EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO THE INDEPENDENT
JFK files: Many of
most important and secret files kept from public, perhaps forever
Donald Trump said the
still unreleased documents could cause 'potentially irreversible harm', in a
comment sure to encourage conspiracy theories
Thanks, Independent.
This is not what most of the press is featuring today, but
it is actually the big story here.
I've read some quickie summaries of documents released, and
I have to say they contain almost nothing that was not known and certainly
nothing of decisive importance.
Relative trivia like Hoover warning Dallas Police of an
attempt on Oswald's life. A memo which of course could be interpreted as
nothing but Hoover covering his behind.
Hoover was always a very suspicious character through the
entire assassination events. First, it was his agency that did all the
investigative work for the Warren Commission. His Agency that selected which
witnesses would testify and which would not, the selection often seeming to show
the most perverse inclination to the witness who an unbiassed observer might
say was the least reliable.
And it was his Agency which browbeat many witnesses into
amending details of what they witnessed and told a number in threatening terms
not to divulge what they were saying. We also have witnesses who later
discovered their words in the published Report had been altered from what they
actually said.
And it is Hoover who early on named the guilty party as Oswald.
He never offered any sound reason, always referring to Oswald along lines like
“some lone nut communist.”
Hoover was of course aware of Oswald owing to Oswald’s
having been a “defector.” And we even have an earlier memo of Hoover’s, never
explained, about perhaps someone impersonating Oswald. It just hangs there in
space with no context or explanation.
It should be mentioned, too, that Hoover loathed the
Kennedys, both of them. I do not believe he was associated with the assassins –
though some people very much do – but I think he privately rejoiced in
Kennedy’s death. With the President gone, he would no longer be seriously
subject to the demands of his formal boss, Attorney General Robert, a man he
truly detested. And he would not be asked to retire because Lyndon Johnson
loved him.
The investigation of the assassination was also the
opportunity to once again preach his favorite official sermon about the extreme
danger communists represented to America. He had pursued communists for
decades, even at the cost of letting a genuine national threat, the Mafia, grow
and prosper. It was said at one time that about thirty percent of the American
Communist Party’s members were FBI agents or informants. And, quite simply,
Hoover had no motive to relentlessly pursue the people who had actually improved
his life as well as America’s, as he saw it.
The arrest of Oswald was one of the most bizarre and
unexplained matters in the whole assassination saga. There was no reason at all
for anyone to seek him. There was no basis for a suspicion. The only thing that
was known not long after the assassination was that Oswald had left work, as
did others. A description that went out on police radio was so generic as to be
virtually useless in locating any specific person. And why would police
converge on a movie theater away from downtown owing simply to call claiming a
man had sneaked in without buying a ticket?
Why was Oswald at that movie theater? Almost certainly to
meet someone he knew from the conspiracy, quite likely Jack Ruby. Ruby is very
likely to have been the man who earlier shot Officer Tippet on the street.
Oswald could not have made it there in time for that event, walking as he did from
his boarding house. We have good timing testimony on that killing from several
witnesses.
And Tippet was known as a shady cop in Dallas, with right
wing associations. He was quite likely involved with the plotters in some minor
way. Ruby shot him to silence him just as he may have been headed to the
theater to meet and shoot Oswald, but all the sudden heavy police presence
prevented him from doing so. He, of course, two days later shot Oswald while right
in police custody in a supposedly high-security prisoner transfer.
The summaries of new documents just released I saw are so
uninformative you have to ask yourself why the documents would ever have been
classified in the first place.
They include things like the fact that Lyndon Johnson was
once a member of the Klu Klux Klan in Texas. Wow, now there is a serious state
secret. And a fact, considering all the other horrors of Johnson’s career –
documented election rigging, massive financial corruption with people like
Billy Sol Estes, foul behavior of every description, starting a massive
pointless war in Vietnam, complicity in Israel’s 1967 War and its attack on an
American spy ship – the KKK fact seems trivial.
Indeed, as was asked at the time of the assassination, why
was any of it a matter of state security and secrecy if the murder was the work
of one disgruntled man? Why were any documents ever made secret? And why are
many still secret after this dump?
Oswald is said in one document to have spoken with a KGB
agent, Valeriy Kostikov, from the KGB's directorate for assassination, in
Mexico City? We already knew that story. You can find it in dozens of books.
The real question remains whether Oswald himself was, in
fact, ever in Mexico City? It is just taken for granted by our press, as it
pretty much was by the Warren Report.
The CIA covered the Soviet Embassy there with cameras and
telephone intercepts 24 hours a day, yet when asked to produce photos and
recordings of Oswald back for the early investigations, the CIA produced a
photo of a total stranger, blindingly clearly not Oswald, and claimed any phone
recordings had been routinely erased.
There is not one shred of solid evidence placing Oswald in
Mexico City, although we know very well that someone resembling him was there,
going between the Cuban and Russian Embassies and bringing a lot of attention
to himself. Cuba? Russia? Early 1960s?
Why would anyone do that? The best guess is to have Oswald’s
name associated with Cuba when the assassination occurred.
There were other efforts at such association during Oswald’s
time in New Orleans. He worked passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba
organization, even though he was never a proper member. Some of these leaflets
were actually mistakenly stamped with the address of Guy Bannister Associates
on Camp Street, Bannister being a retired fairly senior FBI Agent and a known advocate
for right-wing causes.
His Agency was likely in part a front for CIA’s anti-Castro
weapons acquisition and distribution. Remember, these were days of intense
anti-Castro activity by CIA and its proxies like the various anti-Castro
groups. A couple of witnesses saw Oswald at the office once or at another
location with Bannister.
Oswald’s leaflets, when people filled out the form to
support Fair Play for Cuba, simply provided Bannister and those working with
him with lists of local Castro sympathizers. The effort of course further
associated Oswald’s name with Cuba and with vaguely Marxist sympathies, something
that was certainly an act.
Why would he desire to create all that attention? So that,
after the assassination, the name Oswald would be firmly connected with those
awful places, Russia and Cuba. And believe me, there is nothing in 1963 that
the CIA wanted to see more than another invasion of Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion
by a proxy army of trained refugees in 1961 had badly failed, and part of
Kennedy’s agreement with Khrushchev, late 1962, to end the Cuban Missile Crisis
included a promise not to invade Cuba. Those two events alone and their
aftermath made Kennedy loathed at the CIA and by America’s Cuban refugee
terrorist groups in places like New Orleans and Miami.
Another not widely-known fact which screams conspiracy were
previous assassination plots against Kennedy, one in Chicago and one in Miami.
The one in Chicago was planned remarkably along the same lines as Dallas.
High-power rifles, elevated position, several shooters, and a patsy candidate.
It was broken up, but the would-be assailants escaped. In Miami, the
President’s trip was changed from a car to a helicopter in the face of serious
threat information.
The people actually plotting the assassination wanted not
only to get rid of a President they hated but they wanted the assassination
itself to provide America with an irresistible cause for invading Cuba in force
despite any previous understanding with the Russians. They were trying to “kill
two birds with one stone.”
It should also always be borne in mind that Oswald himself
had no known motive. He said more than once that he admired Kennedy. He was not
really some wild-eyed Marxist either, despite pretenses. Indeed, the suggestion
provided by his associations in New Orleans – as Guy Bannister - was that, if
anything, he might have had right-wing sympathies. But there is reason not to
believe even that. Oswald did work as an FBI informant, despite Hoover’s
denial, and I believe that work would have been associated with the Kennedys’
efforts to clamp down on CIA and anti-Castro activities to improve relations
with the Soviet Union and Cuba after the Missile Crisis.
The likelihood of Oswald being impersonated briefly in Cuba parallels
somebody resembling Oswald involved with a list of pre-assassination incidents in
Dallas we know about. These ranged from a man acting bizarrely while
test-driving a car with a salesman and claiming to be Oswald (Oswald himself could
not drive) to a man making a spectacle of himself at a shooting range.
Everyone who has read at length on the subject knows there
was a man resembling Oswald deliberately and showily doing various odd things
around Dallas, there being many witnesses, to call attention to himself in the
weeks before the assassination. Indeed, right in the Texas Book Depository,
there was another employee named Billy Lovelady who greatly resembled Oswald,
enough to often be confused with him. Indeed, Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger
Craig, a man whose various testimony suggests good observational ability,
maintained that he thought he saw Oswald leave the Book Depository and jump
into a light-colored station wagon which sped away. Oswald himself we know did
not leave that way.
Of course, no serious assassin would ever do such things to
call extreme attention to himself as someone did in Oswald’s name shortly
before the assassination, and the set of events is just one of a number of
things which strongly suggest conspiracy.
We still have no indication how Oswald learned to speak
Russian in the United States while in the Marines, but we have evidence that he
did so fluently although not always with good grammar, and he spoke it before his
discharge and going off to the Soviet Union. The Warren Commission studiously
avoided details of this tricky topic.
And how did a man who had threatened to tell the Soviets
radar secrets about the U-2 spy plane he learned in the Marines, as Oswald very
much did, get to return home without any controversy or penalties?
How did he get an early discharge from the Marines on the
flimsiest of evidence of a compassionate problem with his mother, whom he left
just two days after arriving from the Marines to take off on an elaborately-planned
journey to Russia? Who planned that elaborate trip which reflected knowledge of
the easiest location for entering the Soviet Union? Who paid his costs?
How did he manage to bring a Soviet wife, who spoke almost
no English, with him when he returned to America in less than three years? In
the early 1960s, with the “Reds are at the Gates” rage going on? Unbelievable.
And how did he manage to hit upon a group of White Russian emigres
and Russian-speakers in Dallas, people who gave the couple all kinds of
assistance? And several of those people had past associations with CIA although
they weren’t employees. People like George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine.
Why would White Russian (anti-communist)-associated people
take any interest in a so-called Marxist just returned from having defected to
the Soviet Union, and a young man of very humble means and origins when some of
them were seriously connected? Mohrenschildt, for example, was a sophisticated
aristocrat and was related to Jackie Kennedy.
I could make a long list of important facts screaming cover-ups
and conspiracy, but I think one of the more important ones came to light
recently, and not from these documents. It was from the Cuban refugee,
CIA-trained terrorist Antonio Veciana of the violent anti-Castro group, Alpha
66, finally telling us the truth about a famous incident known to all
researchers.
Veciana saw a contact of his, a man with the pseudonym
Maurice Bishop, talking with Oswald before the assassination. In the past, he
would never identify Bishop as the CIA’s David Atlee Phillips, but he finally
has done so in his recent book. So here we have a quite senior CIA agent, David
Atlee Phillips, meeting with Oswald before the assassination, identified by a
man who worked closely with him, albeit under another name.
Again, during the meetings of the Warren Commission, there
was an emergency meeting called about the discovery of an FBI informant number
for Oswald as well as an uncashed voucher for $200. They simply dropped the
whole matter with a self-serving letter from Hoover denying any connection.
We know Oswald had intelligence connections, but still
apparently nothing is in this release of trivia.
This dump of bits of redacted papers it seems will add
nothing of substance to our understanding, and that is what it clearly was
meant to do. It has been done only to say, “See, we told you so.”
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