MEDIA COVERAGE OF CONFERENCES

[William Kelly]

So far, I've only been able to come up wtih three published reports on any of the three conferences last weekend, all about DC - Walter Pincus in the Wasington Post, Andrew Bridges of AP and Lisa Pease for Consortium News - [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/112205A.html ], the last of which is the best and most accurate, IMO.

Here's Bridges, quoting Nicola Longord of the TSBD muse, "To my knowledge, there have not been any new developments," sounds very similar to Bob Porter of the TSBD a few years ago, saying, "Nothing is happening and nothing is planned" for the anniversary, when outside his window there were thousands of people and a host of speakers marking the occassion that I tape recorded and transcribed, and have around here somewhere.

November 21, 2005

JFK Assassination Debate Lives On

By ANDREW BRIDGES

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the 42 years since the assassination of President Kennedy, here's what has been agreed on by those who still pursue one of the most sensational crimes in history: very little, if anything.

After the release of millions of pages of documents, and more than four decades of probes by professionals and amateurs, there is no consensus among those who toil in the conspiracy theory industry.

Some see the fingerprints of the Mafia, others the CIA. For some it was the Cubans, the Russians, Jimmy Hoffa or just about everyone who was anyone on or about Nov. 22, 1963.

No theory tying together disparate characters or events is too outlandish: Remember the Maine? Some even link the explosion that sank the U.S. battleship in Havana harbor in 1898 to the shooting of Kennedy 65 years later, the belief being that both marked trumped-up pretexts for American intervention in Cuba.

Interest comes to a head each year around the time of the assassination anniversary, which is Tuesday.

"To my knowledge, there have not been any new developments," said Nicola Longford, the executive director of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where Kennedy was shot. "It's just part of the enduring myth and reality of this intoxicating story. It's just a continuing fascination with solving a mystery."

The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and squeezed off just three shots at Kennedy's motorcade from the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the plaza. A 1979 report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded Oswald probably did not act alone - a contention supported by a majority of Americans polled in 2003, the 40th anniversary of the assassination.

A conference dedicated to "Cracking the JFK Case" recently drew roughly 100 people to a Bethesda, Md., hotel. Sessions covered everything from the CIA's monitoring of Oswald in the months prior to the assassination to what a Dallas police audio tape may - or may not - prove about the numbers of shots fired.

Former Sen. Gary Hart reminded participants that his own investigative foray into the case, as a member of the Church Committee that met in 1975 and 1976, revealed both the Mafia and the Cuban exile community had ample reasons to want Kennedy dead.

"It's an understatement to say there were some very, very unhappy people in both those camps," said Hart.

Jim Lesar, a Washington, D.C., attorney who helped organize the conference, said the three-day meeting was dedicated to the proposition that Kennedy's death remains an open investigation.

The move was in part a ploy to rekindle interest in JFK. Lesar cited last year's reopening of the investigation into the slaying of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, as an example of what he'd like to see done with the Kennedy assassination.

"The Department of Justice is showing no inhibitions in dealing with 40-year-old civil rights cases, but the JFK case is being left to languish," Lesar said.

On the private side of the equation, he added that the lack of documents that could prove or disprove many theories hampers ongoing investigative efforts. "There is still a load of information we need to accurately and completely understand what happened," Lesar said.

Meanwhile, the cadre of conspiracy theorists is growing older and grayer and sources are dying off, further slowing progress, conference participants said.

"The case seems frozen now, perhaps more than it's been for a number of years," said David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, who is writing his own book on the case.

--

LISA'S REPORT

consortiumnews.com

The Enduring JFK Mystery

By Lisa Pease

November 22, 2005

Editor’s Note: The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the darkest moments in modern American history. But one of its most pernicious legacies has been the notion that average Americans must be shielded from what really happens on matters of national security, even something as important as the murder of a president.

Since the Warren Commission probe of the JFK assassination, other investigations of serious government wrongdoing, one after another, have been truncated – CIA abuses, Iran-Contra, Contra drug trafficking, Iraq-gate, misuse of Iraq War intelligence, Abu Ghraib – supposedly because the full stories would undermine morale or otherwise not be “good for the country.”

Ultimately, of course, this loss of a true history is corrosive to the concept of a democratic republic, and it has been one of our goals as a publication to flesh out the facts of those failed investigations. In that light, we are publishing a report from JFK assassination expert Lisa Pease on a recent historical conference in Washington:

Forty-two years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. In Bethesda, Maryland, this past weekend, a group of distinguished journalists, historians, scientists and others gathered to discuss and debate the evidence of conspiracy in the JFK case.

While the research community has often slammed the mainstream media for not covering the facts of the case, the blame must go both ways. The conference organizers offered no handouts, no summaries of what is new in the case this year, or any hook upon which a journalist might hang a story.

As one of the reporters said in a panel discussion, this is a story without an ending, and how satisfying is that?

But that is a tragedy, in light of the Downing Street Memo and other evidence that the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq was built on a false platform. The common thread throughout the weekend was that secrecy and democracy cannot safely coexist, that the more we have of the former, the less we have of the latter.

The credentials of the speakers this year was more impressive than in previous conferences. Featured speakers included former presidential candidate Gary Hart, author James Bamford, journalists Jeff Morley and Salon founder David Talbot, and historians David Wrone and John Newman (who was a military intelligence analyst), and the former head of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey.

Former Sen. Hart, a Colorado Democrat, recounted his experiences on the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more popularly known as the “Church Committee” after its leader, Sen. Frank Church.

Hart began with a disclaimer saying he didn’t read the assassination books, hadn’t reviewed his Church Committee files, and warned that everything he said should be prefaced with, “as I recall.”

Little Interest

According to Hart, there was little interest among Committee members in seriously investigating the intelligence community. There had been little oversight of the CIA since its creation 28 years earlier. Reviewing the CIA’s operations seemed both a gargantuan and ultimately unnecessary task. The Vietnam War was in its last days, and there was the sense that poking around in Agency business might undermine morale.

The Committee members also realized that if there was even one leak, their work would be over. That’s one of the reasons there was so little oversight in the years up to that point. Simply put, the CIA did not trust Congress to keep its secrets. So they implemented strict security.

One day, CIA Director William Colby asked for even more security than ever before. He wanted the room swept for bugs before they began. Colby also insisted only members, not their staff, attended.

At that session, Colby presented Committee members with the 600-page Inspector General report on Agency abuses, a document popularly known as the “family jewels.” Included in that document were tales of drug experiments on both witting and unwitting subjects, the wholesale opening of mail, bugging operations, and plots to overthrow governments including -- “with almost demented insistence,” Hart said -- the attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

The Committee members were shocked. And significantly, Hart said that only a few items from that report have ever made it to the public, begging the question of what other abuses occurred. How can we measure the success of Congressional oversight if we don’t know if any of those other abuses were successfully handled?

Hart recounted an episode where he had the chance to meet one of the CIA’s top contract assassins, known only as QJ/WIN. After a long series of instructions, Hart arrived at the location, only to find QJ/WIN did not want to talk to him. Hart wrote about that episode in fictional form in the novel Double Man (co-written with William Cohen).

When Hart ran for president, he said he was frequently asked what he would do about the Kennedy assassination. He promised if elected, he would reopen the investigation. But then he was caught with Donna Rice on a boat in Florida. “If you’ve seen the movie ‘Bullworth,’ you know that now we can assassinate people with cameras,” he said.

Few Theories

Most of the speakers did not offer theories as to who killed Kennedy, but presented instead the context of the event within the framework of the Kennedy administration during the Cold War.

On that point, there was considerable agreement that John and his brother Robert Kennedy found themselves increasingly isolated within their own administration. They were at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA over Cuba and Vietnam.

Bamford discussed documents from Operation Northwoods, a plan that called for a wave of terrorism inside the United States that falsely would be blamed on Fidel Castro and become the justification for invading Cuba.

At one point, all the Joint Chiefs had signed off on these plans. Kennedy stood alone in opposing this, and one is left wondering if that was one of the prime motives for his murder.

Professor Blakey’s hands shook slightly as he spoke to the group gathered for dinner on Saturday night. He confessed that he had trusted the CIA too much.

CIA Director Stansfield Turner showed Blakey a letter in which Turner admonished CIA people not to lie to the committee members. Blakey believed that was enough. He finds now that was not the case.

Blakey denied that his long background dealing with organized crime was the reason he chose to focus on the Mob as the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. He said when he looked for a group that could connect both Oswald and Ruby, the choice seemed clear that the Mob fit the bill. He said if proof surfaced that Oswald had been framed, that would indicate conspirators other than the Mob, which did not have that capability.

CIA Obstacles

Blakey spoke specifically about George Joannides, a CIA psychological warfare expert and the focus of several of Jeff Morley’s articles about the case. Joannides had been in charge of the anti-Castro Cuban student organization known as the DRE.

Carlos Bringuier of the DRE fought verbally with Oswald in the streets of Miami, which led to the arrest of Oswald just weeks before the assassination, and later put Oswald on the air in a DRE-sponsored program in which Oswald said he was a Marxist.

During the House investigation, Blakey assigned two of his young law school student assistants, Edward Lopez and Dan Hardway, to the CIA. They were set up in an office at CIA and given great freedom to request documents.

The Agency was forced to comply. But when Lopez and Hardway started pressing for more of the DRE documents, Joannides, who had been brought back from retirement to oversee the investigation, went to Blakey and complained that Lopez and Hardway were too aggressive, that they were pushing too hard.

Blakey said at the time, he believed the CIA. Now he wished he had backed up Lopez and Hardway.

In addition, Blakey had originally used the Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), a method for testing metal composition in bullets, as the basis for saying that – despite the acoustical evidence of conspiracy – Oswald had fired the fatal shots. Now, in light of the exposes about the inaccuracies of NAA, Blakey called that “junk science.”

Blakey’s mea culpa met with mixed reaction from the crowd, who asked him several questions, including why he had not continued with the effort in effect to file perjury charges against senior CIA official David Atlee Phillips after he was caught red-handed lying to the Committee. (Blakey claimed not to know anything about that effort, which was in essence shut down upon his arrival.)

The crowd did applaud him, however, for being the first public official to go on record saying there was a probable conspiracy in the assassination. He based that on the acoustical evidence.

The Dictabelt

In regards to the acoustical evidence, two presenters spoke back to back on Saturday about the Dictabelt tape – a tape a motorcycle cop made inadvertently during the shooting of Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.

The House assassination committee hired two different companies to evaluate the evidence and both agreed the tape showed five distinct shots. Blakely only asked the Committee to evaluate the evidence for four of the shots, one of which purportedly came from the “grassy knoll.” (Blakey did not see the point in looking at five shots when four was enough to prove conspiracy and a knoll shot.)

Richard Garwin, whose program biography did not include his work for the CIA (which he acknowledged during the Q&A), presented an opaque argument that the sounds on the Dictabelt tape came a minute too late to have been any of the shots in Dealey Plaza. Presenting charts and graphs that confused most people in the audience, and fumbling over his sound files, Garwin was not well received.

Garwin was followed by Donald Thomas, who had written an article on the acoustical evidence for the well-respected British publication Science & Justice (2001 – see http://www.forensic-science-society.org.uk/Thomas.pdf).

Dr. Thomas presented a stark contrast to Garwin. Thomas began by asserting that the number on the tape Garwin tested was not the number of the tape the House assassination committee tested. He also pointed out that there is a difference in recording speed and playback speed, and that Garwin’s team had applied one which made the shot sounds no longer line up with the House committee analysis.

Thomas provided slides that made clear the points he was making. One could feel the change in the room. People now felt they could follow along as Thomas lined up each sound with the motorcycle’s probable position, and then showed us pictures from the Zapruder film and others that confirmed that the motorcycle cop, Officer H.B. McLain, was indeed in those positions at those times.

Lone Assassin?

Former military intelligence analyst John Newman was the only speaker willing to speculate about a potential conspirator, based on the documentary record.

Professor Newman reviewed how CIA reports of Oswald’s trips to the Cuban and Soviet embassies was a key factor in getting President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Warren Commission members to go with the Oswald as lone assassin line.

Newman described how the reports in essence created a “World War III” virus, such that after the assassination, no one wanted to look too closely at who Oswald served, lest it touch off a nuclear war with the Soviets or the Cubans.

Newman traced how false information that helped promote this WWIII virus got into Oswald’s file and concluded that the person who controlled the file at those points was Ann Egerter, one of the six or so hand-picked operatives working in James Jesus Angleton’s CI/SIG unit – the Special Investigations Group within the larger 200-man Counterintelligence group at CIA.

Newman also pointed out how many in the Agency feared Angleton, feared for their lives if they crossed him, and suggested Egerter would not have manipulated Oswald’s file on her own, but only under express instructions from Angleton himself.

The U.S. 'Empire'

Virginia lawyer Dan Alcorn spoke of the parallels between George Washington’s farewell address, in which he warned against the danger of maintaining a standing army, and Eisenhower’s admonition to beware the Military-Industrial complex.

“I think what’s at stake is the identity of our country and what kind of country we want to be,” Alcorn said. “The world ‘empire’ has been thrown around. I can’t believe people around Washington have seriously discussed describing themselves as an empire.

“But we were not founded to be an empire. A free republic cannot be an empire. I think people have lost touch with the ethic of the country and what the country should be. [We’ve converted ourselves into] a global domination state…

“If morality doesn’t concern us, practicality should. The reason we’re a free republic is that it’s a self-sustaining system on an ethical basis. Lessons of history are that empires do not succeed.”

Kennedy’s consistent refusal to allow America to become an empire, and his desire to avoid a “pax Americana” may have been key motives for his assassination.

The topic of the Iraq War and the lies that took the nation to war was a frequent sub-theme at the conference. To many of the 135 people gathered, history is one long through line. By not confronting the lies we were given about the assassination and demanding government accountability, we essentially agreed to look the other way, empowering government to lie to us about other events.

To study the assassination is to peer into the yawning chasm between what we are told happened, and our true history. Information empowers us to take corrective action. Disinformation – or a lack of information – keeps us out of the loop, unable to make appropriate choices for oversight. Nowhere has that point been brought home more strongly than in the buildup to war in Iraq.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of the speakers as Don Thompson, rather than Thomas.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lisa Pease began studying the Kennedy assassination in 1992 after observing how the raw evidence from the Warren Commission’s investigation was misrepresented in the mainstream media. Some of her writings can be found in the anthology, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Her Web site is www.realhistoryarchives.com.

[Robert Howard]

So far, I've only been able to come up wtih three published reports on any of the three conferences last weekend, all about DC - Walter Pincus in the Wasington Post, Andrew Bridges of AP and Lisa Pease for Consortium News - [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/112205A.html ], the last of which is the best and most accurate, IMO.

Here's Bridges, quoting Nicola Longord of the TSBD muse, "To my knowledge, there have not been any new developments," sounds very similar to Bob Porter of the TSBD a few years ago, saying, "Nothing is happening and nothing is planned" for the anniversary, when outside his window there were thousands of people and a host of speakers marking the occassion that I tape recorded and transcribed, and have around here somewhere.

November 21, 2005

JFK Assassination Debate Lives On

By ANDREW BRIDGES

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the 42 years since the assassination of President Kennedy, here's what has been agreed on by those who still pursue one of the most sensational crimes in history: very little, if anything.

After the release of millions of pages of documents, and more than four decades of probes by professionals and amateurs, there is no consensus among those who toil in the conspiracy theory industry.

Some see the fingerprints of the Mafia, others the CIA. For some it was the Cubans, the Russians, Jimmy Hoffa or just about everyone who was anyone on or about Nov. 22, 1963.

No theory tying together disparate characters or events is too outlandish: Remember the Maine? Some even link the explosion that sank the U.S. battleship in Havana harbor in 1898 to the shooting of Kennedy 65 years later, the belief being that both marked trumped-up pretexts for American intervention in Cuba.

Interest comes to a head each year around the time of the assassination anniversary, which is Tuesday.

"To my knowledge, there have not been any new developments," said Nicola Longford, the executive director of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where Kennedy was shot. "It's just part of the enduring myth and reality of this intoxicating story. It's just a continuing fascination with solving a mystery."

The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and squeezed off just three shots at Kennedy's motorcade from the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the plaza. A 1979 report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded Oswald probably did not act alone - a contention supported by a majority of Americans polled in 2003, the 40th anniversary of the assassination.

A conference dedicated to "Cracking the JFK Case" recently drew roughly 100 people to a Bethesda, Md., hotel. Sessions covered everything from the CIA's monitoring of Oswald in the months prior to the assassination to what a Dallas police audio tape may - or may not - prove about the numbers of shots fired.

Former Sen. Gary Hart reminded participants that his own investigative foray into the case, as a member of the Church Committee that met in 1975 and 1976, revealed both the Mafia and the Cuban exile community had ample reasons to want Kennedy dead.

"It's an understatement to say there were some very, very unhappy people in both those camps," said Hart.

Jim Lesar, a Washington, D.C., attorney who helped organize the conference, said the three-day meeting was dedicated to the proposition that Kennedy's death remains an open investigation.

The move was in part a ploy to rekindle interest in JFK. Lesar cited last year's reopening of the investigation into the slaying of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, as an example of what he'd like to see done with the Kennedy assassination.

"The Department of Justice is showing no inhibitions in dealing with 40-year-old civil rights cases, but the JFK case is being left to languish," Lesar said.

On the private side of the equation, he added that the lack of documents that could prove or disprove many theories hampers ongoing investigative efforts. "There is still a load of information we need to accurately and completely understand what happened," Lesar said.

Meanwhile, the cadre of conspiracy theorists is growing older and grayer and sources are dying off, further slowing progress, conference participants said.

"The case seems frozen now, perhaps more than it's been for a number of years," said David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, who is writing his own book on the case.

--

LISA'S REPORT

consortiumnews.com

The Enduring JFK Mystery

By Lisa Pease

November 22, 2005

Editor’s Note: The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the darkest moments in modern American history. But one of its most pernicious legacies has been the notion that average Americans must be shielded from what really happens on matters of national security, even something as important as the murder of a president.

Since the Warren Commission probe of the JFK assassination, other investigations of serious government wrongdoing, one after another, have been truncated – CIA abuses, Iran-Contra, Contra drug trafficking, Iraq-gate, misuse of Iraq War intelligence, Abu Ghraib – supposedly because the full stories would undermine morale or otherwise not be “good for the country.”

Ultimately, of course, this loss of a true history is corrosive to the concept of a democratic republic, and it has been one of our goals as a publication to flesh out the facts of those failed investigations. In that light, we are publishing a report from JFK assassination expert Lisa Pease on a recent historical conference in Washington:

Forty-two years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. In Bethesda, Maryland, this past weekend, a group of distinguished journalists, historians, scientists and others gathered to discuss and debate the evidence of conspiracy in the JFK case.

While the research community has often slammed the mainstream media for not covering the facts of the case, the blame must go both ways. The conference organizers offered no handouts, no summaries of what is new in the case this year, or any hook upon which a journalist might hang a story.

As one of the reporters said in a panel discussion, this is a story without an ending, and how satisfying is that?

But that is a tragedy, in light of the Downing Street Memo and other evidence that the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq was built on a false platform. The common thread throughout the weekend was that secrecy and democracy cannot safely coexist, that the more we have of the former, the less we have of the latter.

The credentials of the speakers this year was more impressive than in previous conferences. Featured speakers included former presidential candidate Gary Hart, author James Bamford, journalists Jeff Morley and Salon founder David Talbot, and historians David Wrone and John Newman (who was a military intelligence analyst), and the former head of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey.

Former Sen. Hart, a Colorado Democrat, recounted his experiences on the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more popularly known as the “Church Committee” after its leader, Sen. Frank Church.

Hart began with a disclaimer saying he didn’t read the assassination books, hadn’t reviewed his Church Committee files, and warned that everything he said should be prefaced with, “as I recall.”

Little Interest

According to Hart, there was little interest among Committee members in seriously investigating the intelligence community. There had been little oversight of the CIA since its creation 28 years earlier. Reviewing the CIA’s operations seemed both a gargantuan and ultimately unnecessary task. The Vietnam War was in its last days, and there was the sense that poking around in Agency business might undermine morale.

The Committee members also realized that if there was even one leak, their work would be over. That’s one of the reasons there was so little oversight in the years up to that point. Simply put, the CIA did not trust Congress to keep its secrets. So they implemented strict security.

One day, CIA Director William Colby asked for even more security than ever before. He wanted the room swept for bugs before they began. Colby also insisted only members, not their staff, attended.

At that session, Colby presented Committee members with the 600-page Inspector General report on Agency abuses, a document popularly known as the “family jewels.” Included in that document were tales of drug experiments on both witting and unwitting subjects, the wholesale opening of mail, bugging operations, and plots to overthrow governments including -- “with almost demented insistence,” Hart said -- the attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

The Committee members were shocked. And significantly, Hart said that only a few items from that report have ever made it to the public, begging the question of what other abuses occurred. How can we measure the success of Congressional oversight if we don’t know if any of those other abuses were successfully handled?

Hart recounted an episode where he had the chance to meet one of the CIA’s top contract assassins, known only as QJ/WIN. After a long series of instructions, Hart arrived at the location, only to find QJ/WIN did not want to talk to him. Hart wrote about that episode in fictional form in the novel Double Man (co-written with William Cohen).

When Hart ran for president, he said he was frequently asked what he would do about the Kennedy assassination. He promised if elected, he would reopen the investigation. But then he was caught with Donna Rice on a boat in Florida. “If you’ve seen the movie ‘Bullworth,’ you know that now we can assassinate people with cameras,” he said.

Few Theories

Most of the speakers did not offer theories as to who killed Kennedy, but presented instead the context of the event within the framework of the Kennedy administration during the Cold War.

On that point, there was considerable agreement that John and his brother Robert Kennedy found themselves increasingly isolated within their own administration. They were at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA over Cuba and Vietnam.

Bamford discussed documents from Operation Northwoods, a plan that called for a wave of terrorism inside the United States that falsely would be blamed on Fidel Castro and become the justification for invading Cuba.

At one point, all the Joint Chiefs had signed off on these plans. Kennedy stood alone in opposing this, and one is left wondering if that was one of the prime motives for his murder.

Professor Blakey’s hands shook slightly as he spoke to the group gathered for dinner on Saturday night. He confessed that he had trusted the CIA too much.

CIA Director Stansfield Turner showed Blakey a letter in which Turner admonished CIA people not to lie to the committee members. Blakey believed that was enough. He finds now that was not the case.

Blakey denied that his long background dealing with organized crime was the reason he chose to focus on the Mob as the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. He said when he looked for a group that could connect both Oswald and Ruby, the choice seemed clear that the Mob fit the bill. He said if proof surfaced that Oswald had been framed, that would indicate conspirators other than the Mob, which did not have that capability.

CIA Obstacles

Blakey spoke specifically about George Joannides, a CIA psychological warfare expert and the focus of several of Jeff Morley’s articles about the case. Joannides had been in charge of the anti-Castro Cuban student organization known as the DRE.

Carlos Bringuier of the DRE fought verbally with Oswald in the streets of Miami, which led to the arrest of Oswald just weeks before the assassination, and later put Oswald on the air in a DRE-sponsored program in which Oswald said he was a Marxist.

During the House investigation, Blakey assigned two of his young law school student assistants, Edward Lopez and Dan Hardway, to the CIA. They were set up in an office at CIA and given great freedom to request documents.

The Agency was forced to comply. But when Lopez and Hardway started pressing for more of the DRE documents, Joannides, who had been brought back from retirement to oversee the investigation, went to Blakey and complained that Lopez and Hardway were too aggressive, that they were pushing too hard.

Blakey said at the time, he believed the CIA. Now he wished he had backed up Lopez and Hardway.

In addition, Blakey had originally used the Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), a method for testing metal composition in bullets, as the basis for saying that – despite the acoustical evidence of conspiracy – Oswald had fired the fatal shots. Now, in light of the exposes about the inaccuracies of NAA, Blakey called that “junk science.”

Blakey’s mea culpa met with mixed reaction from the crowd, who asked him several questions, including why he had not continued with the effort in effect to file perjury charges against senior CIA official David Atlee Phillips after he was caught red-handed lying to the Committee. (Blakey claimed not to know anything about that effort, which was in essence shut down upon his arrival.)

The crowd did applaud him, however, for being the first public official to go on record saying there was a probable conspiracy in the assassination. He based that on the acoustical evidence.

The Dictabelt

In regards to the acoustical evidence, two presenters spoke back to back on Saturday about the Dictabelt tape – a tape a motorcycle cop made inadvertently during the shooting of Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.

The House assassination committee hired two different companies to evaluate the evidence and both agreed the tape showed five distinct shots. Blakely only asked the Committee to evaluate the evidence for four of the shots, one of which purportedly came from the “grassy knoll.” (Blakey did not see the point in looking at five shots when four was enough to prove conspiracy and a knoll shot.)

Richard Garwin, whose program biography did not include his work for the CIA (which he acknowledged during the Q&A), presented an opaque argument that the sounds on the Dictabelt tape came a minute too late to have been any of the shots in Dealey Plaza. Presenting charts and graphs that confused most people in the audience, and fumbling over his sound files, Garwin was not well received.

Garwin was followed by Donald Thomas, who had written an article on the acoustical evidence for the well-respected British publication Science & Justice (2001 – see http://www.forensic-science-society.org.uk/Thomas.pdf).

Dr. Thomas presented a stark contrast to Garwin. Thomas began by asserting that the number on the tape Garwin tested was not the number of the tape the House assassination committee tested. He also pointed out that there is a difference in recording speed and playback speed, and that Garwin’s team had applied one which made the shot sounds no longer line up with the House committee analysis.

Thomas provided slides that made clear the points he was making. One could feel the change in the room. People now felt they could follow along as Thomas lined up each sound with the motorcycle’s probable position, and then showed us pictures from the Zapruder film and others that confirmed that the motorcycle cop, Officer H.B. McLain, was indeed in those positions at those times.

Lone Assassin?

Former military intelligence analyst John Newman was the only speaker willing to speculate about a potential conspirator, based on the documentary record.

Professor Newman reviewed how CIA reports of Oswald’s trips to the Cuban and Soviet embassies was a key factor in getting President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Warren Commission members to go with the Oswald as lone assassin line.

Newman described how the reports in essence created a “World War III” virus, such that after the assassination, no one wanted to look too closely at who Oswald served, lest it touch off a nuclear war with the Soviets or the Cubans.

Newman traced how false information that helped promote this WWIII virus got into Oswald’s file and concluded that the person who controlled the file at those points was Ann Egerter, one of the six or so hand-picked operatives working in James Jesus Angleton’s CI/SIG unit – the Special Investigations Group within the larger 200-man Counterintelligence group at CIA.

Newman also pointed out how many in the Agency feared Angleton, feared for their lives if they crossed him, and suggested Egerter would not have manipulated Oswald’s file on her own, but only under express instructions from Angleton himself.

The U.S. 'Empire'

Virginia lawyer Dan Alcorn spoke of the parallels between George Washington’s farewell address, in which he warned against the danger of maintaining a standing army, and Eisenhower’s admonition to beware the Military-Industrial complex.

“I think what’s at stake is the identity of our country and what kind of country we want to be,” Alcorn said. “The world ‘empire’ has been thrown around. I can’t believe people around Washington have seriously discussed describing themselves as an empire.

“But we were not founded to be an empire. A free republic cannot be an empire. I think people have lost touch with the ethic of the country and what the country should be. [We’ve converted ourselves into] a global domination state…

“If morality doesn’t concern us, practicality should. The reason we’re a free republic is that it’s a self-sustaining system on an ethical basis. Lessons of history are that empires do not succeed.”

Kennedy’s consistent refusal to allow America to become an empire, and his desire to avoid a “pax Americana” may have been key motives for his assassination.

The topic of the Iraq War and the lies that took the nation to war was a frequent sub-theme at the conference. To many of the 135 people gathered, history is one long through line. By not confronting the lies we were given about the assassination and demanding government accountability, we essentially agreed to look the other way, empowering government to lie to us about other events.

To study the assassination is to peer into the yawning chasm between what we are told happened, and our true history. Information empowers us to take corrective action. Disinformation – or a lack of information – keeps us out of the loop, unable to make appropriate choices for oversight. Nowhere has that point been brought home more strongly than in the buildup to war in Iraq.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of the speakers as Don Thompson, rather than Thomas.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lisa Pease began studying the Kennedy assassination in 1992 after observing how the raw evidence from the Warren Commission’s investigation was misrepresented in the mainstream media. Some of her writings can be found in the anthology, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Her Web site is www.realhistoryarchives.com.

Very compelling information Bill! Especially in light of the fact that "Pax Americana" seems very apropos in describing our country these day's.

[William Kelly]

DURING INTERMISSION OF THE COPA CONFERENCE IN DALLAS IN 1998, [sEE VINCENT SALANDRIA'S STURRING SPEACH ], I TAPE RECORDED THE SPEAKERS AT DEALEY PLAZA AND LATER TRANSCIBED WHAT THEY SAID, AN EVENT THAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TOTALLY IGNORED. I HOPE SOMEBODY GETS SOMETHING OUT OF ALL THIS.

The Event That Never Happened

DEALEY PLAZA MEMORIAL SERVICE - Sunday, 11/22/98 THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION

OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY. Edited and transcribed by William Kelly

"Build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness. Conduct it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity. Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question." - George Bannerman Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News.

CNN news reported that for the first time in 35 years there was to be no memorial service at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1998, the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

CBS News with Dan Rather reported that the Final Report of the JFK Assassinations Records Review Board "did find enough evidence to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman," while the Final Report never concluded any such thing.

Then the Associated Press (AP) reported from Dallas on November 22 that, "JFK assassination hype fades" and that "other than the usual handful of curious people milling about Dealey Plaza, the day was expected to be uneventful..."

Bob Porter of the Fourth Floor Museum told a reporter that nothing was scheduled to happen at Dealey Plaza that day, even though, if he looked out his office window, he could see hundreds if not over a thousand people gathering around the Grassy Knoll for a memorial service in honor of the slain president.

Well, what actually occured was that from noon until 1pm, the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) took a break from their fifth annual conference at Union Station, two blocks away, to hold a memorial service that was attended by a sea of people who filled the both sides of the street of the entire plaza. Participants in the JFK LANCER conference, also held in Dallas that weekend, also attended, as well as ordinary tourists, interested citizens and passersby.

COPA is an organization composed of three independent groups - the Assassination Records and Research Center (ARRC) of Washington D.C., the Committee for an Open Archvies (COA) and the Citizens for the Truth about the John F. Kennedy Assassination (CTKA). They are professional associations interested in developing the truth about the assassination, that lobbied extensively for the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Review Act and have met with Cuban officials in the Bahamas to obtain information about the assassination from Cuban sources.

In an address before COPA the previous day, the chairman of the Assassinations Records Review Board, John Tunheim reiterated the Final Report's first paragraph that it "will not offer conclusions about what the assassination records released did or did not prove," and that significant documents were missing and some were even destroyed by federal agencies after the board began its business of identifying and releasing records to the public.

Others who spoke at the COPA conference included Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria, history professor John Newman, former FBI agent William Turner and others who have been instrumental in reviewing the recently released documents and attempting to make sense of what the government wants to maintain a mystery.

At noon on Sunday, November 22, 1998, COPA board member, and Washington D.C. attorney Dan Alcorn began the memorial service at Dealey Plaza.

Dan Alcorn : The federal board - The JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) discovered that many of the records have been destroyed, and we do not have a complete record. Yet we have a much more of a documentary record than we have had ever before.

There's a memorial down on the street that has a quotation from the bible: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

That quote is also inscribed on the wall of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia, so there is a commonality of thought there. Many of us are here today because we have never believed that the government has told us the truth about the assassination, and we believe that unless we know the truth, we are not free.

Unless we know the truth about these events we are not a free people and we have not been a free people as long as we have been lied to about the events that occured here. The spirit of our commemorative event is to take those words to heart, and until we know the truth and the full truth of what occured in the street before us today on a day very much like today, a clear, sunny day in the fall of 1963.

On behalf of our organization I will make a challenge to you. Everyone here must be here because you care very deeply about the meaning of this event and what it means to our history as a nation. I will make the challenge to you to join us in our efforts in seeking the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy. And not just the truth as pieced together by citizens who put in the time and effort to this, but to actually cause the government to tell the truth about this event, and for the government to come forward and give us a full and truthful accounting of what happened here in 1963. Otherwise, we in fact are not the free people we want to be, have been and we should be as a nation.

You know, it is a crime for a citizen of this country to tell a lie to a federal investigator, but it is not a crime for your government to lie to you. And we feel this is an unfair relationship. If it's a crime for us to lie to our government, it should be a crime for us t o lie as well.

It is in that spirit of investigation and of honest inquiry that our organization has worked closely with the Assassinations Records Review Board to get materials out. They ran into an obstructive wall of secrecy at the federal agencies. They told us that they ran into a Cold War system of secrecy that refused to relent on the documents and information as it related to this event. And this was thirty-five years after the event occured, and after a federal board was set up by the Congress to try to get information released about what happened here.

So we call on you to join us in our efforts. We think that great nations and civilizations cannot survive the kinds of doubt and turmoil that have been raised by the events that happened here. If you study the history of great civilizations you will find that when they lost their way in terms of truth, self-governing, democratic and republican institutions began their decline and was one of the reasons for their ultimate collapse. We do not want the decline and decay of our public and political system. We want to be a part of a healthy revival of those institutions.

We have experienced a decline in the public's trust in government since November,1963, a blimp in the charts that notes the significance of these events. Today a majority of people don't even bother to vote. The largest turnout of voters in American history was in 1960. The decline in public confidence in the government began with the ambush at Dealey Plaza and has continually declined since then. These trends are very troubling.

So we ask you to join us and support the effort we have started to try to pursue the truth of these events, to try to pursue credibility, honesty and openness on behalf of our governmental institutions. And by that effort to try to turn our nation in a healthy direction, to build stronger democratic institutions, to build a stronger faith between the pubic and its government. We feel that is essential, and we call on you as free citizens of this nation to join us in that effort.

I'm going to introduce to you a series of speakers who have been very involved in this issue and can give you the benefit of their experience as well. The first is Mark Lane, one of the earliest researchers in this case who did tremendous ground-breaking work, recorded much of his work for posterity and has written extensively about this case.

Mark Lane: I remember coming here thirty-five years ago and there were no crowds on the grassy knoll. But now, after all of these years, although they have a museum over there on the 6th Floor, which is a museum dedicated to a place where nothing happened. They don't have a plaque over here, on the grassy knoll, and they should.

Thirty-five years ago today the Dallas Morning News published a full page ad with the sarcastic heading: "Welcome To Dallas Mr. President," and then went on to practically call him a communist and a trator. That was then.

Today's Dallas Morning News has an editorial: "Kennedy's Legacy - The Time Is Ripe For Idealism," with no references to him being a communist or a traitor. Now he's a great man. They'll tell us everything about John Kennedy, everything, except who killed him. Because look at the rest of the Dallas Morning News, thirty-five years later, when every survey in America shows that 75 to 95% of the people are convinced that there was a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, here we go in the guise of a book review in today's Dallas Morning News: Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy, Oswald Alone Killed Tippit, One Man Two Murders, they're sticking with the same story. I have but one word for the Dallas Morning News:

Shame. Shame on you, you are discracing the city of Dallas, and it is not fair to do that.

I'll tell you where there should be plaques in this city. There were a number of brave, courageous residents of this city, longtime residents of Texas, who had the courage to speak the truth to power in the face of intimidation and threats. Right over there was Jean Hill, and she's still there thirty-five years later, one of the first to tell the truth that shots came from behind that wooden fence. And they attacked her and ridiculed her. There should be a plaque over there commemorating her right on the spot where she is standing...

The Grassy Knoll should be called "Lee Bowers Memorial Park," the railroad bridge should be the Holland-Dode-Symmons Underpass - that's the monuments that should be named after the people of this state, people who had the courage to come forward with the truth, while the Dallas Morning News lied thirty-five years ago and continues to lie thirty-five years later.

This is the place where our leader was murdered. This is hollowed grown, and the people of this country know it. It is supose to be the largest tourist attraction in Dallas. There's people here all the time, at the grassy knoll, nobody looks for the truth from the 6th floor of the Book Depository building, because the people of America know the truth, even though the Dallas Morning News is unwilling to share the information with us.

That day in Dallas, in this city, at this location, when the government of the United States executed its own president, when that happened, we as a nation, lost our code of honor, lost our sense of honor. And it can only be restored when the government of the United States - and it will not do it without us insisting, and marching and fighting and voting, and putting this matter on the agenda,...but when that day comes that the government of the United States tells us the truth and all the factual details about the assassination, including their role in the murder. When that day comes, honor will be restored to this nation. Thank you.

Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is a member of the Board of Directors of COPA, a medical doctor from San Francisco who has researched this issue and has written about it in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Columbia Journalism Review, Dr. Gary Agular.

Dr. Gary Agular: It's hard to follow such a powerful speaker as Mark Lane and I certainly can't hope to match his eloquence, wit or command of this case, but what I can share with you is evidence...that autopsy photos are missing. This is something that you will not read in the Dallas Morning News, Time or Newsweek, but is something that is very clearly established, the ARRB releases are very clear on the point, the autopsy pathologists have described autopsy photographs that are missing. One of them defiantly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was supposed to tell us the truth about the assassination...which not only did not report that, it wasn't released until the ARRB came along.

There is enormous evidence in the forensic, in the medical area alone that indicates there was more assassin, but what is most shameful of all is the government's willingness, even in subsequent investigations, to lie about that evidence. Thank God there was an Assassinations Records Review Board, thank God they did the work they did, because now we no longer have to rely on government appointed authorities to tell us that we can trust the government's original conclusions, because we know we can't.

We know they've destroyed evidence, not only in the medical-autopsy area, not only among photographs, we know that witnesses have been intimated, and it is ashame that you won't read about that. No credible journalist will touch the story. It is a story not unlike the story of the CIA and crack cocaine, which led to the downfall of Gary Webb, before two volumes of the CIA Inspector's Report that confirmed much more than what Gary Webb even alleged about the CIA's complicity in the cocaine importation. But you won't read about that in the Dallas Morning News. You barely get a small column about it in the New York Times after they devote many, many column inches defamined journalists who talk about the subject.

I think it is important that those of you who are here today continue to insist that your government is accountable to you and does not conduct its operations in secrecy, that it does not deny you the evidence that is collected in its investigations and that it be as accountable to us as it insists we be accountable to it.

I hope you will continue to work with us to force the government to be responsible and admit the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is a member of the Board of Directors of COPA, a professor at Dartmouth, and the author of a number of books about the assassination, Dr. Phillip Melanson.

Dr. Phillip Melanson: Thank you. As we commemorate the 35th anniversary of this terrible political tragedy that so negatively affected our lives, our policies, our political system and our faith in our own government, we should remind ourselves that the tragedy of the President's assassination is compounded by a separate but related tragedy - the failulre of our law enforcement institutions, the failure of our political institutions and the failure of the media to affectively discover the truth of who killed President Kennedy and why. And until that happens, and it is never too late to find the truth if the citizens demand it, and until that happens the original tragedy will be compounded like a bad political debt into the next millenieum, and the faith in our political system will continue to erode.

I think also the failure to come to grips with who killed President Kennedy and why is related to the other assassinations in the 1960s, and that's why Martin Luther King's is begging the Justice Department to look for justice in that case, and we hear from Siran's lawyer in the case of Robert Kennedy.

If we had come to terms with what happened here at Dealey Plaza, discovered the truth and admitted it, the whole history of the 1960s would be different.

If the vast majority of the public believes this case is an unsolved conspiracy, who are the minority in officialdom to deny us the truth and to cling to the lone-assassin theory like it was an absolute religion in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Thank you.

Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is an acclaimed author and professor of history at the University of Maryland. His books include JFK and Vietnam and Oswald and the CIA, Dr. John Newman.

Dr. John Newman: I would like to say a few words about the media, and a couple of new developments for all of you gathered here. When I come here at this time of the year, I remember another place, a place connected to this place, and without the events that happened here, the other place would not exist, and that's the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., which is like no other war memorial in the world. I've been to other war memorials in Russia, China and Germany, and people frequent those memorials, they eat lunch there and talk and its a nice place to be. I don't how many of you have been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., but nobody hangs out It's a very, very somber place because there's still something going on there, something deep, something that's still in our psyche, and our culture and it connects directly to Dealey Plaza. And I think most people know that.

I'm not going to give a speech on the Vietnam War, but I think it is clear now that John F. Kennedy was on his way to pulling us out of Vietnam when he died, and the events that happened here catapulted us to that devistating debacle called the Vietnam War.

I'd like to echo what Mark Lane said about the media. I just heard that CNN this morning said that for the first time in all these years there were no events planned for Dealey Plaza on this day. So you are not here, this gathering does not exist. Furthermore, the evening before last, none other than Dan Rather, the major icon of the network television, made the announcement that the Review Board had conducted this very large investigation and looked at all these millions of pages of documents and had discovered that the lone-nut hypothesis was true, which was attributed to Judge Tunheim. Judge Tunheim was here in Dallas and refutes this story, and all of you who have followed this story know that the Review Board has taken no such position.

But it never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist and turn and obfuscate and block this mass movement to find the truth. Let me close by giving you a few examples of the information that is flowing out of these new files, and I think these are appropriate because of what happened here at Dealey Plaza. I am thinking particularly of a tape recorded conversation between President Johnson and Senator Russell, one of the Warren Comissoners. At great length they were able to save the situation and preserve the lone-nut hypothesis with that wonderful, sine qua non - CE399, the magic bullet that broke seven bones and came out prestine on a stretcher.

The newly released tape is very interesting because Sen. Russell calls the President to explain to him what this single-bullet theory is, and at the end of it he says distinctly, "I don't believe a word of it." And President Johnson said, "I don't either."

And I think that is appropriate thing to share with you the types of things that are coming out of the files. Then there is the galley proofs of the Warren Report where our estimed President Ford moved the bullet hole up, and these are the types of things that are in the newly released documents, but the mainstream media is not there to put them on page one.

Occasionally they get noted, but its like ships passing in the night. I am heartened to see by the turnout here today, that with respect to the American people, this is not passing in the night and I hope as we stand here today and think about the events that happened here, we pass the torch to a younger generation, which we are doing, our movement and our desire for the truth in this case carries on. Thank you very much.

Dan Alcorn: We are approaching the time in our program which is a memorial to the events that happened here thirty-five years ago, so for that purpose I'd like to introduce to you the executive secretary of COPA, a man who has devoted himself for a number of years to working on the projects we have as an organization, but has also done his own independent research on the assassination. I think that those who have had the experience of working with John Judge know of his serious and sincere commitment to investigating the issues that are at stake here and to his contribution that he has made to the the history of the investigation of the assassination. He has really been the heart and soul of the work we have done through COPA. He has put in a tremendous volunteer effort and sacrificed and suffered a great deal for the efforts he has made, which have gone largely uncompensated. So let me introduce to you the executive secretary of COPA, John Judge.

John Judge: It is interesting to see such a large crowd. For the better part of the last 25 years, I have come out here every year, usually with only five or six people, often in worse weather than this, with researcher and newspaper editor Penn Jones, who some of you know as having done work on the death of the witnesses, who passed on this year.

From the inception of the national security and military-intelligence state in the late 1940s, the history of this country has been a commodity that has been owned by that state. The people who don't own their own history are a conquered people.

Much of the effort I put in has to do with the idea of taking our own history back, of owning it ourselves, since much is still locked up in government vaults and hidden from us and we are really the only ones who can restore it. 35 years ago, in my view, there was a coup d'etat here in Dealey Plaza, and the government has not recovered in any significant way, towards democracy, since that day. Kennedy began to represent for many people, hope and change and a response from the top level of government to the popular movements at the time for civil rights, for arms limitations, for an end to the Cold War, and Kennedy was responding to popular movements in a way that presidents after him rarely have. So what was assassinated here that day was not just a particular man or a particular president, but a sense of hope by the American people. And I think that the government has let us know over the years, fairly consistently, that they did kill the president, and they killed him from a very high level, and that if they can kill the president and get away with it that they can kill anyone of us that they would like to and that we should sit down and shut up and get out of the way.

But I'm hoping that there is enough decency left in people in America, and I see evidence of that all the time, that we can understand that there are more of us, and that we can think, and we can take back our own democracy, if we want it.

It is now 12:30, and 35 years ago President Kennedy was assassinated here, so lets have a moment of silence.

[Two minutes of silence]

Thank you.

Peter Dale Scott, a researcher who could not be with us here today, sent an e-mail in which he said a few interesting things. He said that we've come into a new era in that one of the major tasks ahead of us right now is to focus on getting the government documents that are still locked up on the Martin Luther King assassination. The other thing he noted was a government statute that makes it illegal for a citizen of this country to lie to the government, and he suggested that a similar statute be passed that would make it illegal for the government to lie to its people.

I hope you will take this topic seriously and continue to act to get the full release of the files and to get the truth, and you are welcome to join us at COPA in fulfilling the remainder of our agenda and what is to be done in the future. You are welcome to join us and take your democracy back.

Dan Alcorn: We have a few other speakers here, including former FBI agent William Turner, whose books have been translated into Russian, German, Japanese, French and Spanish. He is currently working on a new book entitled: "Rearview Mirror - Looking back at the FBI, CIA and Other Tails.

William Turner: Thank you Dan. It's been exactly 35 years ago and two days that I came here on assignment for a national magazine to do an article on the breakdown in security that resulted in the assassination being successful. I was assigned to it because of my background as a former FBI agent. I can tell you that when I arrived the mood was really somber, the floodlights were on, reporters from all over the world were converging, people had left floral wreaths along the curbstone where the shooting took place, and it was very erry. The headquarters of the Dallas Police Department was a feeding frenzy of reporters trying to find out what happened. I was on a very tight deadline, I could only contend with the security breakdown issue at the time, which was that Oswald had worked as an informant for the FBI and that was the reason they had not furnished his name to the Secret Service prior to the presidential visit.

One thing I remember was talking to a Dallas patrolman named Malcolm Eugene Barnett who had been posted in front of the School Book Depository for crowd control at the time of the assassination. He told me that a women came running from the grassy knoll who told him that shots were fired from here. That being the case, I became very critical of the Warren Commission and when it's report came out I read it and realized it was pretty much a fairy tale. I am proud to say that I was associated with District Attorney Jim Garrison in New Orleans who tried to reopen the investigation into the assassination. Jim was a great American and was on the trail of the assassins, as his book says, when he was destroyed by the media at the Clay Shaw trial. The Garrison investigation paved the way for what we know today, and I believe that we know to a good degree of journalistic certitude what happened.

First the motives were piling up, John Kennedy had supposidly with held air cover for the Bay of Pigs, motive number one. John Kennedy had failed to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, motive number two. John Kennedy had promised to withdraw from Vietnam, motive number three. Motive number four is that John Kennedy, at the time he was assassinated, was on a second track, which was to secretly carry on negotiations with Cuba to bring about a detente. These motives piled up to the point where it became necessary to assassinate him. And I think it is very obvious with the compilation of information that we have today that the whole mechanism of it came out of the allegiance between the CIA and the rabid Cuban exiles and the Mafia, who already had an assassination apparatus set up to kill Castro. They switched targets and hit Kennedy.

And I hope you will join us, in recognizing the significance of the events that happened here, and try to do something about it. Thank you.

[Tape runs out]

Hal Verb: The saying on the wall at the CIA: "Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," is wrong. When you know the truth, the truth makes you MAD!"

[Tim Gratz]

The New York Times prides itself as being the "paper of record" and its motto is "All The News That's Fit To Print" (or words to that effect).

I may have missed it but I did not see any coverage of the conferences in the "Times", or even a note regarding the anniversaryof the assassination.

Edited November 25, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

It is not just the JFK Conferences that the media ignores. I suspect Lamar Waldron's book will get very little coverage. Gerald McKnight's Breach of Trust was largely ignored. Joan Mellen is likely to get more press but not for the right reasons. Can we expect Larry Hancock's revised Someone Would Have Talked when it is published in March to get much attention. I doubt it, even though he will probably include the name of the CIA agent who organized the operation.

I was talking to David Talbot about this problem on Tuesday night. I believe his book has the potential to get the headlines when it is published in 2007. Although he is a well known figure in the media world (unlike Lamar Waldron and Larry Hancock), there is no guarrantee this will happen. It is my belief that the research community has got to rethink the way it puts out information into the public domain. After all, Operation Mockingbird is alive and well. Maybe this is a topic for a new thread.

[Tim Gratz]

Of course the publication of books is normally covered in book reviews. I usually follow all of the book reviews in the "New York Times" and so far have seen no reviews of the new assassination books.

With my help, Mark Howell published in the "Solares Hill" issue immediately preceding the anniversary of the assassination a list of the new JFK assassination books (and a brief, brief synopsis of each). We counted six new books.

[John Simkin]

With my help, Mark Howell published in the "Solares Hill" issue immediately preceding the anniversary of the assassination a list of the new JFK assassination books (and a brief, brief synopsis of each). We counted six new books.

This is of course important. Penn Jones did the same with his newspaper, the Midlothian Times. The only problem is that it only had a circulation of 810.

Salon will be publishing a long review of Lamar Waldron's book. It has over 3 million readers so the review might increase sales.

[Tim Gratz]

Yes, clearly reviews in newspapers of great circulation like the "Times" and the "Washington Post" would be helpful.

The "Times" did publish last year a review of Holland's "The Assassination Tapes" by Max Holland. The review was by Thomas Mallon and it it he reargued the LN POV.

As you may recall, Mark Howell and I sent a letter to the "Times" replying to Mallon's review. I suspect it also received other critical letters. But it did not publish any letter in response to the review.

[William Kelly]

Yes, clearly reviews in newspapers of great circulation like the "Times" and the "Washington Post" would be helpful.

The "Times" did publish last year a review of Holland's "The Assassination Tapes" by Max Holland. The review was by Thomas Mallon and it it he reargued the LN POV.

As you may recall, Mark Howell and I sent a letter to the "Times" replying to Mallon's review. I suspect it also received other critical letters. But it did not publish any letter in response to the review.

TG, Do you still have a copy of Mallon's review of Holland's book? Or know if it is on line?

Is this the same Mallon who did "Mrs. Paine's Garage?"

I'd also like to read your letter in response.

Also check out the Wasington Post's story on the DC conference, by Walter Pincus, the guy who replaced George Lardner in covering the spooks and assassination.

BK

Edited November 25, 2005 by William Kelly

[Tim Gratz]

Bill,

Someplace I have a hard copy of the review.

Yes, indeed, it was written by the same gentleman who authored "Mrs. Paine's Garage".

Last fall we posted the letter we had sent to the "Times". We even sent it on the letterhead of the "Key West Citizen". I will try to find it.

Here is a link to the Forum topic on the Mallon review of Holland. I was mistaken; I did not post the entire text of our letter to "The New York Times":

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...l=thomas+mallon

Edited November 25, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

The November 27, 2005 edition of "The Washington Post" carries a review by Jefferson Morley of "The Ultimate Sacrifice" and "A Farewell to Justice". See my post in the thread "The Ultimate Sacrifice".

[JL Allen]

Just wanted to say that in Mark Lane's comments - the transcription reads that he calls the entire TSBD-knoll area "hollowed grown". He must have said "hallowed ground" - a much more powerful and cogent description... although, a case could be made for a "hollow groan"...

[William Kelly]

Just wanted to say that in Mark Lane's comments - the transcription reads that he calls the entire TSBD-knoll area "hollowed grown". He must have said "hallowed ground" - a much more powerful and cogent description... although, a case could be made for a "hollow groan"...

JL,

That's my misspelling in typing the transcript. It was late at night and I was tired, though it was hollow ground if there was a shooter in the sewer.

BK