large exit in the middle of the back of the head, and an entrance on the front, one should acknowledge that their theory is at odds with the statements of these witnesses, and not pretend they are somehow defending their credibility...

I think these witnesses were wrong, and that the wound they saw was a few inches forward of where they remembered it. Many if not most CTs think they were wrong, and that the wound they saw was a few inches back of where they remembered it. The difference is that these CTs like to pretend they're in line with the statements of the witnesses. They're not.

From patspeer.com, chapter 18c:

Of the 18 witnesses presented by Groden to demonstrate that the bulk of the Parkland and Bethesda witnesses believed there was an exit on the far back of the head--an exit purported to be centered in the occipital bone--2 (Phil Willis and Aubrey Rike) never saw the wound, 2 (Paul O'Connor and Jerrold Custer) depicted a wound encompassing the entire right side of the head, 2 (Kenneth Salyer and Theron Ward) depicted the wound on the side of the head, 4 (Marilyn Willis, Ed Hoffman, Richard Dulaney, and Frank O'Neill) depicted the wound on the top of the head, and 3(Ronald Jones, Charles Carrico, and Floyd Riebe) depicted a wound on the back of the head, but apparently came to accept they were mistaken, and deferred to the accuracy of the autopsy photos. This means that only 5 witnesses actually believed the wound was on the far back of Kennedy's head, and 2 of these--Peters and McClelland, were inconsistent in their statements but ultimately claimed they believed the wound to be further forward than in the "McClelland" drawing. This means that but 3 witnesses felt comfortable asserting the large head wound was really behind the ear in the occipital bone, as purported by most conspiracy theorists and as presented in the "McClelland" drawing: Crenshaw, Bell, and Oliver.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Pat Speer

[Frankie Vegas]

Aren't you glad that the ARRB got so many files released?

Yeah, that's nice. But where has it taken "conspiracy" researchers?

Jim DiEugenio wants to pretend that the ARRB released documents that totally shatter to bits the lone-assassin conclusion reached by the Warren Commission.

But WHICH documents did this shattering?

IOW, WHERE is the "smoking gun" amongst the stuff released by the Assassination Records Review Board?

-------------------------------

"Three things are very clear: First, after an unprecedented and historic four-year scavenger hunt by the ARRB for all documents “reasonably related” to the assassination, no smoking gun or even a smoldering ember of conspiracy was found. The reason is that no such smoking gun or ember ever existed. Second, if it did exist, it would never have been left in any file for discovery. And finally, assassination researchers and conspiracy theorists will never be satisfied, not even when the cows come home." -- Vincent Bugliosi; Page 149 of "Reclaiming History" (Endnotes)

-------------------------------

http://DVP-Potpourri...tober-1998.html

I don't see why 'smoking guns' and conspiracy theories have to do with the ARRB. They files were released for the people (well most of them) and its a good thing.

I guess I thought people, even Lns would be pleased at having access to so many more documents.

[Bernice Moore]

robert; you may interested in these Horne files at Lancer......

The Horne Presentation, part 2a

THE WOUNDS AT BETHESDA:

Now the description of the wounds dramatically changes at Bethesda. Horne showed a page from the autopsy protocol, and read from it, (MD3 p.3)

"There is a large irregular defect of the scalp and skull on the right involving chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions, in this region there is an actual absence of scalp and bone producing a defect which measures approximately 13 centimeters in greatest diameter."

Horne commented, "Now there has been a big change taken place here. In Dallas the wound is in the back of the head, pretty well localized to the occipital or occipitalparietal region. Now it's chiefly in the right side of the head extending into the temporal region and the occipital region. And Dr. Humes says it's 13 centimeters in greatest diameter."

Horne showed the infamous autopsy diagram drawn by Dr. Boswell with the notation "10 by 17' [centimeters] and the word "missing."(MD 1 p.2) This is a superior view of the skull, looking down.

http://www.jfklancer...e/Backes2a.html

b..

Edited December 11, 2010 by Bernice Moore

[Pat Speer]

Pat:

You are never going to be able to sell that circular shaped object as an oblong.

Or the back of the skull as behind the eye.

I'm not going to argue this point with you anymore.

As like Mantik, I think most of your work is good.

The large fragment as originally photographed by the FBI and presented by John Hunt at the 2003 conference looks a heckuva lot more like the supposedly 6.5 mm fragment than it does the club shaped fragment in the forehead. Mantik agrees that this fragment is NOT the club-shaped fragment. So my position that this fragment was removed from behind they eye--precisely as claimed by most everyone at the autopsy--is quite logical, and almost certainly correct.

As far as the back of the skull...no one at the autopsy thought this fragment was at the back of the skull. This was something conjured up by the Clark Panel, and rubber-stamped by the HSCA. Most everyone today, including Mantik and the ARRB's consultants, agrees that the large fragment is NOT on the back of the head in the lateral x-rays. So why pretend it is on the back of the head in the A-P? Why not look for it where the doctors claimed they found it?

I know it's far more sexy to say the fragment was added to the x-ray than to say the Clark Panel made a mistake or told a lie, but it is what it is...

Edited December 11, 2010 by Pat Speer

[Bernice Moore]

Good essay on the JFK Movie. Frog ;; The J.F.K. Flapby Murray N. Rothbard This essay originally appeared in the May 1992 issue of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report. The most fascinating thing about JFK, as exciting and well-done as it is, is not the movie itself but the hysterical attempt to marginalize, if not to suppress it. How many movies can you remember where the entire Establishment, in serried ranks, from left (The Nation) through Center to Right, joined together as one in a frantic orgy of calumny and denunciation. Time and Newsweek actually doing so before the movie came out? Apparently, so fearful was the Establishment that the Oliver Stone movie might prove convincing that the public had to be thoroughly inoculated in advance. It was a remarkable performance by the media, and it demonstrates, as nothing else, the enormous and growing gap between Respectable Media opinion and what the public Knows in its Heart. You would think from the shock of the Respectable Media, that Stone's JFK was totally outlandish, off-the-wall, monstrous and fanciful in its accusations against the American power structure. And you would think that historical films never engaged in dramatic license, as if such solemnly hailed garbage as Wilson and Sunrise at Campobello had been models of scholarly precision. Hey, come off it guys! Despite the fuss and feathers, to veteran Kennedy Assassination buffs, there was nothing new in JFK. What Stone does is to summarize admirably the best of a veritable industry of assassination revisionism – of literally scores of books, articles, tapes, annual conventions, and archival research. Stone himself is quite knowledgeable in the area, as shown by his devastating answer in the Washington Post, to the smears of the last surviving Warren Commission member, Gerald Ford, and the old Commission hack, David W. Belin. Despite the smears in the press, there was nothing outlandish in the movie. Interestingly enough, JFK has been lambasted much more furiously than was the first revisionist movie, Don Freed's Executive Action (1973), an exciting film with Robert Ryan and Will Geer, which actually did go way beyond the evidence, and beyond plausibility, by trying to make an H.L. Hunt figure the main conspirator. The evidence is now overwhelming that the orthodox Warren legend, that Oswald did it and did it alone, is pure fabrication. It now seems clear that Kennedy died in a classic military triangulation hit, that, as Parkland Memorial autopsy pathologist Dr. Charles Crenshaw has very recently affirmed, the fatal shots were fired from in front, from the grassy knoll, and that the conspirators were, at the very least, the right-wing of the CIA, joined by its long-time associates and employees, the Mafia. It is less well established that President Johnson himself was in on the original hit, though he obviously conducted the coordinated cover-up, but certainly his involvement is highly plausible. The last-ditch defenders of the Warren view cannot refute the details, so they always fall back on generalized vaporings, such as: "How could all the government be in on it?" But since Watergate, we have all become familiar with the basic fact: only a few key people need be in on the original crime, while lots of high and low government officials can be in on the subsequent cover-up, which can always be justified as "patriotic," on "national security" grounds, or simply because the president ordered it. The fact that the highest levels of the U.S. government are all-too capable of lying to the public, should have been clear since Watergate and Iran-Contra. The final fallback argument, getting less plausible all the time is: if the Warren case isn't true, why hasn't the truth come out by this time? The fact is, however, that the truth has largely come out, in the assassination industry, from books – some of them best-sellers – by Mark Lane, David Lifton, Peter Dale Scott, Jim Marrs, and many others, but the Respectable Media pay no attention. With that sort of mindset, that stubborn refusal to face reality, no truth can ever come out. And yet, despite this blackout, because books, local TV and radio, magazine articles, supermarket tabloids, etc. can't be suppressed – but only ignored – by the Respectable Media, we have the remarkable result that the great majority of the public, in all the polls, strongly disbelieve the Warren legend. Hence, the frantic attempts of the Establishment to suppress as gripping and convincing a film as Stone's JFK. Conservatives, as well as centrists, are smearing JFK because Stone is a notorious leftist. Well, so what? It is not simply that the ideology of the teller has no logical bearing on the truth of the tale. The case is stronger than that. For in a day when the Moderate Left to Moderate Right constitute an increasingly monolithic Establishment, with only nuanced variations among them, we can only get the truth from people outside the Establishment, either on the far right or far left, or even from the highly non-respectable supermarket tabloids. And it is no accident that it is an open secret that the heroic "Deep Throat" figure in JFK is Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who is certainly no leftist. And one of the outstanding Revisionist writers is the long-time libertarian Carl Oglesby. One particularly welcome aspect of JFK, by the way, is its making Jim Garrison the central heroic figure. Garrison, one of the most viciously smeared figures in modern political history, was simply a district attorney trying to do his job in the most important criminal case of our time. Kevin Costner's expressionless style fits in well with the Garrison role, and Tommy Lee Jones is outstanding as the evil CIA-businessman conspirator Clay Shaw. All in all, a fine movie, for the history as well as the cinematics. There are some minor problems. It is unfortunate that the founding Kennedy Revisionist, Mark Lane, felt that he had to leave the movie-making early, with the result that the film does not bring out the crucial testimony of Cuban ex-CIA agent Marita Lorenz, who has identified right-wing CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, Bill Buckley's pal and control in the CIA, as paymaster for the assassination. (See the brilliant new book by Lane, Plausible Denial.) According to Lane, heat from the CIA during the filming led Stone to underplay the CIA's role by spreading the blame a little too thickly to the rest of the Johnson administration. As the case for revisionism piles up, there is evidence that some of the more sophisticated members of the Establishment are preparing to jettison the Warren legend, and fall back on an explanation less threatening than blaming E. Howard Hunt or the CIA: that is to lay blame solely on the Mafia, specifically on Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Jimmy Hoffa, none of whom are around to debate the issue. A convincing attack on the Mafia-only thesis was leveled by Carl Oglesby in his Afterward to Jim Garrison's book of a few years back (which formed one of the bases for JFK) On the Trail of the Assassins. The Mafia simply did not have the resources, for example, to change the route or call off military or Secret Service protection. Many conservatives and libertarians will surely be irritated by one theme of the film: the old-fashioned view of Kennedy as the shining young prince of Camelot, the great hero about to redeem America who was chopped down in his prime by dark reactionary forces. That sort of attitude has long been discredited by a very different kind of Revisionism – as tales have come out about the sleazy Kennedy brothers, Judith Exner, Sam Giancana, Marilyn Monroe, et al. Well, OK, but look at it this way: a president was murdered, for heaven's sake, and good, bad, or indifferent, it is surely vital to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, and bring the villains to justice, if only at the bar of history. Let the chips fall where they may. One happy result of the film was the conclusive Stoneian argument: if everything is on the up and up, why not open up all the secret government files on the assassination? It looks as if the pressure for opening will win out, but once again, phony "national security" will prevail, so we won't get the really incriminating stuff. And some of the crucial material is long gone, e.g., the famed Kennedy brain, which mysteriously never made it into the National Archives. Reprinted from Mises.org. Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School, founder of modern libertarianism, and academic vice president of the Mises Institute. He was also editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and appointed Lew as his literary executor. See his books.

Edited December 18, 2010 by Bernice Moore

[Steve Duffy]

That's excellent, Bernice, and speaks volumes.

Imagine if every historically inaccurate movie had people in hysterics like JFK did.

"You mean Ben Kingsley's character in Schindler's list was an amalgam of 2 people" Is Spielberg an anti-Semite. He couldn't have 2 actors?

It was an amazing outpouring against one movie, something that spread even as far away as down here...

[Bernice Moore]

Title: The Garrison Probe (Part I)

The Garrison Probe (Part I)

The following magazine article is being reprinted by permission.

Subject: The Garrison Probe (Part I)

Keywords: William W. Turner article in January, 1968 Ramparts Magazine

Date: 4 Aug 92 23:08:19 GMT

This is part I of an article, written by William W. Turner that appeared

in Ramparts magazine. It is a rather lengthy article, so I don't know

how many parts it will eventually compromise. The first portion deals

with Garrison's bio and then dives into some of the meat of the

investigation.

Paul Collacchi

______

The Garrison Commission On the Assassination of President Kennedy

by William W. Turner

JIM GARRISON IS AN ANGRY MAN. For six years now he has been the tough,

uncompromising district attorney of New Orleans, a rackets-buster

without parallel in a political freebooting state. He was elected on a

reform platform and meant it. Turning down a Mob proposition that would

have netted him $3000 a week as his share of slot machine proceeds, he

proceeded to raid Bourbon Street clip joints, crack down on

prostitution, and eliminate bail bond rackets. His track record as the

proverbial fighting DA is impressive: his office has never lost a major

case, and no convictions have been toppled on appeal because of improper

methods.

Garrison is angry right now -- as angry as if some bribed cops had tried

to steer him away from a vice ring or as if the Mob had attempted to use

political clout to get him off their backs. Only this time, the file

reads, "Conspiracy to Assassinate President Kennedy," and it isnt' COSA

NOSTRA, but the majestic might of the United States government which is

trying to keep him from his duty.

"Who appointed Ramsey Clark, who has done his best to torpedo the

investigation of the case?" He fumed in a recent speech before a

gathering of southern California newscasters. "Who controls the CIA?

Who controls the FBI? Who controls the Archives where this evidence is

locked up for so long that it unlikely that there is anybody in this

room who will be alive when it is released? This is really your

property and the property of the people of this country. Who has the

arrogance and the brass to prevent the people from seeing that evidence?

Who indeed?

"The one man who has profited most from the assassination -- your

friendly President, Lyndon Johnson!"

Garrison made it clear that he was not accusing Johnson of complicity in

the crime, but left no doubt that as far as he was concerned, the burden

had shifted to the government to prove that it was not an accessory

before or after the fact.

"I assume that the President of the United States is not involved," he

said. "But wouldn't it be nice to know it?"

The simple probity of Garrison's challenge is underscored by the fact

that the government and government-oriented forces have concealed and

destroyed evidence, intimidated witnesses and maligned, ridiculed and

impeded Garrison and his investigation. In short, the conduct of the

government has not been that of an innocent party, but of one determined

to cover its tracks. For the past nine months, I have worked closely

with the DA and his staff, hoping to contribute to their investigation.

In my opinion there is no question that they have uncovered a

conspiracy. Nor is there any doubt that Jim Garrison is one of a

vanishing breed: a Southern populist anchored in very traditional

American ideals about justice and truth, who can neither rationalize nor

temporize in pursuit of them.

By design or ignorance, the mass media -- from NBC to Life -- have

created an image of Garrison as a ruthless opportunist with vaulting

political ambition, which naturally leads to the conclusion that he is

trying to parlay the death of a President into a political tour de

force. He is, in fact, neither knave nor fool. No politician on the

make would be reckless enough to attempt to usurp the findings of the

seven distinguished men of the Warren Commission. "It's not a matter or

wanting to gain headlines," says Garrison indignantly. "It's a matter

of not being able to sleep at night. I am in an official position in a

city where the greater part of the planning of the assassination of

President Kennedy took place, and this was missed by the Warren

Commission. What would these people who have attacked me do if they

were here and had official responsibility? Would they be able to say,

'Jack Kennedy is dead and there is nothing I can do about it?"

[THE MAKING OF A DA]

GARRISON'S ATTITUDES were undoubtedly set by his experiences during

World War II in Europe where, while flying a Piper Cub as an artillery

spotter during the Allied sweep, he came upon Dachau. The residue of

horror he witnessed there etched itself so deeply on his conscience that

in the foreword to a collection of criminology essays published in 1966,

he deplored the apathy that permitted Dachau. Since man emerged from

the mists of time, he wrote, "such reason as he possesses has produced

the cross, the bowl of hemlock, the gallows, the rack, the gibbet, the

guillotine, the sword, the machine gun, the electric chair, the hand

grenade, the personnel mine, the flame thrower, poison gas, the nearly

obsolete TNT bomb, the obsolescent atom bomb, and the currently popular

hydrogen bomb -- all made to maim or destroy his fellow man." Garrison,

who is fond of allegorical example, pictured an extra-terrestrial being

happening upon a self-desolated world and asking, "What happened to your

disinterested millions? Your uncommitted and uninvolved, your

preoccupied and bored? Where today are their private horizons and their

mirrored worlds of self? Where is their splendid indifference now?"

With a diploma from Tulane University law school, Garrison tried the

life of an FBI agent but found the role too circumscribed to be

stimulating. A stint with a firm specializing in corporation law was

likewise unrewarding. After another tour of duty in the Korean War --

he is presently a Lt. Colonel in the Louisiana National Guard -- he

latched on as an assistant DA in New Orleans and began his public

career. After two unsuccessful tries at elective office, he pulled an

upset in the 1961 district attorney race. Bucking the Democratic

machine and backed only by five young lawyers known as the "Nothing

Group" because of their lack of money and prestige, he took to

television and came on strong. Like Jack Kennedy, he projected a

youthful vigor and enthusiasm that was missing in the stereotyped

politicians he was opposing.

Garrison's current battle to get the Justice Department, the FBI, and

the CIA to release evidence about the assassination is not the first

time he has tangle with anal retentive government authorities. After

the DA's Bourbon Street raids, the city's eight criminal judges began

blocking his souce of funds for the raids, a fines forfeitures pool.

Garrison took on the judges in a running dispute that was the talk of

New Orleans. On one occasion, a luncheon of the Temple Sinai

Brotherhood, he likened the judges to "the sacred cows of India." On

another, he accused them of goldbricking by taking 206 holidays, "not

counting legal holidays like All Saints' Day, Long's Birthday and St.

Winterbottom's Day." Outraged, the judges collectively filed criminal

defamation charges. (Complained one, "People holler 'Moo' at me.") The

case escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a landmark decision

upheld Garrison's right to criticize public officials.

He exercised that right. When Mayor Victor H. Schiro vacillated on an

he quipped, "Not since Hamlet tried to decide whether or not to stab the

king of Denmark has there been so agonizing a decision." But if he was

an embarrassment to officials, he was a delight to the voters. In 1965,

he was returned to office by a two to one margin -- the first New

Orleans DA to be reelected in 30 years.

GARRISON's POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY defies definition. He subscribes in part

to Ayn Rand's individualist dogma, but is too much of a traditional

democrat to accept its inevitable elitism. He is friendly with

segregationists and archconservatives, but bristles at the mention of

the Ku Klux Klan. Negro leaders have no quarrel with his conduct of

office, and he has appointed Negroes as asistant DAs. Several years ago

when the police vice squad tried to sweep James Baldwin's "Another

Country" from bookstore shelves, he refused to prosecute ("How can you

define obscenity?") and denounced the censorship in stinging terms, thus

incurring the wrath of the White Citizens Council. He sees no virtue in

capital punishment, but is somewhat ambivalent on the libertarian

trend in court decisions. In a law quarterly he predicted that

increasing emphasis on "the rights of the defendant against the state

may come to be seen as the greatest contribution our country has made to

this world we live in"; yet on occasion he has implied that Supreme

Court decisions are a factor in the rising rate of violent crime.

But since the start of his assassination probe, his views on many issues

have changed appreciably. "A year ago I was a mild hawk on Vietnam," he

relates. "But no more. I've discovered the government has told so many

lies in this [th assassination] case it can't be believed on anything."

He fears that the U.S. is evolving into a "proto-fascist state," and

cites as one indication the subtle quashing of dissent by an

increasingly autocratic central government. The massive and still

growing power of the CIA and the defense establishment, he contends, is

transforming the old America into a Kafkaesque society in which power is

equated with morality.

Garrison detests being called flamboyant, which is the most common

adjective applied to him, and in truth he makes no conscious effort at

ostentation. But he is one of those arresting figures who automatically

dominates any gathering, and his bold strokes in battle, as deliberate

as his moves in chess, seem to dramatize his formidable personality. He

also must rank as one of the more intellectual big city DAs. He avidly

devours history -- it reflects in his metaphor -- and quotes everything

from Graham Greene and Lewis Carroll to Polonius' advice to Laertes.

But he is not exactly a square. Once known as a Bourbon Street swinger,

he is still familiar in a few of the livelier French Quarter spots,

where he can sometimes be found holding forth on the piano and crooning

a basso profundo rendition of a tune popular half a generation ago. But

mostly he sticks to his study at home, and his striking blonde wife and

five kids.

It may be that in the end, the rank unfairness of the current siege on

Garrison will be its undoing, for the American sense of fair play is not

easily trifled with. But do the people really want the truth about the

assassination, or is it more comfortable to let sleeping dogs lie?

Garrison sees this as the pivotal question in the history of the

American democratic experiment: "In our incipient superstate it really

doesn't matter what happened. Truth is what the government chooses to

tell you. Justice is what it wants to happen. It is better for you not

to know that at midday on November 22, 1963, there were many men in many

places glancing at their watches. But if we do not fight for the truth

now, we may never have another chance."

[The FBI Clears a Suspect]

ON THE MORNING AFTER the assassination, as the nation lay stunned by

grief, [Jim] Garrison summoned his staff to the office for a "brain-

storming session" to explore the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald had

accomplices in New Orleans, where the previous summer he had stumped the

streets advocating Fair Play for Cuba.

The DA's men put out feelers into the city's netherworld, and it was

First Assistant DA Frank Klein who registered the first feedback. A

slight, furtive sometime private eye named Jack S. Martin confided that

a David William Ferrie had taken off on a sudden trip to Texas the

afternoon of the assassination. The tipster knew Ferrie well, although

there was bad blood between them. Both had worked intermittently for

the same detective firm, W. Guy Banister & Associates, and were

affiliated with the Apostolic Orthodox Old Catholic Church, a sect

steeped in theological anti-communism. An exceptionally skilled pilot,

Ferrie had been dismissed from Eastern Air Lines in 1962 due to

publicity over alleged homosexual activities.

According to Martin, Ferrie had commanded a Civil Air Patrol in which

Oswald had once been a member. He had taught Oswald to shoot with a

telescopic sight, and had become involved with his protege in an

assassination plot. Less than two weeks before the target date, Ferrie

had made a trip to Dallas. His assigned role in the assassination,

Martin said, was to fly the escaping conspirators to Matamoros, Mexico,

near Brownsville, Texas.

When Ferrie returned to New Orleans on the Monday following President

Kennedy's death, he was interrogated by the DA's office. He said his

trip had been arranged "on the spur of the moment." With two

companions, Alvin Beauboeuf and Melvin Coffey, he had driven straight

through to Houston Friday night. On Saturday afternoon, the three

skated at an ice rink; that evening they made the short jog to Galveston

and hunted geese Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon they headed back to

New Orleans, but detoured to Alexandria, Louisiana, to visit relatives

of Beaubeouf.

Garrison was unconvinced by Ferrie's account. An all-night dash through

the worst rainstorm in years to start a mercurial junket of over 1000

miles in three days for recreational purposes was too much to swallow.

"It was a curious trip to a curious place at a curious time," the DA

recalls. He booked Ferrie as a "fugitive from Texas" and handed him

over to the FBI. The G-men questioned him intensively, then released

him.

Since the 40-odd pages recording the FBI interrogation of Ferrie are

still classified in the National Archives, one can only surmise the

reasons the Bureau stamped its file on him "closed." [1]

Apparently the FBI did not take the pilot too seriously. A short Bureau

document in the National Archives reveals Ferrie had admitted being

"publicly and privately" critical of Kennedy for withholding air cover

at the Bay of Pigs, and had used expressions like "he ought to be shot,"

but agents agreed he did not mean the threat literally.

Most convincing at the time, the fact that Ferrie did not leave New

Orleans until hours after the assassination seemed to rule out his role

as a getaway pilot. Moreover, the Stinson monoplane he then owned was

sitting at Lakefront Airport in unflyable condition.

Accepting the FBI's judgment, Garrison dropped his investigation. "I had

full confidence in the FBI then," he explains. "There was no reason to

try and second guess them."

For three years the DA's faith in the Bureau's prowess remained

unshaken. Then in November 1966, squeezed into a tourist-class seat on

an Eastern jet headed for New York, his interest in the possiblity of a

conspiracy was rekindled. Flanking him were Senator Russell B. Long of

Louisiana and Joseph Rault Jr, a New Orleans oilman. The previous week,

Long had remarked in the course of a press conference that he doubted

the findings of the Warren Commission. It was at the height of the

controversy stirred by publications ripping at the Commission's methods

and conclusions.

Garrison bombarded the senator with questions in the manner, he

reminisces, "of a prosecutor cross-examining a witness." Long

maintained that there were grievous flaws and unexplored territory in

the Warren Report. He considered it highly implausible that a gunman of

Oswald's "mediocre skill" could have fired with pinpoint accuracy within

a time constraint barely sufficient "for a man to get off two shots from

a bolt-action rifle, much less three."

The DA's mind reverted to the strange trip of pilot David Ferrie, and he

began to wonder how perceptive the FBI had really been in dismissing the

whole thing. When he retruned to New Orleans, he went into virtual

seclusion in his study at home, lucubrating over the columns of the

Warren Report. When he became convinced that Oswald could not have

acted alone, and that at least a phase of the conspiracy had been

centered in New Orleans, he committed his office to full-scale probe.

He launched it quietly, preferring to work more efficiently in the dark.

THE PROBE REFOCUSED ON on Ferrie, and on December 15 he was brought in

for further questioning. Asked pertinent details of the whirlwind Texas

trip in 1963, he begged lack of memory and referred his questioners to

the FBI. What about the goose hunting? "We did in fact get to where

the geese were and there were thousands," he recounted. "But you

couldn't approach them. They were a wise bunch of birds." Pressed for

details of what took place at the ice rink, Ferrie became irritated.

"Ice skate -- what do you think?" he snapped.

It didn't take the DA's men long to poke holes in Ferrie's story.

Melvin Coffey, one of his companions on the 1963 Texas trip, deposed

that it was not a sudden inspiration:

Q: The trip was arranged before?

A: Yes.

Q: How long before?

A: A couple of days.

The probers also determined that no one had taken along any shotguns on

the "goose-hunting" trip.

In Houston, the ice skating alibi was similarly discredited. In 1963,

the FBI had interviewed Chuck Rolland, proprietor of the Winterland

Skating Rink. "FERRIE contacted him by telephone November 22, 1963, and

asked for the skating schedule," a Bureau report, one of the few

unclassified documents on Ferrie, reveals. "Mr. FERRIE stated that he

was coming in from out of town and desired to do some skating while in

Houston. On November 23, 1963, between 3:30 and 5:30 PM, Mr. FERRIE and

two companions came to the rink and talked to Mr. ROLLAND." The report

continues that Ferrie and Rolland had a short general conversation, and

that Ferrie remarked that "he and his companions would be in and out of

the skating rink during the weekend" (Commission Document 301). When

Garrison's men recently talked to Rolland, they obtained pertinent facts

that the FBI had either missed or failed to report in 1963. Rolland was

certain that none of the three men in Ferrie's party had ice skated;

Ferrie had spent the entire two hours he was at the rink standing by a

pay telephone -- and finally received a call.

At Houston International Airport, more information was gleaned. Air

service personnel seemed to recall that in 1963 Ferrie had access to an

airplane based in Houston. In this craft, the flight to Matamoros would

take little more than an hour.

Ferrie had patently lied about the purpose of the trip. One of the

standard tactics of bank robbers is to escape from the scene of the

crime in a "hot car" that cannot be traced to them, then switch to a

"cold car" of their own to complete the getaway. Garrison considers it

possible that Ferrie may have been the pilot of a second craft in a two-

stage escape of the Dallas assassins to south of the border, or may have

been slated to be a backup pilot in the evnet contingency plans were

activated.

Did Ferrie know Oswald? The pilot denied it, but the evidence mounts

that he did. For example, there is now in Garrison's hand information

that when Oswald was arrested in Dallas police, he had in his possession

a CURRENT New Orleans library card issued to David Ferrie. Reinforcing

the validity of this information is a Secret Service report on the

questioning of Ferrie by that agency when he was in federal custody in

1963. During an otherwise mild interrogation, Ferrie was asked,

strangely enough, in he lent his library card to Oswald. No, he

replied, producing a card from the New Orleans public library in the

name of Dr. David Ferrie. That card had expired.

When he realized he was a suspect in Garrison's current investigation,

Ferrie seemed to deteriorate. By the time he died on February 22, 1967,

he was a nervous wreck, subsisting on endless cigarettes and cups of

coffee and enough tranquilizers to pacify an army. He had sought out

the press only days before his death, labeling the probe a "fraud" and

complaining that he was the victim of a "witch hunt." "I suppose he has

me pegged as a getaway pilot," he remarked bitterly.

When Garrison delivered his epitaph of Ferrie as "one of history's most

important individuals," most of the press winked knowingly. The probe

was, after all, a publicity stunt, and the DA had had his headlines.

Now that his prime suspect had conveniently passed away, he had the

perfect excuse to inter his probe alongside the deceased pilot.

But for DA Jim Garrison, it was not the end but the beginning.

[544 CAMP STREET, NEW ORLEANS]

"WHILE THE LEGEND '544 Camp St., NEW ORLEANS, LA.' was stamped on some

of the literature that Oswald had in his possession at the time of his

arrest [for "disturbing the peace"] in New Orleans, extensive

investigation was not able to connect Oswald with that address" (Warren

Report, p.408). So said the Commission. But Garrison *has* connected

Oswald with that address. His investigation shows that Oswald functioned

in a paramilitary right-wing milieu of which 544 Camp Street was a nerve

center, and that Oswald's ostentatious "Fair Play for Cuba" advocacy was

nothing more than a facade.

The dilapidated building at 544 Camp Street is on the corner of

Lafayette Place. Shortly after news of Garrison's investigation broke,

I went to 531 Lafayette Place, an address given me by Minuteman defector

Jerry Milton Brooks as the office of W. Guy Banister, a former FBI

official who ran a private detective agency. According to Brooks, who

had been a trusted Minutemen aide, Banister was a member of the

Minutemen and head of the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean,

assertedly an intermediary between the CIA and Caribbean insurgency

movements. Brooks said he had worked for Banister on "anti-Communist"

research in 1961-1962, and had known David Ferrie as a frequent visitor

to Banister's office.

Banister had died of an apparent heart attack in the summer of 1964.

Brooks had told me of two associates whom I hoped to find. One was Hugh

F. Ward, a young investigator for Banister who also belonged to the

Minutemen and the Anti-Communism League. Then I learned that Ward, too,

was dead. Reportedly taught to fly by David Ferrie, he was at the

controls of a Piper Aztec when it plunged to earth near Ciudad Victoria,

Mexico, May 23, 1965.

The other associate was Maurice Brooks Gatlin Sr, legal counsel to the

Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. Jerry Brooks said he had once

been a sort of protege of Gatlin and was in his confidence. Brooks

believed Gatlin's frequent world travels were as a "transporter" for the

CIA. As an example, he said, Gatlin remarked about 1962, in a self-

important manner, that he had $100,000 of CIA money earmarked for a

French right-wing clique that was going to attempt to assassinate

General de Gaulle; shortly afterward Gatlin flew to Paris. The search

for Gatlin, however, was likewise futile: in 1964 he fell or was pushed

from the sixth floor of the El Panama Hotel in Panama during the early

morning, and was killed instantly.

But the trip to 531 Lafayette Place was not entirely fruitless. The

address, I discovered, was a side entrance to 544 Camp Street. Entering

either at the front or the side, one arrives via a walkup staircase at

the same second floor space. That second floor once housed the Cuban

Democratic Revolutionary Front and W. Guy Banister & Associates.

Guy Banister had been in charge of the Chicago FBI office before

retiring in 1955 and becoming New Orleans deputy superintendent of

police for several years. He was regarded as one of the city's most

vocal anti-Castroites, and published the racist Louisiana Intelligence

Digest, which depicted integration as a communist conspiracy. Evidence

of his relationship with the federal intelligence apparatus has recently

surface. A man who knew Banister well has told Garrison that Banister

became associated with the Office of Naval Intelligence through the

recommendation of Guy Johnson, an ONI reserve officer and the first

attorney for Clay Shaw when he was arrested by Garrison.

A copyrighted story in the New Orleans States-Item, April 25, 1967,

further illuminates the Camp Street scene. The newspaper, which at the

time had an investigative team working parallel to the Garrison probe,

reported that a reliable source close to Banister said he had seen 50 to

100 boxes marked "Schlumberger" in Banister's office-storeroom early in

1961 before the Bay of Pigs. The boxes contained rifle grenades, land

mines and unique "little missiles." Banister explained that "the stuff

would just be there overnight ... a bunch of fellows connected with the

Cuban deal asked to leave it there overnight." It was all right,

assured Banister, "I have approval from somebody."

The "somebody," one can surmise from the Gordon Novel episode which

follows, was the CIA. Novel is wanted by the DA as a material witness

in the 1961 burglary of the Schlumberger Well Co. munitions dump near

New Orleans. Subpoenaed by the grand jury last March, Novel fled to

McLean, Virginia, next door to the CIA complex at Langley, and took a

lie detector test administered by a former Army intelligence officer

which, he boasted to the press, proved Garrison's probe was a fraud. He

then skipped first to Montreal and then to Columbus, Ohio, from where

Governor James Rhodes, in one of the most absurd stipulations ever

atached to a normally routine procedure, refuses to extradite him unless

Garrison agrees not to question him on the assassination.

From his Ohio sanctuary the fugitive cryptically asserted that the

munitions caper was one of "the most patriotic burglaries in history."

When an enterprising reporter took him to a marathon party, Novel's

indiscreet tongue loosened further. According to the States-Item

article, Novel's oft-repeated account was that the munitions bunker was

a CIA staging point for war materiel destined for use in the impending

Bay of Pigs invasion. He is quoted as saying that on the day the

munitions were picked up, he "was called by his CIA contact and told to

join a group which was ordered to transport munitions from the bunker to

New Orleans." The key to the bunker was provided by his CIA contact.

Novel reportedly said the others in the CIA group at the bunker were

David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith -- New Orleans delegate to the Cuban

Democratic Revolutionary Front -- and several Cubans. The munitions,

according to his account, were dropped in Novel's office, Ferrie's home

and Banister's office-storeroom.

Ferrie worked on and off for Banister as an investigator, and the mutual

affinity was such that in 1962, when Eastern Air Lines was in the

process of dismissing Ferrie for publicity over alleged homosexual acts,

Banister appeared at a Miami hearing and delivered an impassioned plea

on his behalf. When Banister suddenly died, the ex-pilot evidently

acquired part of his files. When he realized he was a prime suspect in

Garrison's probe, Ferrie systematically disposed of his papers and

documents for the years 1962 and 1963. But in photocopying the

bibliography of a cancer paper he had written (at one time he had caged

mice in his home on which he experimented with cancer implants), he

inadvertently overlapped the bottom portion of notes recording the

dispositions. Included is the notation: "Copies of B's [presumably

Banister's] microfilm files to Atlanta rite-wingers [sic]."

The Banister files were reputed to be the largest collection of "anti-

communist intelligence" in Louisiana, and part were sold by his widow to

the Sovereignty Commission, a sort of state HUAC, where a Garrison

investigator was able to examine them. Banister's filing system was

modeled after the FBI's, and contained files on both friends and foes.

The "10" and "23" classification dealt with Cuban matters; 23-5, for

example, was labeled Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front and 10-209

simply Cuban File. There was a main file, 23-14, labeled Shaw File, but

someone had completely stripped it before Garrison's man go there.

The Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, which occupied what was

grandiosely called Suite 6 at 544 Camp Street, was the coalition of

Cuban exile "liberation" groups operating under CIA aegis that mounted

the Bay of Pigs invasion. Arcacha, the New Orleans delegate of the

Miami-based organization, is a dapper, moustachioed man who had served

in Batista's diplomatic corps. There are numerous witnesses who attest

that he was a confidant of Banister and Ferrie, and that his office was

a way station for the mixed bag of Cuban exiles and American adventurers

involved in the "liberation" movement. Late in 1962, the Front closed

up shop, at which time Arcacha became a founder of the Crusade to Free

Cuba, a paramilitary group of militant right wingers. In March 1963, he

moved to Houston, Texas. Early in his investigation, Garrison charged

Arcacha with being a party to the munitions burglary with Novel and

Ferrie, but by this time he was living in Dallas, where he refused to

talk to the DA's men without Dallas police and assistant DA Bill

Alexander present. When Garrison obtained an arrest warrant and sought

to extradite him, Texas Governor John Connally would not sign the

papers.

As for Oswald and 544 Camp Street, Garrison declares that "we have

several witnesses who can testify they observed Oswald there on a number

of occasions." One witness is David L. Lewis, another in Banister's

stable of investigators. In late 1962, Lewis says, he was drinking

coffee in the restaurant next to 544 Camp street when Cuban exile Carlos

Quiroga, who was close to Arcacha, came in with a young man he

introduced as Leon Oswald. A few days later, Lewis saw Quiroga, Oswald

and Ferrie together at 544 Camp Street. A few days after that, he

barged into Banister's office and interrupted a meeting between

Banister, Quiroga, Ferrie and Leon Oswald. It was not until he was

interviewed by Garrison that Lewis concluded that Leon Oswald was

probably Lee Harvey Oswald. Noting that the "natural deaths of Banister

and Ferrie were strikingly similar," Lewis has slipped into seclusion.

[End of Part I]

___________

"The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" by

William Turner is reprinted from Ramparts, January 1968. Copyright ©

1968 by Noah's Ark, Inc. All rights reserved.

Title: Re: The Garrison Probe (Part I)

Post by: admin on January 10, 2008, 08:24 AM The Garrison Probe (Part II)

The following magazine article is being reprinted by permission.

Subject: The Garrison Probe (Part II)

Keywords: William W. Turner article from January, 1968 Ramparts magazine

Date: 5 Aug 92 23:50:31 GMT

This is part II of "The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of

President Kennedy" by William W. Turner. It appeared in the January 1968

edition of Ramparts magazine.

Paul Collacchi

________

[ CIA: THE COMMON DENOMINATOR]

ON OR ABOUT THE NIGHT of September 16, 1963, a nondescript Leon Oswald,

the brilliant, erratic David Ferrie, and a courtly executive-type man

name Clem Bertrand discussed a guerilla ambush of President Kennedy in

Ferrie's apartment. There was talk of "triangulation of fire ... the

availability of exit ... one man had to be sacrificed to give the other

one or two gunmen time to escape." Escape out of the country would be

by a plane flown by Ferrie. This was the hub of the testimony of Perry

Raymond Russo at a preliminary hearing for Clay Shaw, accused by

Garrison of conspiracy in the assassination. Russo identified Leon

Oswald as Lee Harvey Oswald, and Clem Bertrand as Clay Shaw.

What would bring three such widely disparate men together in the first

place? One possible answer: the CIA.

On the fringe of downtown New Orleans, the building at 544 Camp Street

is across the street from the government building which in 1963 housed

the local CIA headquarters. One block away, at 640 Magazine Street, is

the William B. Reily Co. a coffee firm where Oswald was employed that

pivotal summer. He worked from May 10 to July 19, earning a total of

$548.41 (Commission Exhibits 1154). Despite this, he did not seem hard

put to support Marina and their child. Nor did he seem particularly

concerned about being fired. The personnel manager of the Reily Co.

told the Secret Service that "there would be times when Oswald would be

gone for periods of an hour or longer and when questioned he could not

furnish a plausible explanation as to where he had been ..." (CE 1154).

Next door is the Crescent City Garage, whose owner, Adrian T. Alba,

testified that Oswald spent hours on end in his waiting room buried in

gun magazines (Warren Report, Vol. 10, p.226). Shortly before leaving

the coffee firm, Oswald mentioned to Alba that his employment

application was about to be accepted "out there where the gold is" --

the NASA Saturn missile plant at Gentilly, a suburb (Vol. 10, p. 226).

On the face of it, the idea that Oswald could get a job at a space

agency installation requiring security clearance seems preposterous. He

was a self-avowed Marxist who had tried to renounce his American

citizenship in Moscow, married the niece of a Soviet KGB colonel, openly

engaged in "Fair Play For Cuba" activity, and attempted to join the

Communist Party, U.S.A. But Garrison points out that it is an open

secret that the CIA uses the NASA facility as a cover for clandestine

operations. And it is his contention that Oswald was a "witting" agent

of the CIA.

There is a surfeit of indications of Oswald's status. One is the story

of Donald P. Norton, who claims he was impressed into the Agency's

service in 1957 under threat of exposure as a homosexual. In September

1962, Norton related, he was dispatched from Atlanta to Mexico with

$50,000 for an anti-Castro group. He had no sooner registered in the

Yamajel Hotel in Monterrey, Mexico, per instructions, than he was

contacted by one Harvey Lee, a dead ringer for Oswald except that his

hair seemed slightly thicker. In exchange for the money, Lee gave him a

briefcase containing documents in manila envelopes. According to plan,

Norton delivered the briefcase to an employee of an American oil firm in

Calgary, Alberta, who repeated the pass phrase, "The weather is very

warm in Tulsa."

Norton also contends he met David Ferrie earlier in his CIA career. In

early 1958, he was tapped for a courier trip to Cuba and told to meet

his contact at the Eastern Air Lines counter at the Atlanta airport.

The contact was a singular appearing man who called himself Hugh Pharris

or Ferris; Norton now states it was Ferrie. "Here are your samples,"

Ferrie remarked, handing Norton a phonograph record. "It is in the

jacket." "It" was $150,000, which Norton duly delivered to a Cuban

television performer in Havana. Norton asserts he went to Freeport,

Grand Bahamas, on an Agency assignment late in 1966, and upon his return

to Miami his contact instructed that "something was happening in New

Orleans, and that I [Norton] should take a long, quiet vacation."

He did, and started to fret about the "people who have died in recent

months -- like Ferrie." Then he decide to contact Garrison. Norton was

given a lie detector test, and there were no indications of deception.

Garrison believes that Oswald was schooled in covert operations by the

CIA while in the Marine Corps at the Atsugi Naval Station in Japan, a U-

2 facility (interestingly, two possibly relevant documents, "Oswald's

access to information about the U-2" [CD 931] and "Reproduction of CIA

official dossier on Oswald" [CD 692] are still classified in the

National Archives). Curiously, the miscast Marine who was constantly in

hot water had a Crypto clearance on top of a Top Secret clearance, and

was given two electronics courses. "Isn't it odd," prods Garrison,

"that even though he supposedly defected to the Soviet Union with Top

Secret data on our radar nets, no action was taken against him when he

came back to the United States?"

Equally odd is Oswald's acquisition of Russian language ability.

Although the Warren Report spread the fiction tha he was self-taught,

and Oswald himself falsely told a New Orleans acquaintance that he had

studied Russian at Tulane University, the likelihood is that he was

tutored at the CIA's Atsugi station. Marine Corps records reflect that

on February 25, 1959, at the conclusion of his Atsugi tour of duty, he

was given a Russian language proficiency test (Folsom Exhibit No. 1, p.

7). A former Marine comrade, Kerry Thornley, deposed to Garrison that

Oswald conversed in Russian with John Rene Heindel every morning at

muster.

Oswald's "defection" to the Soviet Union also smacks of being CIA-

initiated. In retrospect, the clearance of U.S. departure and reentry

formalities seems unduly expeditious. When the Marine Corps post facto

downgraded his discharge to less than honorable, Oswald indignantly

wrote Secretary of the Navy John B. Connally, "I have and allways [sic]

had the full sanction of the U.S. Embassy, Moscow USSR and hence the

U.S. government" (Warren Report, p. 710). When an interviewer on a New

Orleans radio station asked him on August 21, 1963 if he had had a

government subsidy during his three years in Russia, the normally

articulate Oswald stammered badly: "Well, as I er, well, I will answer

that question directly then as you will not rest until you get your

answer, er, I worked in Russia, er, I was er under the protection er, of

the er, that is to say I was not under protection of the American

government but I was at all times er, considered an American citizen..."

(This is the original version as disseminated by the Associated Press.

The version released by the Warren commission has been edited to delete

the hemming and hawing and the apparent slip of the tongue, "I *was*

under the protection..." [Vol. 21, p 639].)

Possibly the most cogent suggestion of Oswald's mission in the Soviet

Union can be found in the testimony of Dennis H. Ofstein, a fellow-

employee at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall Co. in Dallas (this is the

photographic/graphic arts firm where Oswald worked upon his return from

Russia; it receives many classified government contracts). Ofstein's

smattering of Russian evidently set the usually phlegmatic Oswald to

talking. "All the time I was in Minsk I never saw a vapor trail,"

Ofstein quotes him. "He also mentioned about the disbursement

[disbursement?] of military units," Offstein continued, "saying they

didn't intermingle their armored divisions and infantry divisions and

various units the way we do in the United States, and they would have

all of their aircraft in one geographical location and their tanks in

another geographical location, and their infantry in another ..." On

one occasion, Oswald asked Ofstein to enlarge a photograph taken in

Russia which, he explained, represented "some military headquarters and

that the guards stationed there were armed with weapons and ammunition

and had orders to shoot any trespassers..." (Vol. 10, p. 202). Oswald's

inordinate interest in the contrails of high flying aircraft, Soviet

military deployment and a military facility involving an element of risk

to photograph hardly seems the natural curiosity of a hapless ex-Marine

private.

An intriguing entry in Oswald's address book is the word "microdots"

appearing on the page on which he has notated the address and phone

number of Jaggers-Chiles_Stovall (CE 18, p. 45). Microdots are a

clandestine means of communication developed by German intelligence

during World War II and still in general use among espionage agencies.

The technique is to photograph the document to be transmitted and vastly

reduce the negative to a size that will fit inside a period. The

microdot can be inserted in an innocuous letter or magazine and mailed,

or left in a "dead drop" -- a prearranged location for the deposit and

pickup of messages.

Thus it may be significant that Oswald obtained library cards in Dallas

and New Orleans, and usually visited the libraries on Thursday. The

possible implication of his visits was not overlooked by the FBI, which

confiscated every book he ever charged out, and never returned them. A

piece that may fit into the puzzle is the discovery by Garrison of an

adult borrower's card issued by the New Orleans public library in the

name Clem Bertrand. The business address shown is the International

Trade Mart [shaw's former place of employment], and the home address

3100 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, a wrong number, but conspicuously close

to that of David Ferrie at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway. There may be

a pattern here, since Oswald supposedly carried a card issued to Ferrie

when arrested in Dallas.

Still another hint of Oswald's intelligence status is the inventory of

his property seized by Dallas police after the assassination. Included

is such sophisticated optical equipment as a Sterio Realist camera, a

Hanza camera timer, filters, a small German camera, a Wollensak 15 power

telescope, Micron 6X binoculars and a variety of film -- hardly the

usual accouterments of a lowly warehouseman (Stovall Exhibits).

Upon his return from Russia, the man who subscribed to Pravda in the

Marine Corps and lecutred his fellow Marines on Marxist dialectics set

about institutionalizing his leftist facade. He wrote ingratiating

letters to the national headquarters of the Communist Party, Fair Play

for Cuba Committee and Socialist Workers Party (a copy of the famous

snapshot of Oswald with a revolver on his hip, a rifle in one hand and

the Party organ, the Militant, in the other was mailed to the SWP office

in New York in April 1963.) Garrison believes the facade was intended

to facilitate his entry into communist countries for special missions.

Ferrie's involvement with the CIA seems to stem mainly from his anti-

Castro paramilitary activity, although there is a suggestion that he was

at one time a pilot for the Agency. In the late 1940s and early 1950s

he flew light planes commercially in the Cleveland, Ohio area, and was

rated by his colleagues as an outstanding pilot. In the middle 1950s

there is an untraceable gap in his career. Then he turns up as an

Eastern Air Lines pilot. Although he supposedly obtained an instrument

rating at the Sunnyside Flying School in Tampa, Florida, there is no

record that any such school ever existed.

A clue to Ferrie's activities may lie in the loss of hair he suffered.

A fellow employee at Eastern recalls that when Ferrie first joined the

line he was "handsome and friendly," but in the end became "moody and

paranoiac -- afraid the communists were out to get him." The

personality change coincided with a gradual loss of hair. First a bald

spot appeared, which Ferrie explained was caused by acid dripping from a

plane battery. Then the hair began falling out in clumps -- Ferrie

desperately studied medicine to try to halt the process -- until his

body was entirely devoid of hair. One speculation is that he was

moonlighting and suffered a physiological reaction to exposure to the

extreme altitudes required for clandestine flights. Chinese Nationalist

U-2 pilots reportedly have suffered the same hair-loss phenomenon.

One of Ferrie's covert tasks in the New Orleans area was to drill small

teams in guerrilla warfare. One of his young proteges has revealed that

he trained some of his Civil Air Patrol cadets and Cubans and formed

them into five-man small weapons units, this under the auspices of the

Marine Corps and State Department. Coupled with this is the information

from another former protege that Ferrie confided "he was working for the

CIA rescuing Cubans out of Castro prisons," and on one occasion was

called to Miami so that the CIA could "test him to see if he was the

type of person who told his business to anybody." In a speecdh before

the Military Order of World Wars in New Orleans in late 1961, Ferrie

related that he had trained pilots in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs, and

professed bitter disappointment that they were not used.

Clay Shaw, an international trade official with top-level contacts in

Latin America and Europe, would have been a natural target for CIA

recruitment. Gordon Novel, who was acquainted with Shaw, was quoted by

the States-Item as venturing that Shaw may have been asked by the CIA to

observe the traffic of foreign commerce through New Orleans. More

persuasive is Shaw's membership on the board of directors of a firm

called Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome. According to the newspaper

Paese Sera of Rome and Le Devoir of Montreal, among others of the

foreign press, CMC was an obscure but well-financed firm that was ousted

from Italy by the police because it was suspected of being a CIA front.

It transplanted its operation to the more friendly climate of

Johannesburg, South Africa, where it still functions.

The same group that incorporated CMC also set up a firm called Permindex

Corporation in Switzerland, but that company was dissolved by the Swiss

government when it was proved to be a conduit for funds destined for the

Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group of right-wing French officers

dedicated to "keeping Algeria French" by force of arms. The composition

of the CMC group with which Shaw was associated is of more than cursory

interest, since it includes a former U.S. intelligence officer, now an

executive of the Bank of Montreal; the publisher of the neo-Nazi

National-Zeitung of Germany; Prince Guitere de Spadaforo, an Italian

industrialist related by marriage to Hitler finance minister Hjalmar

Schacht; and the lawyer to the Italian neo-Fascist Party. Through his

attorney, Shaw has stated he joined the CMC board of directors in 1958

at the insistence of his own board of directors of the International

Trade Mart of New Orleans.

ON AUGUST 1, 1963 the front page of the States-Item carried two news

stories which, Garrison asserts, symbolize the bitter end of the

paramilitary right's tolerance of John F. Kennedy. "A-Treaty Signing

Set On Monday" was the lead to one story, disclosing that the test ban

treaty was about to become reality and that a NATO-Warsaw bloc

nonaggression pact was in the wind. "Explosives Cache Home Lent to

Cuban, Says Owner's Wife," announced the lead to another story, telling

of an FBI raid on a military training site and arms cache on the north

side of Lake Pontchartrain. Agents had seized more than a ton of

dynamite, 20 100-pound bomb casings, fuses, napalm ingredients and other

war materiel.

The whipsaw developments -- Kennedy's patent determination to effect a

rapprochement with the communist nations on the one hand, his crackdown

under the Neutrality Act on anti-Castro paramilitary groups on the other

-- triggered a rage against the President that would find vent in his

assassination.

The true nature of the group raided at Lake Pontchartrain was not

evident from the story. The FBI announced no arrests, and the wife of

the property owner, Mrs. William J. McLaney, gave out the cover story

that the premises had been loaned to a newly-arrive Cuban named Jose

Juarez as a favor to friends in Cuba. (McLaney had been well-known as a

gambler associated with the Tropicana Hotel in Havana before being

ousted by Castro in 1960.)

According to information leaked to Garrison by another government

agency, the FBI had in fact arrested 11 men, then quietly released them.

Among those in the net was Acelo Pedro Amores, believed to be a former

Batista official who slipped out of Cuba in 1960. Also caught was

Richard Lauchli Jr, one of the founders of the Minutemen. Lauchli who

possessed a federal license to manufacture weapons in his Collinsville,

Illinois machine shop, was arrested again in 1964 when Treasury

investigators, posing as agents of a South American country, trapped him

in a deal to sell a huge quantity of illicit automatic arms. The other

arrested were American adventurers and Cuban exiles.

Garrison believes that the assassination team at Dealey Plaza included

renegade Minutemen operating without the knowledge of the group's

central headquarters. Free-lance terrorism has plagued Minutemen

national coordinator Rober DePugh since the organization's inception,

and there have been several abortive assassination schemes hatched by

individual cliques.

For example, in 1962, a Dallas extremist using the pseudonym John Morris

was given money by a Minutemen clique at the Liberty Mall in Kansas City

to subsidize the sniper slaying of Senator J. William Fulbright of

Arkansas. The plan called for Morris to escape in a plane flown by a

Texas man, but DePugh got wind of it and aborted it. And a Cuban exile

close to Guy Banister has told Garrison that in 1962 Minuteman Banister

seriously discussed "putting poison in the air conditioning ducts in the

Havana Palace and killing all occupants."

The latest plot to surface was formulated in Dallas in September 1966;

its target was Stanley Marcus of the Neiman-Marcus department store, a

pro-United Nations liberal who somehow has managed to thrive in rigidly

conservative Dallas. According to an informant who was present, several

Minutemen decide to ambush Marcus outside of Dallas, because "another

assassination in Dallas would be too much." Again, there was a leak and

the plan fell through. However, as the Warren Report might phrase it,

such schemes "establish the propensity to kill" on the part of the

radical right.

"Minutmen" has become an almost generic term for the paramilitary right,

a far from homogenous movement. Some elements are driven primarily by

race hatred and anti-Semitism, others by perfervid anti-communism, still

others by a personal interest in overthrowing Castro and regaining

property or sinecures in the Cuban bureaucracy. There is considerable

cross-pollination, especially in the south. A graphic example can be

found in rurual St. Bernard Parish, near New Orleans. A state police

undercover investigator relates that inside a farmhouse which serves as

a Ku Klux Klan regional headquarters are Nazi emblems and a shrine to

Horst Wessel, and in back, behind a copse of trees, a rifle range and

large cache of guns belonging to Minutemen.

There is intense factionalism inside the paramilitary right, and in

recent years a power struggle for hegemony over the movement raged

between DePugh of the Minutemen and the late George Lincoln Rockwell of

the American Nazis. In a recent public statement DePugh commented that

"fascism is the number one danger in this country today," and that the

"fascists" are using anti-communism as a smokescreen to cover their own

rush for power. I had occasion to talk to DePugh, and suggested to him

that the guerrilla team that bushwhacked the President included

Minutemen who had drifted into the Nazi orbit. "I'm inclined to agree,"

he said.

One of the most inexplicable entries in Oswald's address book is "Nat.

Sec. Dan Burros, Lincoln Rockwell, Arlington, Virginia" (CE 18. p55).

Other right-wing figures in the address book are Carlos Bringuier of the

Cuban Student Directorate in New Orleans and retired General Edwin

Walker of Dallas. Bringuier told the Commission that Oswald had

approached him and offered to train Cuban exiles in Marine tactics, but

he suspected Oswald was a plant.

An anti-Castro adventurer who trained in the Florida Keys prior to the

assassination claims that by November 22, 1963 there was not one but

several paramilitary teams gunning for Kennedy. They had been in

contact, he said, with "wealthy backers who wanted to see Kennedy dead

and had been given money to do the job."

[end of part II]

Title: Re: The Garrison Probe (Part I)

Post by: admin on January 10, 2008, 08:26 AM The Garrison Probe (Part III)

The following magazine article is being reprinted by permission.

Subject: The Garrison Probe (part III)

Keywords: William W Turner article appeared in Jan '68 RAMPARTS

Date: 11 Aug 92 18:56:53 GMT

Sender: news@pyramid.pyramid.com

This is part III of "The Garrison Commission on the Assassination of

President Kennedy" by William W. Turner. It appeared in the January

1968 edition of Ramparts magazine.

Paul Collacchi

________

[THE MAKING OF A PATSY]

ON JANUARY 20, 1961 TWO MEN approached Oscar W. Deslatte, assistant

manager of the Bolton Ford Truck Center in New Orleans, and identified

themselves as members of the Friends of Democratic Cuba. To help their

cause, they wanted to purchase ten trucks at cost. Deslatte filled out a

bid form, recording their names as Joseph Moore and Oswald. The young

man calling himself Oswald said that if the trucks were purchased he

would be the one to pay for them. This is the gist of an incident

recorded by the FBI immediately after the assassination and dug out of

the obscurity of the Archives by Garrison researcher Tom Bethell (CD

1542).

Garrison has located the former Bolton Ford manager who was present at

the time, Fred A. Sewell. He recalled that the younger "skinny" man

gave the full name *Lee* Oswald, and that "Joseph Moore" actually was a

Cuban who gave a Cuban name on the bid form. What is puzzling about the

incident is that Lee Harvey Oswald was in Minsk, Russia in 1961, thus

raising the question of who was impersonating him and why.

Any answer must necessarily be conjecture, but it may be significant to

recall that Lee Harvey Oswald spent four days in New Orleans in

September 1959 before departing on the first leg of his joureny to the

Soviet Union aboard the SS Marion Lykes (CE 1963). Garrison has picked

up indications that Oswald's decision to embark via ship *from New

Orleans* was dictated by intelligence considerations. It is not beyond

the realm of possibility that during the four-day period in the city he

was inducted into a CIA group, an anti-Castro member of which would

later use Oswald's name.

The genesis of the Friends of Democratic Cuba is not inconsistent with

this theory. One of the incorporators of the organization was Guy

Banister, the Minutmen/CIA type. Another was William Wane Dalzell who

knew Ferrie and Arcacha, and was still another in the Banister coterie

of sleuths. To a States-Item reporter he admitted he was CIA.

The Friends of Democratic Cuba was founded January 9, 1961, less than

two weeks before the Bolton Ford incident. It was intended as a kind of

American auxiliary to Arcacha's all-Cuban Revolutionary Front, and

Arcacha was instrumental in its creation. Government advisors to the

Friends, says an informant who was closely involved with the group, were

a CIA man named Logan and the FBI's Regis Kennedy, who invoked executive

privilege when questioned not long ago by the New Orleans grand jury

looking into the assassination. The Friends were short-lived, and the

Front slowly dissolved after the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. The

die-hard remnants of these moribund groups formed the Free Cuba

movement.

The Secret Service stumbled upon the Free Cuba group in its hectic post-

assassination inquiries at 544 Camp Street, but apparently the T-men

were completely sold on Oswald's left-wing orientation and never thought

to connect him with a right-wing outfit. Learning that "Cuban

revolutionaries" had occupied space at that address, Secret Service men

talked to a Cuban exile accountant who said that "those Cubans were

members of organizations known as 'Crusade to Free Cuba Committee' and

'Cuban Revolutionary Council.'" Arcacha, the accountant related, was

authorized to sign checks on both accounts (CE 3119). He said that

Arcacha continued with the Free Cuba group even after he had been ousted

from the CRC (CE 1414). There is no record that the Secret Service

questioned Arcacha about Oswald.

It was a grievous omission, for it is now manifest that Oswald was

intimately involved with the Free Cuba group. One indication is

implicit in the testimony of Mrs. Sylvia Odio, an aristocratic Cuban

refugee. When Lee Harvey Oswald's picture was flashed on television

after the assassination, she fainted. She explained to the Warren

Commission that in late September 1963, three men appeared unannounced

at her Dallas apartment seeking assistance for the anti-Castro movement.

The spokesman gave a "war name" that sounded like Leopoldo; a second man

was introduced as something like Angelo. The third man was introduced

as Leon Oswald, and Mrs. Odio was certain he was the accused assassin.

Unsure of the trio's true allegiance, Mrs. Odio was noncommittal. They

left, after commenting that they had just arrived from New Orleans and

were leaving shortly "on a trip." The next morning Leopoldo telephoned

Mrs. Odio with a new sales pitch. "Leon" was an ex-Marine, he said.

"He told us we don't have any guts, you Cubans, because President

Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs...It is easy

to do. He has told us." When his listener became upset at talk of

killing Kennedy, Leopoldo remarked that it would be just as easy to kill

the Cuban Premier. Leon was an expert shot, he said, a man who "could

do anything like getting undergound in Cuba, like killing Castro" (Vol.

11, pp. 367-389).

Just before the Warren Report went to press, the FBI located three men

possibly identical with Mrs. Odio's provocative visitors. Some three

weeks after the visit, Loren Eugene Hall and William Seymour had been

arested by the Dallas police on a technical narcotics charge.

Significantly, their arrest record bore the notation: "Active in the

anti-Castro movement ... Committee to Free Cuba." G-men traced them and

a companion, LawrenceHoward Jr, to the west coast.

Hall admitted to the FBI that he, Howard and Seymour had been to see

Mrs.Odio, whose apartment he correctly located on Magellan Circle, "to

ask her assistance in the movement," presumably the Free Cuba movement.

But Howard, although conceding he was with Hall in Dallas in late

September, flatly denied being at Mrs. Odio's. Seymour alibied that he

was working in Miami Beach at the time; the FBI verified that pay

records of a Miami Beach firm showed him at work from September 5

through October 10.

In a second session with the FBI, Hall recanted his admission and

claimed he had been mistaken, a turnabout that did not seem to be viewed

too skeptically by the G-men. The Bureau closed its inquiry by

observing that Seymour bore a striking resemblence to Oswald, a

meaningless footnote considering that the pay records had been accepted

as prima facie evidence that he was in Miami Beach at the relevant time.

With Seymour "out of the way," the Warren Commission had only to dispose

of the possibility that it *was* Oswald at Mrs. Odio's. It did so by

declaring it improbable that Oswald could have traveled to Dallas in the

limited time between his departure from New Orleans and his crossing of

the Mexican border. But the Commission reckoned from surface

transportation timetables, and there is a suggestion he flew at least

part of the way. Mrs. Horace Twiford of Houston stated that in late

September, when Oswald telephoned her husband, he commented that he "had

only a few hours" before "flying to Mexico" (CE 2335).

The post-assassination search at the Irving premises of Ruth and Michael

Paine, with whom Marina had been staying, yielded another tie to the

Free Cuba movement. Among Oswald's belongings in the garage was a

barrel that had, said Deputy Buddy Walthers, "a lot of these little

leaflets in it, 'Freedom for Cuba'" (Vol 7, p. 548). And at his

celebrated press conference the night of the assassination, DA Henry

Wade let it slip that "Oswald is a member of the Free Cuba Committe."

He was immediately "corrected" by Jack Ruby who had mingled with the

press: "No, he is a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee."

Deputy Walthers added a final link. In a "Supplementary Investigative

Report" dated November 23, 1963, he stated that he had advised Dallas

Secret Service Chief Forrest Sorrels that "for the past few months at a

house at 3128 Harlendale some Cubans had been having meetings on the

week ends and were possably [sic] connected with the 'Freedom for Cuba

Party' of which Oswald was a member." Three days later, when the Secret

Service had evinced no interest, he wrote a wistful addendum: "I

learned today that sometime between seven days before the President was

shot and the day after he was shot these Cubans moved from this house.

My informant stated that subject Oswald had been to this house before"

(Decker Exhibit No. 5323).

Why Oswald's anti-Castro comrades decided to make him the patsy is open

to conjecture. Perhaps he balked at going through with the

assassination. Perhaps they did not trust him and suspected he was an

infiltrator. The most likely explanation is a pragmatic one: they

needed a patsy and he was the ideal candidate. To make the

assassination look like the work of an avowed Marxist and Castro

sympathizer would have been a propaganda tour de force. "Even so,"

offers Garrison, "I think the big money backers of the plot were a

little disappointed. Oswald was supposed to be killed trying to escape,

and if those Cuban and Soviet visas he applied for but didn't get could

have been found on his body, public opinion against Ruissia and Cuba

would have been incited to a dangerous pitch."

In the weeks preceding the assassination, there are a number of

instances of an Oswald double in Dallas who probably was instrumental in

"setting him up." Gunsmith Dial D. Ryder told the Commission that in

early November, someone giving the name Oswald brought in a rifle to

have a telescopic sight mounted; he produced a repair tag in that name

as confirmation (Report, p. 315). Garland G. Slack and other target

shooters patronizing the Sports Drome Rifle Range reported that a man

resembling Oswald had practiced there as late as November; the man made

himself obvious, at one time incurring Slack's displeasure by firing on

his target (Report, pp. 318-319).

An incident at Downtown Lincoln-Mercury is highly revealing.

Immediately after the assassination, salesman Albert Guy Bogard reported

to the FBI that a man giving the name Lee Oswald, who closely resembled

the accused assassin, came into the showroom on November 9. Remarking

that in several weeks he would have the money to make the purchase, he

test-drove an expensive model on the Stemmons Freeway at 60 to 70 miles

an hour. Both Bogard and another salesman, Oren Brown, wrote down the

name Oswald so that they would remember him if he called back. A third

salesman, Eugene M. Wilson, recalled that when the man purporting to be

Oswald was told he would need a credit rating, he snapped, "Maybe I'm

going to have to go back to Russia to buy a car" (Report, p. 320).

Given a lie detector test by the FBI, Bogard's responses were those

"normally expected of a person telling the truth." Nevertheless, the

Warren Commission dismissed the incident by noting that Oswald

supposedly could not operate an automobile and that on November 9 he

allegedly spent the day drafting a lengthy letter to the Soviet Embassy.

It evidently never considered the possiblity someone might be

impersonating Oswald. But Bogard will never identify the impersonator.

He stuck to his story in news interviews, and subsequently was beaten to

within an inch of his life by an unknown assailant and arrested by the

Dallas police on seemingly trumped-up bad check charges. He retreated

to his native Louisiana, where on St. Valentine's Day 1966, he was found

dead of exhaust fumes in his automobile.

The main ingredients of the patsy theory are wrapped up in a story that

has gradually filtered out of Leavenworth Penitentiary. The story is

that of inmate Richard Case Nagell, and paradoxically, the most cogent

confirmation for it is the manner in which he wound up sentenced to ten

years in federal custody.

Nagell was a highly decorated infantry captain in the Korean War who, he

claims, subsequently became a CIA agent. It is a matter of record that

in 1957 he was seriously injured in a plane crash in Cambodia, which

tends to support his contention, since Cambodia was not exactly a

tourist playground. On September 20, 1963, Nagell walked into a bank in

El Paso, Texas, fired a gun into the ceiling, and then sat outside

waiting to be arrested. He says he stage the affair because he wanted

to be in custody as an alibi when the assassination took place. It was

a desperate measure, he admits. But he had sent a registered letter to

J. Edgar Hoover warning him of the impending assassination, which he

says was then scheduled for the latter part of September (probably the

26th in Washington, D.C), and the letter had gone unanswered.

There is an incredibly brief FBI interview report stating, in part, that

on December 19, 1963 Nagell advised, "For the record he would like to

say that his association with Oswald (meaning LEE HARVEY OSWALD) was

purely social and that he had met him in Mexico City and in Texas" (CD

197). Another report states that when the prisoner was being led from

court on January 24, 1964, he "made wild accusations to newspaper

reporters, accusing the FBI of not attempting to prevent the

assassination of President Kennedy..." (CD 404).

That the charges may not be so wild is indicated by the fact that the

government threw the book at Nagell, a first offender who says he

expected to be charged only with discharging a firearm on government-

protected property. Since his sentencing, he has been shuttled between

Leavenworth and the federal medical center (a euphemism for mental

institution) at Springfield, Missouri. While the government has

suggested in court that his airplane crash mentally affected Nagell, the

fact remains that he was given intelligence training *after* the crash.

What Nagell alleges is damning not only to the FBI, but to the CIA. In

brief, he says that the motive for the assassination was Kennedy's move

in the direction of a rapprochement with Castro, which was a rank

betrayal in the eyes of anti-Castro elements. As he puts it, an anti-

Castro group in New Orleans and Mexico City, code name Bravo Club,

decided to give Kennedy a "Christmas present" to be delivered September

26, a date that was postponed. A party was required. Two members of

Bravo Club approached Oswald while he was working at the Reily coffee

firm in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, and appealed to his ego in

setting him up as the patsy. When the "delivery" site was shifted to

Dallas, Bravo Club enlisted the aid of a Dallas "subsidiary," Delta

Club.

Meanwhile the CIA got wind of the plans and sent several agents into the

field to ascertain whether they were "for real." Nagell says he was one

of the agents dispatched. Within a short time, he claims, he was pulled

in. It had been verified that the plans were authentic, that "gusanos

[anit-Castroites] were making the watch tick," and that the sum of the

plot was right-wing in nature. Nagell says that he was instructed to

"arrow" the patsy, that is kill him, after the assassination. At this

point, he contends, he got cold feet and bailed out. "I would rather be

arrested than commit murder and treason," he declared in a self-prepared

petition for habeas corpus.

In the petition, Nagell asserts that he used the pseudonyms Robert Nolan

and Joseph Kramer in the U.S. and three foreign countries under the

authorization of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He states that the

files of the FBI and the CIA contain information that Oswald was using

the aliases Albert Hidel and Aleksei Hidel. He charges that the FBI

illegally seized from him evidence crucial to his defense, such as

notebooks containing the names of certain CIA employees, photographs,

two Mexican tourist cards (one in the name Joseph Kramer, the other in

the name Albert Hidell), and receipts for registered mail, including the

one for the letter sent Hoover warning of the assassination.

When Nagell complains he has been "salted away" because of what he

knows, he just might be making the understatement of the year.

[end of part III]

[End of Article]

Edited December 18, 2010 by Bernice Moore

[Dawn Meredith]

The two things about Stone's movie that was so anathema to the press were:

1. He was going to question their obeisance to an outright lie that just happened to have enormous political significance. And further, he was going to update that significance by using new work on the whole Vietnam issue. Which, until that time, the mass of the public had never been exposed to: Namely, Vietnam likely would not have happened if Kennedy had lived.

2. He was going to do all this by using as his protagonist a man who had been vociferously attacked and smeared by the MSM, namely Garrison.

In other words, he was crossing them twice in the same film.

You can't do something like that and expect not to be smacked. But even I was a bit surprised that the campaign started so early. Even before anyone had seen the film.

And this was because Garrison had become a figure of controversy not just in the MSM but within the critical community. The attack on Garrison was so effective, that even JFK researchers had bought into some of it. I mean, you could not say a kind word about Garrison at JFK conferences for decades. Or you would be sneered at by people like Hoch and Scott.

In retrospect, Stone did fairly well. Because a.) There has been a reconsideration of Garrison since the film, and b.) The idea of Kennedy's intent to withdraw from Vietnam now has a much wider grip, even in the academic world.

IMO, few films have ever shown just how bought an paid for the MSM in this country was.

Unfortunately, as I have written about elsewhere, the New Media does not look much better.

Interesting Jim. I knew that about Paul Hoch, who I have had my own opinions about for decades but did not know it about PDS. Has he changed his view? (Sorry if this appears to be a dumb question, I am a bit distracted today).

I am a Garrison partisan and always have been and LOVE the film JFK.

Dawn

Dawn

[Michael Hogan]

From the editor of Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood blog:

Top 25 Left-Wing Films: #1 - JFK (1991)

by John Nolte

Excerpt:

Why it’s a left-wing film

Where to begin.

With this particular film, discussing “why” it was made is more important and revealing than digging into the specific politics of it all. Director Oliver Stone’s brilliantly structured, brilliantly shot, brilliantly written, brilliantly edited (to say the least), and brilliantly directed, wet dream of left-wing wish-fulfillment is the greatest pack of charismatic lies ever filmed, but there is simply not enough bandwidth on these here Internets to document and deconstruct the what and how of those lies.

If you haven’t read Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed,” please do so. It is, in my opinion, the definitive investigation of the Kennedy assassination and a withering rebuttal to Stone’s paranoid political revisionism. In the years since it was published, computer technology and new revelations have only strengthened Posner’s case. Unlike Stone’s willfully dishonest narrative, Posner is exhaustive, thorough and logical. But like Stone, Posner tells one helluva compelling story. “Case Closed” is a great read that also happens to be painstakingly thorough in proving that on one terrible November day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was murdered by a lone, left-wing, Castro-supporting Marxist.

The utterly obscene political opportunism we saw rise like a stench from the Left and their media allies within hours of last week’s mass murder in Tuscon, is useful in understanding “why” Stone was so driven to realize in motion picture form his anti-American web of audacious historical perversion. When truth and history and facts and decency aren’t on your side, it becomes all about the narrative. The Narrative is its own beast, something that transcends the pesky details of right, wrong, true or false. Whether it’s history, economics, character assassination, or pretty much anything… He who controls the narrative, controls truth.

Simply put, the Left cannot psychologically or emotionally reconcile their undying hatred of the Vietnam War with their undying love for the same president who escalated our involvement in that war. And the Left most certainly cannot psychologically or emotionally reconcile that one of their very own — a strident, left-wing Castro lover — assassinated that same beloved president....

Full story: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2011/01/21/top-25-left-wing-films-1-jfk-1991/