Katzenbach/inconsistencies

[Steve Thomas]

Katzenbach wrote this memo by hand on the evening of Sunday 24 November, a few hours after Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot dead by Jack Ruby. A typed version was prepared the following morning and sent to Bill Moyers, an assistant to President Johnson.

http://22november1963.org.uk/katzenbach-memo-moyers-warren-commission

"It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy’s Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this effect be made now....

I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to inconsistencies between this report and statements by Dallas police officials."

Can anybody think off the top of their head what some of those inconsistencies might have been?

Steve Thomas

[Michael Walton]

I think this memo is one one of the more blatantly obvious pieces of evidence for a conspiracy without intentionally meaning to do so. I mean think about it - this is just three days after the assassination. Supposedly, Lee Oswald was a lone kook that nobody was supposed to have known about; in other words, he's supposedly working all alone with no confederates and all investigative agencies are supposedly just starting to find out who he is.

But now he's dead, shot down by a concerned saloon owner. I encourage you to read a translation of a speech given by Castro on 11/27. Even he, supposedly isolated on his island, knew this was turning into a really rotten deal. Read, too, the part about what he says about Ruby.

But regarding Nick's memo, why was he even concerned about the "no confederates" concept? If the then official story was true (LHO was a loner) why even bring it up? Then he wraps it up very neatly in the "facts" portion of his memo.

As for evidence:

Read the Paines thread on EF

The Zapruder film - confiscated and withheld from the public for 12 years; and CBS reporter Dan Rather describing it on TV on 11/25 but completely eliminating the "back and to the left" description of it; he's a reporter who's supposed to describe everything, right?

Hoover's call to Johnson telling him that the photos of Oswald in Mexico were not the same person they had in jail.

Bringing Dulles back in to run the WC after he was fired from the CIA two years before.

Many, many more inconsistencies as well.

[Glenn Nall]

In Harvey and Lee John Armstrong says this:

""Hoover did not like to see the Warren Commission come into existence.

He showed marked interest in limiting the scope of it or circumventing the scope of it

and taking any action that might result in neutralizing it". Hoover was concerned the

Warren Commission would take testimony from witnesses that conflicted
with the FBI's already completed report naming Oswald as the lone
assassin."

i was just reading in one of a number of books, either Harvey and Lee or Walt Brown's JFK Chronicles (Walt Brown is hilarious, it's a great read) that Chief Curry had issued a statement to the effect of the FBI having known of Oswald for some time (they had files on O back to 58 or 59); Hoover freaked and sent a (documented) message to Curry to publicly retract the statement "or else," which he did.

sounds like a "contradiction" to me.

clearly "complete and thorough" is a phrase with multiple definitions.

Edited May 21, 2016 by Glenn Nall

[Steve Thomas]

Katzenbach wrote this memo by hand on the evening of Sunday 24 November, a few hours after Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot dead by Jack Ruby. A typed version was prepared the following morning and sent to Bill Moyers, an assistant to President Johnson.

http://22november1963.org.uk/katzenbach-memo-moyers-warren-commission

I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to inconsistencies between this report and statements by Dallas police officials."

Steve Thomas

The thing that struck me was, how did Katzenbach know, two days after the assassination, what the FBI report was going to say, and how did he know that it was going to be inconsistent with what the DPD was saying?

I guess it goes back to the motive part in Katzenbach's memo: "Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off..."

At its heart, JFK's assassination boils down to a murder mystery, and in any given murder investigation, you have to satisfy the three basic requirements of means, motive, and opportunity. Supposedly Oswald had the means and the opportunity, it was the motive that was in question.

I know that Bill Alexander wanted to indict Oswald for murder "in furtherance of an international conspiracy", and that Henry Wade freaked when he heard that (see his WC testimony here: http://jfkassassination.net/russ/testimony/wade.htm).He said, "Well, on that score it doesn't make any sense at all to me because there is no such crime in Texas, being part of an international conspiracy, it is just murder with malice in Texas, and if you allege anything else in an indictment you have to prove it and it is all surplusage in an indictment to allege anything, whether a man is a John Bircher or a Communist or anything, if you allege it you have to prove it.

So, when I heard it I went down to the police station and took the charge on him, just a case of simple murder."

How did Katzenbach know on the 24th what the FBI report, which had not yet been written, was going to say?

Steve Thomas

[Michael Walton]

How did Katzenbach know on the 24th what the FBI report, which had not yet been written, was going to say?

I guess because he was high up enough in the chain of command to know what was really going on. I mean, Bobby Kennedy was pretty much silenced by grief and out of the picture. Hoover and Johnson were Georgetown neighbors and buddies. They had to have known what was going on off the wire.

If the government was really and vigorously pursuing the truth of this case, that memo would have never been written in the first place. In fact, they would have done the opposite of what the memo states.

I know Americans like to think of high-minded justice, following the rules of evidence collecting, and so on, but that was definitely not going to happen in this case. And one of the biggest and most obvious signs of that was when practically the entire Dallas police force is lined up like a show, the suspected assassin is slowly brought down the hall, a captain of the police force, instead of guarding his charge, walks feet ahead of him, breaking security and allowing a guy who had no business being there to silence him forever on national TV to boot.

Did you read the Castro 11/27 speech? Whether you like Castro or not, read the speech. Think of him as a human first - not a communist dictator - and you'll see he had it all figured out while, meanwhile, the government was doing everything it could to sweep things under the rug from the public.

Mark Lane had it figured it too as early as December 1963.

Edited May 22, 2016 by Michael Walton