J. Morley on JFK Records, Disinfo from Posner, Isikoff

[Benjamin Cole]

Worth reading.....

Is There Really Nothing New in the JFK Files?

Only if you avert your eyes from CIA lies in the case of the murdered president

JEFFERSON MORLEY MAY 17

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Gerald Posner (Credit: Trisha Posner)

After Chad Nagle used the latest JFK file release to recount the “Tale of Two Defectors,” anti-conspiratorial writer Gerald Posner weighed in with the familiar claim that the latest JFK releases do not contain any significant revelations about JFK’s assassination.

Posner writes:

In writing about new files last year, Michael Isikoff concluded, it “only underscores the point that what has been hidden from the public is largely about highly sensitive agency collection activities and exotic plans for operations that, while in some instances highly embarrassing and by today’s standards indefensible, bear little if any relevance to the crime itself.” I echoed the same sentiment in my article about the files the Archives released last month.

Posner has written some good books (on the Vatican and Big Pharma), but his JFK book is not among them, because it was written before the massive declassification JFK files in the 1990s, and because he tendentiously dismisses “conspiracy theorists” while ignoring the views of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Charles De Gaulle and many others who concluded the president was killed by political enemies. His outdated book is prosecutorial, not historical.

Isikoff is an excellent national security reporter but his claims about “relevance to the crime” are not sustainable. Consider the Heath memo, not fully declassified until last December, and first reported in JFK Facts in January 2023 under the headline “Declassified Memo Reveals CIA Investigated Cuban Exiles for JFK's Assassination.”

The fact that the CIA’s Miami station conducted its own undisclosed JFK investigation focused solely on Cubans “capable of orchestrating the murder of President Kennedy in order to precipitate and armed conflict between Cuba and USA” is clearly relevant to understanding November 22. It reveals how CIA officers understood Kennedy’s murder. 

The Heath memo shows that at a time when the assassination investigation had barely begun—and the White House and the FBI were insisting that one man alone had killed the president—the CIA in Miami had a very different reaction. Top officials in the station did not assume Oswald acted alone. Rather they suspected Cubans known to the Agency might have been involved, and they set out to find them.

That’s irrelevant to the crime only if you believe that any evidence that contradicts the White House and FBI statements is irrelevant. That’s the standard that Posner and Isikoff are applying. It is more is prejudicial than logical.

A more defensible conclusion would be that CIA evidence contradicting White House and FBI statements is highly relevant to understanding the superficial and controlled investigation that followed. 

It would be one thing if the CIA’s investigation had ratified the lone gunman theory. But the results of Miami investigation—described by case officer Donald Heath as “fairly massive undertaking”—were never shared with the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations or the Assassination Records Review Board. So, it seems that the CIA is keeping secret the results of its own internal investigation of the Dallas ambush. 

Which raises more questions that are also clearly relevant to the causes of November 22.

• What did the Agency’s Cuban sources say about possible involvement of JFK’s enemies in Miami?

• What conclusions did the Miami station reach about the information obtained by Heath and other case officers?

• Why didn’t the CIA ever share the results of this investigation with the rest of the government?

These are questions that Posner and Isikoff do not ask, much less answer, probably because they cannot. They simply don’t know the answers because the CIA hasn’t supplied any. The lack of answers calls into question the credibility of the Agency on JFK’s murder, something partisans of the lone gunman theory are loath to acknowledge. They avoid discussion of new evidence that doesn’t support their theory. They are entitled to their avert their eyes from inconvenient facts, but theirs is a minority point of view. 

What Is Relevant?

Posner and his co-religionists limit the definition of relevance in a way that spares them from taking into account any information that undermines their theory of a “lone gunman.”

The 502 documents released on May 11 contain little information about JFK’s murder. “They are not significant,” Professor Robert Reynolds, one of a handful of assassination researchers who study and follow the documents in detail, told me in a recent email. They either “have nothing to do with the assassination, or bear on it in only the most marginal, tangential way.”

In fact, the assassination researchers associated with the Mary Ferrell Foundation and JFK Facts have studied the declassified documents in rather more detail than Posner and Co., and we reach a different conclusion. We believe that the CIA’s disparate treatment of defectors Robert Webster and Lee Oswald qualifies as “information about the assassination.” 

Nagle’s “Tale of Two Defectors” uses the new JFK files to show that the Agency handled the defection and return of Oswald and Webster very differently. After Webster was debriefed extensively in the summer of 1962, he was of no interest to the Agency. Oswald, who returned a couple of weeks later, was not debriefed yet his subsequent actions within the United States were closely monitored by senior Agency officers—including the assistant deputy director of plans, the acting chief of operations in the Western Hemisphere, the liaison officer for the Counterintelligence Staff, and the chief of the Mexico Desk—all of who signed off on a cable about Oswald six week before JFK was killed. In short, the declassified Webster documents are significant because they illuminate the unusual handling of Oswald the defector. 

Is it really credible to say that top CIA officials monitoring of the accused assassin is “marginal” or “tangential” to Kennedy’s murder? That’s not what Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton believed when he said he wanted “wait out” the Warren Commission. Angleton felt the need to conceal the October 10, 1963 cable about Oswald from investigators precisely because it was devastating to the Agency’s false claim that it had only “minimal information” about Oswald before Kennedy was killed.

What Is the Context?

The difference between partisans and critics of the lone gunman theory boils down to their treatment of historical context. Those who believe that one man alone killed JFK for no reason (and another man killed the first man because he felt like it) look at the new records searching for a theory of the crime that contradicts their lone gunman scenario. Finding none, they claim vindication. The CIA’s record of false JFK statements does not directly refute their widely disbelieved lone gunman scenario so it is studiously ignored. The drawback of this approach is obvious: confirmation bias. 

The critics of the lone gunmen theory associated with the Mary Ferrell Foundation and JFK Facts take a broader view. We don’t offer a theory of the assassination, and we don’t expect to find one in the new JFK files. We are dedicated to completing the record of Kennedy’s murder and explaining the context in which the crime occurred. 

Rather than vindicate the government’s hastily concocted theory, we focus on the new facts, especially the information that the government tried hard to conceal: the code-named CIA operations that monitored Oswald while JFK was alive (HTLINGUAL, AMSPELL, LIENVOY); the CIA’s targeting of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee; the post-assassination suspicions of the CIA itself; the rejection of the official theory by the man who appointed the Warren Commission; the now-documented tampering with the autopsy evidence; and the continuing withholding of evidence in 2023 that is obviously relevant, such as the Joannides file. The advantages of this approach are also obvious: context matters.

 

[Michaleen Kilroy]

Morley’s site has stepped up its reporting quality and cadence considerably since he went to Substack. It was always good. Now it’s really, really good, imho.

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, Michaleen Kilroy said:

Morley’s site has stepped up its reporting quality and cadence considerably since he went to Substack. It was always good. Now it’s really, really good, imho.

Amen. 

Although Morley was generous to Posner. 

Posner's book was always lacking.

Among many shortcomings, Poser posited modern guns do not smoke, but that everyone smelled gunsmoke in Dealey Plaza from LHO's gun, downwind and six floors up.

If you want to shoot yourself in the foot...Posner scored a bullseye. 

[Michael Griffith]

17 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Is There Really Nothing New in the JFK Files?

Only if you avert your eyes from CIA lies in the case of the murdered president

JEFFERSON MORLEY MAY 17

Posner has written some good books (on the Vatican and Big Pharma), but his JFK book is not among them, because it was written before the massive declassification JFK files in the 1990s, and because he tendentiously dismisses “conspiracy theorists” while ignoring the views of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Charles De Gaulle and many others who concluded the president was killed by political enemies. His outdated book is prosecutorial, not historical.

Posner's book on SS doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele (Mengele: The Complete Story) is also quite good. 

It is curious how some people can be objective and accurate on some subjects but severely biased and inaccurate on other subjects. 

Posner did far more research for his book on Mengele than he did for his book on the JFK case. 

Edited May 18, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Benjamin Cole]

On 5/19/2023 at 12:31 AM, Michael Griffith said:

Posner's book on SS doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele (Mengele: The Complete Story) is also quite good. 

It is curious how some people can be objective and accurate on some subjects but severely biased and inaccurate on other subjects. 

Posner did far more research for his book on Mengele than he did for his book on the JFK case. 

MG--

But here is the thing: We know a lot about the JFKA, and thus can see defects and dissembling in Posner's work about that topic. 

I, and probably you, know nothing really about Mengele. Posner has clear field to write any sort of history he wants--who would know better or what mistakes he made?

In addition, Posner may not have been a "writer for hire" on the Mengele book.  So, he had no axe to grind. 

On the JFKA? He seemed to have an axe to grind. 

[Gerry Down]

On 5/18/2023 at 5:40 AM, Michaleen Kilroy said:

Morley’s site has stepped up its reporting quality and cadence considerably since he went to Substack. It was always good. Now it’s really, really good, imho.

Why couldn't he achieve the same quality on jfkfacts.org?

What is so special about substack that it has allowed him to improve his quality all of a sudden?

[Michaleen Kilroy]

4 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

Why couldn't he achieve the same quality on jfkfacts.org?

What is so special about substack that it has allowed him to improve his quality all of a sudden?

My guess? He’s making more money from the site now via Substack and can spend more time on his stories, deliver more stories, and can pay others to write as well such as the excellent conservative JFKA writer Chad Nagle.