Tom Bethell: A Study in Duplicity

[Pamela Brown]

37 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

Miles Davis ~ "Kind of Blue" **** A jazz Masterpiece - Bing video

Love Miles. I talk to young black people about him. They ask who he was. That makes me sad. I tell them, and then I play a bit of So What for them and they seem to get him...

[Pamela Brown]

On 3/29/2021 at 8:45 PM, Benjamin Cole said:

The story of what happened to Jim Garrison is one of the darkest chapters in US history and journalism. 

Sure, Garrison made some mistakes, undermined, as he was, by several on-staff landmines like Bethell and the weight of the US government and even state governments, which would not even grant Garrison extradition on many key participants/witnesses. 

To say Garrison operated on a shoestring would exaggerate his resources. 

Yet, Garrison on to something and in the larger picture he was right. My guess is somehow someone in the CIA fed Garrison the real dope (as much as was known), and Garrison never even betrayed a whisper of that inside information. But of course, documentation was impossible. 

The Garrison plan was to open up the JFKA through the aperture of Clay, Ferrie and Oswald, and some other participants/witnesses who were not called to testify as they could not be extradited. 

Garrison nearly won in New Orleans anyway, with several jurors afterwards saying that they had "reasonable doubt" and could not vote to convict. 

It is interesting that George Joannides also maintained a residence in New Orleans in 1963, when he worked out of Miami and had house and family there. 

It is now known the CIA maintained hundreds of contacts in US media in the 1960s, some paid off. 

James D's book, "Destiny Betrayed" is must reading, not just for students of the JFKA, but for anyone who is interested in US post-war US history. To understand what passes for "history" you must also understand what forces are present who are shaping academic and popular history. 

 

 

 

 

 

I was in New Orleans the. weekend the Garrison investigation broke in the press. I was hopeful and excited.  But by the time I returned to NYC, David Ferrie was dead, and I had the usual sense of foreboding that whatever Garrison was doing would probably not be allowed to see the light of day. 

Edited April 4, 2021 by Pamela Brown

[James DiEugenio]

Tthat was right on.

BTW, one of the most interesting things from that article I wrote was what Gayle Nix Jackson found in Bethell's diaries, but the New Orleans papers leave out.

In November of 1966, Bethell and Penn Jones met up with Martin Waldron of the NY TImes.  Waldron was part of their reinvestigation of the JFK case. He had a set of questions he was inquiring about. Many of them dealt with New Orleans.  And many of those had to do with David Ferrie. We know of course what happened to the inquiry.  Just like we know what happened at CBS in 1967. 

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/why-cbs-covered-up-the-jfk-assassination

 Waldron ended up covering the trial of Clay Shaw.  During the trial, as we know from Art Kunkin and others, Jim Phelan had rented a house.  And each day he pulled out a chalkboard to reveal what the talking points would be for the morning headlines.  This is how things like the testimony of Pierre FInck, the Z film, and the Clinton/Jackon incident were kept from the public. (Jim DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp, 289-90)

The media is just awful on the JFK case. The media that Tom Bethell joined is even worse.