Japanese TV Documentary on JFK

[James DiEugenio]

This was first broadcast last month

 

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016074/

[Micah Mileto]

They made Oswald HOT 😍

[James DiEugenio]

Here is part 2:

 

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016075/

[James DiEugenio]

Wow, Charles Givens and Ruth Paine?

In this day and age?

And Oswald did the Walker shooting based on Marina Oswald's WC testimony?  What about Kirk Coleman?  And it was not six months before the JFK assassination.  It was more like 7 1/2 months before.  And Oswald was never never a suspect in that case before the FBI got into it.

Esterline and Moore were the masterminds behind it?

[James Norwood]

20 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

And Oswald did the Walker shooting based on Marina Oswald's WC testimony?  What about Kirk Coleman?  And it was not six months before the JFK assassination.  It was more like 7 1/2 months before.  And Oswald was never never a suspect in that case before the FBI got into it.

Jim,

Thanks for your alert on this new documentary entitled Oswald and JFK: Unsolved Cases.

I viewed both parts, and I had the feeling of watching the programs that aired on The Learning Channel, such as JFK:  Inside the Target Car with Gary Mack or JFK:  The Lost Bullet with Max Holland.  It was almost like a fictionalized presentation more than a documentary film.

The program professed to have drawn inspiration from a think tank of "sixty-six campaigners for truth," but the expert consultants were never listed in the closing credits.  The film's premise is that Oswald was "a devoted Marxist" and that his defining moment occurred as a Marine in Japan.  While consorting with escort girls at the Queen Bee, he made a contact that allowed him to travel to the Soviet Union in 1959 to pursue his utopian communist dream.  

The screenwriters have drawn heavily on the tag-team testimony of Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald, leading them to conclude that Oswald shot at General Walker and, on the domestic scene, he was a violent and unhinged husband.  An early dramatization in the film depicts a brutal scene of domestic violence where Oswald punches Marina and knocks her to the floor.  For an audience in the era of the #MeToo movement, the amount of time the film spends in portraying Oswald as a misogynist and wife batterer sets the tone for the filmmakers' approach to Oswald as a person.

The filmmakers' conceit for the assassination is that Oswald acted alone, but was egged on by "rogue agents" of the CIA, who promised him a quick getaway to Latin America after the shooting.  The way the assassination is portrayed is not a far cry from the conclusions of the Warren Report dressed up with some of the findings about the CIA that emerged in the 1970s.  The expression "rogue agents" was frequently invoked by Bob Blakey in the aftermath of the HSCA.  As portrayed in the film, Oswald was their "pawn."

The best scene in the film was when Jeff Morley provided background on George Joannides.  Jeff takes us to a meeting with an eyewitness who reveals that almost instantly after the assassination had occurred, he was instructed by his CIA handler to release a photograph to the press that identified Oswald as sympathetic to Marxism while promoting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in the summer of 1963.  The man appeared on camera to verify convincingly that he complied with the CIA officer's request.  But it was curious that Jeff concluded that segment by saying that it will still take years before we will learn the truth about the JFK assassination.  To that, I would reply:  Nonsense!  We can understand a clear picture of the assassination right now.

James

 

[James DiEugenio]

I agree with that last statement.  Amid 5 million pages of documents and over 57 years of writing, I think we can separate the wheat from the chaff in this case. 

The show was really odd. It mentions the TRC group, but never defined what it was or listed their names.

They then said that this Rolf Mowatt Larssen guy made a great impact at the CAPA conference in Dallas last year. My recall was that many people wondered why the former CIA officer was  there in the first place. He was introduced by Larry Schnapf and that is who I found out invited him.  If it was me, I would not have approved it. I did not see any point in it.  Unless the idea was to see if we could influence him into gravitating toward us somehow.. Evidently we did not if this was the result.

The two hours managed to avoid the medical and ballistics evidence en toto.  And everything we have learned about Oswald. 

 

[Ron Bulman]

Just started watching this.  At about 3:35 Stone appears, turns comes at the camera smiling, opens his mouth and keeps coming like he's going to eat it.  Funny.  I almost quit watching a little before that because is seemed a little hokey so to speak.

[Ron Bulman]

7:10.  Dick Russell just said "Japan was very important in the scenario that brings Oswald to eventually assassinate JFK".  What?  After interviewing and communicating with Richard Case Nagel numerous times, writing The Man Who Knew Too Much, he believes Ozzie did it?  Enough of this, for tonight at least.

[David Andrews]

On 7/27/2020 at 7:11 PM, Micah Mileto said:

They made Oswald HOT 😍

They made Marina hot!  I'm aware that mine is a minority opinion here, but...finally.

Disappointing to find that even Dick Russell doesn't know how to pronounce Richard Case Nagell's name, shifting between stressing the first syllable and stressing the last.

[Ron Bulman]

Disappointing spell check prompts you to spell Nagell to Nagel, and I fell for it.

[James DiEugenio]

Another thing, they did too many recreations.  It gives the film a soft cheesy look.  This is why Oliver Stone does not do them in documentaries.  I asked him about this at the beginning and he said no, his policy is to keep a documentary a documentary.

And some of the recreations, like the Walker shooting, are not accurate,. Even if one buys the WC, its not accurate.

They  wasted John Newman.

[David Andrews]

3 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

7:10.  Dick Russell just said "Japan was very important in the scenario that brings Oswald to eventually assassinate JFK".  What?  After interviewing and communicating with Richard Case Nagel numerous times, writing The Man Who Knew Too Much, he believes Ozzie did it?  Enough of this, for tonight at least.

Well, if you parse the message, only the filmmakers and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen believe Oswald was a shooter, and any extra shooters are only intimated.

One of the problems of Dick Russell's work is that we never know what his, or Nagell's, final take on Oswald-as-shooter is.

Who is this "Committee of 66"?  Is there a blood initiation and a car coat involved? 

Edited July 29, 2020 by David Andrews

[Richard Booth]

Looks like I'm late to the party on this one. I discovered this documentary last night and sent links to several researchers, I can see they're already familiar with it.

This show had some major problems. Like James Norwood mentioned, the fellow who immediately after the assassination was telling people Oswald was a Marxist and that he was doing this on behalf of the CIA -- this was a good part. However, as with everything else in this documentary, they fail to properly follow-up. What should have happened there is they should have provided additional evidence of similar things occurring, such as those letters that were sent from Cuba to Oswald's house the week before the assassination, or the whole debacle with Sylvia Duran and how the CIA was immediately on her within days. These are not isolated incidents. We see here a concentrated effort to connect Oswald to Cuba, and there are a half dozen examples that could have been used.

Then we have Rolf Mowatt Larssen with a classic limited hang-out. Maybe he truly believes what he says he does, but I really doubt that. Anyone who works for the CIA would commit career suicide to endorse what Larssen endorses here so I think we can infer that what he's doing here on this program (and at a recent conference) is acting on behalf of the agency. This shows that in 2020, the CIA is still very interested in this case. We see in recent years from the efforts of Max Holland that this is very much true. In addition, we also see something similar in how Ernst Titovets was treated. Milicent Cranor did a great job in illustrating how Titovets' "troubles" getting a VISA to visit a conference here was something that was probably by design, some kind of scheme put together to make Titovets appear threatening to the narrative so we'll all endorse everything he has to say. With Max Holland and Rolf Mowat Larssen we see the agency is still active on this subject.

One thing I thought interesting was that among the photographs shown in Larssen's spread of possible CIA sponsors, there was a distinctly notable missing figure: James Angleton. That was interesting given that the program mentioned how Oswald's file at CIA did not reside where it should have (SR) and it is Angleton who I think most of us suspect is responsible for the shenanigans with Oswald's file.

Overall this program just barely scratched the surface, failed to add additional detail, and it presents what is obviously a limited hang-out from a CIA officer. He didn't tell us anything we don't already know. It's what he DIDN'T say or who he left out that should be interesting to us.