JFK case going to the Supreme Court

[Chuck Schwartz]

Here is part of a post by Bill Kelly (JFKCoutercoup2  blog):

The Supreme Court Takes on a JFK Case

 

THE SUPREME COURT TAKES ON A JFK CASE

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 

Billkelly3@gmail.com

 

While most of the government and society grounded to a virtual halt during the pandemic of 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States kept chugging along, ruling on a number of cases that will have a major impact on laws, elections, the president’s finances and how government works. The gears of justice grind slow however.

 

Eight years ago, on August 25, 2012, lawyers for the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) for some specific records that are mentioned in another document that was previously released under the JFK Act of 1992.

 

The Assassination Archives and Research Center, is a privately funded, Maryland-based organization founded by Bud Fensterwald in 1984 “to provide a permanent organization which would acquire, preserve, and disseminate information on political assassinations.”  The attorney’s for AARC in this case are AARC director James Lesar and Dan Alcorn. [https://aarclibrary.org/  ]

 

Government agencies usualy drag their feet in response to all FOIA requests, and those filed by individuals often drag on until the requester loses interest or dies, but those filed by permanent organizations are not going to go away. So they get more attention.

 

The case stems from a document dated September 25, 1963 detailing a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were briefed by CIA official Desmond FitzGerald on covert operations against Cuba.

 

Daniel Alcorn, the AARC attorney, said the document contained an intriguing reference to the CIA basing a plot to kill Fidel Castro in 1963 on an earlier plot to kill Adolph Hitler during World War II.

 

[ http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-higgins-memo-of-jcs-meeting-of-sept.html ]

 

[Thanks to Rex Bradford at Mary Ferrell for the Origina Documents: Sept 23 memo Re: Special Group Security.

 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=189164#relPageId=18

 

Sept 25 memo: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10331&relPageId=3  ]

 

Known as the Higgins memo for its author, Colonel Walter Higgins, who was adjunct to General Victor “Brute” Krulak, USMC, the officer responsible for the military’s assistance to the CIA’s covert operations, especially against Cuba.

 

I listed the Higgins Memo - as the Number One Smoking Document released under the JFK Act for a number of reasons.

 

[http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/11/top-ten-jfk-assassination-records.html ]

 

The meeting was chaired by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay because General Maxwell Taylor was in Vietnam on a special mission for the president. The purpose of the meeting was for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be briefed on CIA Covert Operations against Cuba by Desmond FitzGerald, who had replaced William Harvey as head of the CIA Cuban desk -Task Force W. Renamed by FitzGerald as the Special Group of the National Security Council that was responsible for approving or disapproving covert operations.

The key paragraph is bullet point # (13):

 

 "He (Desmond FitzGerald) commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to the military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed. He considers it as a parallel in history, i.e., the plot to kill Hitler, and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach.”

 

“This was new information to us when we saw it,” Alcorn said, so the AARC filed an official Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for any documents or records of this detailed study of the German military plot to kill Hitler.

 

Over the course of a few years the CIA responded by saying that it could not find any reference to the “detailed study” that the CIA had conducted in 1963 of the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler that was being adapted “to develop an approach” for use against Castro.

 

Then the CIA reversed itself and acknowledged that they found one reference to the plot to kill Hitler in a 1954 propaganda pamphet that blamed the failure of the 1944 plot on communists.

 

The CIA’s chief histoiran David Robarge was consulted, and he recommended that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) records be checked at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

 

Frustrated, the center sued the agency in federal court in Washington, D.C. on January 25, 2017.

 

[ https://aarclibrary.org/center-seeks-cia-documents-on-plots-to-kill-hitler-castro/ ]

 

When a three judge appeals court reviewed the case, one of the judges asked the CIA some important questions, wondering if the CIA kept copies of OSS records, a question that went unanswered.

 

The case appeared to be dead in the water until June 8, 2020, when the Solicitor General of the United States,