Note to readers on this site: with some new material, this essay contains material previously posted in two long comments.
REFLECTIONS ON HOW LITTLE IS REVEALED BY JUST-RELEASED JFK
ASSASSINATION DOCUMENTS AND JUST SOME OF THE MANY REASONS WHY THERE HAD TO BE A
CONSPIRACY
John Chuckman
NOTE: PLEASE ALSO SEE MY LATER COMMENT ON AN IMPORTANT NEW PIECE OF INFORMATION, BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT WE HAVE RECEIVED AS IT CONTAINS OUR FIRST BITS OF TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION FROM A GOVERNMENT SOURCE:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/
NOTE: PLEASE ALSO SEE MY LATER COMMENT ON AN IMPORTANT NEW PIECE OF INFORMATION, BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT WE HAVE RECEIVED AS IT CONTAINS OUR FIRST BITS OF TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION FROM A GOVERNMENT SOURCE:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/
In the recent, and supposedly last, release of files
pertaining to the Kennedy assassination, most of the corporate press did not
dwell on the fact that the most important and secret files were kept from the
public, but, of course, that was actually the big story.
Now, I say that not knowing just what was not released or
indeed whether the unreleased files even contain any serious information. You
see, in the world of state secrets, secrecy is often used to hide embarrassing
incompetence or even criminality. The unreleased documents may be just as
uninformative as much of what has been released. So much of what has been
released over recent decades is of little hard value to the case. We may
legitimately ask, why was a lot of this junk ever declared national secrets to
be squirreled away for a half century and more?
I can’t answer that question, but exactly the same question
may be asked about so very many things and activities pertaining to the
assassination. Of course, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and that fact
alone screams that important things always were, and still are, hidden. Are the
key facts really that unbelievably sensitive? Are they even known?
The question might even be asked whether the authorities
themselves ever really understood accurately what happened. The FBI and CIA not
even knowing what happened might itself be a worthy state secret, reflecting on
the sheer competence of these two massively-funded and often abusive security
agencies. God knows, they both have long records of embarrassing and
destructive failures at home and abroad.
And, it must be remembered that outfits like CIA always have
fallback positions ready for major activities should the first story spring
some unexpected leak. So, even if records were maintained of actual events -
something which is not always certain going by CIA’s past record, as in the
case of the coup in Guatemala against a democratic government, an event whose
files could not be found at their scheduled release date - whatever is
eventually released to the public may reflect a fallback narrative. The
complexity of filing systems at a place like CIA permits some amazing antics,
and no one from the outside is able to check. That of course is just one of the
dangers of having such powerful, secret, and largely unaccountable agencies.
The facts of a murder case - no matter who the victim was, a
rather simple murder actually if you believe the Warren Report, a murder by one
disgruntled man with a rifle and no accomplices of any kind - should be public
information in a free society. What possibly warrants secrecy in such a case?
Nothing, of course. Yet we know we have had secrecy and still have it,
massively so, and since the earliest days after the crime.
We still face a huge, impenetrable, blank wall, much
resembling something from an ancient mysterious tomb, when it comes to this
history-changing event.
If the assassination of an elected President can be
effectively covered-up, what cannot? And a great many terrible events have
happened in the United states since that crime. Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria plus many other bloody awful things that make little sense
and have never been honestly explained to the people by government.
The press still is very fond of the term, "conspiracy
theory," and it is easy to find articles weekly which employ it, but the
term should always serve as a red flag for astute readers. It is said to have
been coined by a CIA publicist/disinformation officer in 1967 as a way to
express ridicule of those doubting the Warren Report, a document in fact
riddled with errors and inconsistencies.
I've read some documents and summaries of documents recently
released, and I have to say that many contain things which were already known.
Other things were not known, but they include nothing of decisive importance. (SEE FOOTNOTE REGARDING THIS CLAIM)
We find in the released documents 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,
something he was very good at, having a great deal of experience doing it.
Hoover was always a 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 Mexico 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.”
Saying CIA had no involvement in Kennedy's assassination is
exactly like the claim, made a thousand times, that CIA had no role in the
induced-terror imposed on Syria to topple its government, or, indeed, a long
series of ugly coups and assassinations in a number of countries abroad.
In the first moments after the shooting, some police headed
uphill on the Grassy Knoll. Many indications from sound to the way crowds moved
and pointed suggested something had occurred there. One policeman ran up the
slope and began searching behind the barriers with his gun drawn. He met a
suited man who quickly offered an official-looking ID card for the Secret
Service.
The policeman holstered his gun and didn’t pursue the
direction he had been headed. Nor did he note the identity of the “agent.” The
trouble with that brief episode is that the Secret Service is known not to have
stationed any officers on the Grassy Knoll. It was, of course, a terrible error
in their preparations for the motorcade, but it is nevertheless what they did.
So, who was the suited man with the false Secret Service ID? And what was he
doing there? And where would he obtain such an ID? I think we’re safe in saying
he wasn’t Oswald.
The fake Secret Service agent may well have been a man seen
by another witness briefly earlier. A man who could only communicate by sign
language told a clear story of being on the overpass and noticing a man in a
suit, just behind the wooden picket fence that stood along the top of the
Grassy Knoll, holding something. He saw the man in the suit swing around and
toss what he was holding to another man in work clothes, waiting nearby.
The man who caught what looked like a rifle quickly broke it
into two parts, stashed them into his large open toolbox, and walked away. Just
behind the Grassy Knoll with its picket fence then was a parking lot and
extensive rail yards, just the kind of place for a workman with a tool box to
disappear into. The official investigators chose to ignore this witness. Most
people who ‘heard” a story like that from a witness speaking in sign language
would take it very seriously. After all, in a sense it requires a great of
extra effort for such a witness to give his testimony and I think that adds to
its credibility.
Why was the immensely important evidence of the presidential
limousine so quickly destroyed? The car was sent back to the manufacturer near
Detroit to be rebuilt instead of being preserved for serious and extended
forensic study. The interior was, of course, spattered with blood, but it also
contained bits of bullets and marks from bullets, things which were very
important evidence.
There were witnesses at the hospital, when the car was
briefly parked in front to deliver the mortally-wounded president, who
testified that there were both a bullet crease on the windshield’s chrome frame
and a small hole in the windshield’s glass. Shouldn’t this have been preserved
for close study and to reassure people that every detail was scrutinized? But
it was not. Why? Even if the car was rebuilt, key pieces like the windshield or
the rear interior could easily have been set aside, as were so many more
trivial objects that found their way into the National Archives.
The most important single piece of evidence in the case, the
Zapruder film, has its own remarkable story. The film was purchased from
Abraham Zapruder, who happened to be standing on the concrete pergola along
part of the Grassy Knoll taking home movies of the parade (just a note, his
position was hidden by trees or shrubbery from the position further along the
picket fence from which at least one assassin fired). His film was purchased by
Life Magazine for what was then a very large amount of money. Actually, you
might have thought it should have been seized by local police or FBI as
evidence, but for some unknown reason, this single most important piece of
evidence ended up in private commercial hands.
Apart from the police not seizing key evidence, what is
wrong with that, you might ask? Well, it is just a fact that Henry Luce’s
Time-Life publications in those days often worked with and served as covers for
the CIA. Allen Dulles was part of Luce’s social circle. Luce himself wrote a
famous article in the 1940s called “The American Century,” the title becoming a
frequently-used expression, and he was an ardent supporter of the values we
associate with the Washington establishment, especially with the CIA.
It is no secret that the Luce newsmagazines were considered
as important keys on the CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer,” as one former agent referred
to the list of publications and writers that was regularly used in getting a
story “out there” to the public.
The film was withheld from the general public for a long
time. Why should that be? We even had Dan Rather on CBS Television do a little
broadcast of what he saw when supposedly shown the film in private. His was a
completely false description, as you may easily see for yourself (see
FOOTNOTE). Why was that required, a deliberate false description broadcast by
one of the most well-known men in American broadcasting? One can only be sure
Rather did not just decide on his own to do this or that his broadcast had
anything to do with Oswald, except to support the unproved notion that Oswald,
supposedly behind the president on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository
building, was the sole assassin, an idea that had been set in stone early by J.
Edgar Hoover.
We have testimony that the film was delivered to a
quickly-assembled group of specialists at CIA by hand. They worked into the wee
hours to assemble a “story board” for some very high-level presentation.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but at a later date, one of these technicians
was shown what we now understand as the Zapruder film, and he said that it
clearly was not the original film.
Importantly, the halo we now see above Kennedy’s head as a
bullet struck was not on the original film. Instead there was a cone-shaped
ejection from the rear of Kennedy’s head. That ejection would, of course,
suggest a shot from the front, and it would also support other testimonies as
that of a police outrider on his motorcycle being spattered with blood and
brain tissue. That simply could not happen with a shot from where Oswald
supposedly was.
The film, as we know it, has been altered. You see, we know
an early copy of the film – three had been made – was delivered also to the
CIA’s top photo lab in Rochester for work. This was a lab in which almost
anything possible to do with film could be done. The world’s best equipment and
top experts worked there. We do not know what was done, but considering the comment,
above, of the technician who worked on what definitely was the original film,
it would appear changes were made to a copy that resulted in the film we now
see.
There are a great many more such serious issues left totally
unresolved today, the kind of issues which should not be unresolved with the
most ordinary murder, let alone the murder of a president. Perhaps the greatest
set of issues is around the President’s autopsy. There is a huge set of issues
here, and I won’t go through them all. Several entire books have been written
on the topic, including the very important “Best Evidence” by David Lifton.
I’ll mention only a few glaring matters.
In the Zapruder film, we see President Kennedy, his car
emerging from behind a freeway sign, grasping at his throat with both hands.
Clearly, even in the altered film we have - and there is reason to believe that
this emergence-from-behind-the-sign sequence was also altered - Kennedy was hit
by a bullet in the throat. The emergency medical people attending him – all
experienced, very senior people – later described the wound as a small puncture
wound just above the knot of his necktie, a puncture wound with bullets
invariably indicating an entrance wound. A tracheotomy was performed -
involving two tiny slits (about two centimeters long) on the sides of the wound
– to accommodate the insertion of a tube for emergency breathing.
Now at some point in time later, autopsy photos of the
President were taken by someone and distributed to the press. Some of them are
strange and mysterious photos, poorly lighted, not always well focused, and in
black-and-white – not at all to the standard of official autopsy photos of the
time. The most striking one is of Kennedy on his back with his eyes still open.
There is a sizable gash in the center of his throat, big enough to almost
resemble someone having started to try slashing his throat. This was what the
official autopsy doctors and technicians saw, and it bears no resemblance to
what was described in Dallas. This strange wound ended-up being called an exit
wound for a bullet which entered Kennedy from behind – in other words, the
direction of the bullet making it was reversed.
The official autopsy notes, which of course in a murder case
becomes an important legal document, were destroyed later and burned by the
doctor writing his report. He wrote fresh ones, and we have often been given
the silly excuse (silly certainly when it comes to matters like an autopsy)
that this was because the original notes had blood on them. This destruction
was an illegal act.
Of course, legality played very little role in how the
President’s body was treated. We know that local officials in Dallas demanded
that the body be autopsied there, as required by law, and a literal fight broke
out with the Secret Service drawing guns to wheel the body away. The body was
flown to Washington along with Mrs. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Even its
treatment then is seriously in doubt with many bits of evidence suggesting it
was not even in the coffin brought along with Mrs. Kennedy to the autopsy
hospital. Instead it appears to have been delivered in the rear in a kind of
cheap shipping coffin.
The importance of this lies in the fact that we have
testimonies that the President’s body, when received for formal autopsy, had
already had some medical work done on it. The technician receiving and opening
the shipping case has described what he found which you can read in Lifton’s
book.
Further, and very importantly, two FBI agents who attended
the autopsy made notes which became an official record apart from the doctor’s
report. Two riveting small items are in that FBI write-up. The first involves
the agents’ description, before the autopsy was started, of the body as having
had some “surgery about the head.” We are given no details. The second is a
tiny mention of receiving a “missile” removed from the President by one of the
doctors. Again, no details. Was this missile the bullet that we believe entered
Kennedy’s neck from the front?
We don’t know exactly what happened to the President’s body
in being moved from Dallas to Washington. Was his body ever in the casket with
Mrs. Kennedy and President Johnson? Had it been sent off separately for the
quickest possible receipt in Washington? Or was it surreptitiously removed
aboard the plane? The fact is that work was done on the body by someone
somewhere in Washington before the official autopsy seems beyond dispute. The
autopsy proper, an event with a number of generals and admirals and big suits
standing in the room as witnesses, must have been a very bizarre event. Why
were they necessary?
Why was the autopsy even held in a military facility with
military doctors and many high-ranking military men watching and even sometimes
telling the doctors what to do, as one of the doctors related years later? The
military autopsy doctors did not compare in expertise to the pathologist in a
large American city like Dallas where shootings are frequent. But of course,
military doctors follow orders.
Another intriguing and unexplained event involving the trip
back to Washington was Lyndon Johnson’s insistence on being sworn into office.
We’ve all seen the photos taken inside the plane. Poor Mrs. Kennedy had to
stand there in a confined space, still in her blood-spattered clothes, watching
the man she knew her husband distrusted being sworn into office. It was all
completely unnecessary. Was Johnson subjecting the Kennedy family to some kind
of degradation ceremony? It was possible with this unbelievably crude man, a
man who, as President in the White House, is known for behaviors like talking
to reporters while sitting on the toilet and once, in response to a question
about why America was in Vietnam, unzipping his pants and pulling out his
penis, saying something like, “See, this is why.”
Of course, once Johnson was sworn into office and had
possession of the “best evidence,” Kennedy’s body, a fundamental division in
post-assassination events occurred. Attention in many respects shifted to
Washington rather than remaining where it should have been, the scene of the
crime in Dallas. Johnson could, with the cooperation of people like the admired
and admiring J. Edgar Hoover, direct the way events unfolded, and he very much
did. Bobby Kennedy’s authority was imperceptibly, to outsiders, reduced to that
of a token office holder. Within a week, the Warren Commission was appointed, a
commission whose job was twisted badly from the beginning.
Earl Warren did not want to serve as Chairman of the
Commission, but Johnson used a suggestive and threatening line, delivered in a
theatrical tone of voice, to convince him otherwise, a line he used on many
people at the time. It went something like, “If you knew what I know, the lives
of tens of millions could be at risk in these events.” Well, what responsible
high official could turn down an appeal put in those terms? It was a complete
lie of course, but it had not been that long since the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and memories of those truly frightening events were fresh.
The terms establishing the Warren Commission virtually
guaranteed its failure. Most importantly, the FBI did all the investigation,
Hoover’s FBI, that is. Hoover, the man who extraordinarily-early had said they
had their man in Oswald. Also, behind the scenes there was Johnson’s often
repeated, “If you knew what I know, the lives of tens of millions could be at
risk in these events.” So, it was essential that findings be established
quickly to avoid some vaguely-forecast catastrophe. Since Hoover considered
that they already had their man, it was only necessary to collect a big pile of
tidbits supporting that conclusion, and that is precisely what was done.
Those who are familiar with the Warren Report understand
that it is just one long prosecutor’s brief. It is not an objective effort in
the least. Indeed, at times it goes so far out of its way to be unfair, it is
embarrassing to an honest mind. None of the Commission’s activities reflected
the standard rules of courts with arguments and evidence from both sides. In
essence, it is a document which cast aside all principles of normal justice and
fair procedure to declare a dead man guilty of murder with a carefully-selected
pile of exhibits and witnesses, that man having no proper representation even
in the proceedings, and certainly no other person or group was even considered
worthy of investigation.
Why was it necessary to do things in that fashion? If you
wanted to find the truth, you would never proceed that way, but it is just what
you would do if you wanted to get a story “out there,” and out there with an
impressive shelf-full of books which resemble the client-confidence props you
see in every lawyer’s office. The twenty-six volumes of “evidence” published
after the 889-page report were so carelessly assembled that no index was
provided. Imagine, publishing the equivalent of a huge encyclopedia of photos
and transcripts and exhibits with no way of finding anything? And as all
researchers know, the way in which these were thrown together, literally in a
jumble, makes an index even more necessary. It did serve, though, to slow
mightily all efforts for independent checking of the report’s claims. You see,
even though exhibits and witnesses were carefully selected and many witnesses
were guided as what to say by FBI agents, the vast pile does contain some
interesting information, a good deal of it suggesting the Commission’s
conclusions were often not well-considered and even deceptive.
There are many anecdotes demonstrating the “agenda” of the
Commission and that of its investigative arm, the FBI, but my favorite one is
when the Chairman, Earl Warren, visited Jack Ruby in his Dallas cell, Ruby
having killed Oswald on national television and in the police station. Ruby
literally told Warren that if he wanted him to talk about the truth, he must
take him to Washington. He strongly suggested that events hadn’t been as they
appeared. He pretty close to begged Warren, saying it was not safe in Dallas
for him to talk.
This was all said in Ruby’s usual gangster-like, twisted and
garbled speech, but what he was saying couldn’t be clearer. And who could doubt
the matter of safety with a police department riddled with corruption and dark
secrets, some of whose members clearly had assisted Ruby in his tasks and some
of whose members had so badly handled pieces of evidence that they became
legally useless?
Warren told Ruby that that would not be possible. Why would
that be? Who would have argued with the Commission Chairman and former Chief
Justice if he said that is what he wanted to do to secure vital information? No
one, of course. So much for Warren’s battle for truth.
FOR DAN RATHER’S EARLY DISHONEST DESCRIPTION OF THE ZAPRUDER
FILM PLUS THE ACTUAL FILM ITSELF AS WE NOW KNOW IT, SEE:
FOOTNOTE CONCERNING
FBI MEMO OF 1964 BY MANNING C. CLEMENTS:
Some might say that my
assertion that there is little new in the latest batch of released documents is
wrong, pointing to the FBI Memo sent by Manning C Clements in 1964, and reporting
the words of one Oren Potito in Florida. That memo is only eyebrow-raising for
those who have not studied the assassination. The bullet hole in the windshield
of Kennedy’s limousine has been known about for years, and it is discussed in a
number of books.