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Posts Tagged ‘Warren Commission’

The Strange Synchronicity of Seemingly Unrelated Enigmatic Events: April 1963, Seven Months Before JFK’s Assassination – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 17, 2020

LBJ was interesting to say the least.

This book looks good.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/phillip-f-nelson/the-strange-synchronicity-of-seemingly-unrelated-enigmatic-events-april-1963-seven-months-before-jfks-assassination/

By

LBJ: Master of Deceit

THE ROMAN POET JUVENAL ASKED, “QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES?” (“WHO WILL GUARD THE GUARDS THEMSELVES?”) 

During the month of April, 1963, a number of strange events (or metaphoric “threads”) occurred that, when woven together, suggest that they had much in common, in the context of the evolving plot to murder President Kennedy and ensure that a major change in the direction of the United States would be effected: A military/intelligence take-over of the U.S. foreign policy was the immediate goal of the forces behind the 1963 coup d’état.  Domestic policy was the secondary, albeit inseparable, goal.

The following list includes some of the most notable events that took place over a two-week period of that month:

Wednesday, April 10TH:

Someone – to this day it is not clear who – shot a bullet through the window of retired General Edwin Walker, a staunchly-conservative veteran of World War II and the Korean War.  Walker, despite having been appointed by President Eisenhower to successfully lead the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, later became associated with segregationists and members of the right-wing organization the John Birch Society.  In 1961 he became the only Army general to resign after his controversial actions related to allegedly indoctrinating troops under his command in Germany with materials that claimed that communists were in control of much of the government and were behind the racial integration program.

In 1961-62, Walker began making numerous public speeches and, with the backing of the oil billionaire and radio-host H. L. Hunt, he began a campaign to run for governor of Texas, but finished last in the Republican primary election to John Connally.  On December 4, 1961, his photo appeared on the front cover of Newsweek magazine under the title, “Thunder on the Right.”  It had become widely known in the area that Walker lived on Turtle Creek Drive near downtown Dallas.

The bullet hit the wooden window frame, which deflected it away from Walker.  Many researchers believe that it is unlikely that Oswald was involved in that shooting, given that at least one eyewitness stated that there were two men on the scene during the shooting, who escaped in separate cars immediately afterward; Walker himself stated that, after going upstairs to get a pistol, he came back down the stairway and, through a front window: “I saw a car at the bottom of the church alley just making a turn onto Turtle Creek.  The car was unidentifiable. I could see the two back lights . . . I could see it moving out . . . [it] would have been about at the right time for anybody that was making a getaway.”[i]  Oswald did not have routine access to a car.

Many, if not most, researchers have not only discounted the notion that Oswald fired the shot at Walker but believe that it was part of the plan, intentionally designed to set him up as a patsy as a specific instance of his supposed capacity for violence.  Given General Walker’s reputation as an arch-enemy of the Kennedys, especially their efforts to pass civil rights reforms, it is possible that he volunteered his assistance in such a caper.  That Jack Ruby had casually “fingered” Oswald soon after the event conveniently helped the commission to make a case of violent behavior for a man not otherwise known for that.

As noted below, at least before Marina Oswald told the Warren Commission that she believed that Lee was the shooter (the pressure on her — including threats of deportation — must be considered regarding everything she said), Walker suspected others of the act, specifically a neighbor of George De Mohrenschildt named Dr. William Wolf. As noted below, Wolf would die nine days later in a fire in his apartment.

Easter Weekend, April 13-14:

LBJ Reordered Security: From JFK to Himself Read the rest of this entry »

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JFK: What The CIA Hides | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on November 23, 2019

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/jfk-what-cia-hides

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Jefferson Morley via Counterpunch.org,

When I launched JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 2012, I was often asked by strangers, “So who killed JFK?”  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “It’s too early to tell.” Given that the handsome liberal president had been shot dead a half-century before, my answer was a lame joke based on an apocryphal story. Henry Kissinger once said that when he asked Zhou Enlai, “What was the effect of the French Revolution on world history?” the Chinese statesmen replied, “It’s too early to tell.”

True to Kissingerian form, the story turns out to be not exactly true. Zhou was actually responding to a question about France’s political convulsions in 1968, not 1789.

But Kissinger’s spin on the anecdote struck me as perceptive.

The meaning of a great historical event might take a long time–a very long time–to become apparent. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions about the causes of JFK’s murder in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It’s still too early to tell. Fifty six years after the fact, historians and JFK researchers do not have access to all of the CIA’s files on the subject The 1964 Warren Commission report exonerated the agency with its conclusion that Kennedy was killed by one man alone.  But the agency was subsequently the subject of five official JFK investigations, which cast doubt on its findings.

The Senate’s Church Committee investigation showed that the Warren Commission knew nothing of CIA assassination operations in 1963. JFK records released in the last 20 years show the Commission’s attorneys had no real understanding the extensive counterintelligence monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed. We now know that senior operations officers, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton, paid far closer attention to the obscure Oswald as he made his way to Dallas than the investigators were ever told.

To be sure, there is no proof of CIA complicity in JFK’s death. And  conspiracy theories spouted by the likes of the Alex Jones and James Fetzer deserve no attention. The fact remains some of the most astute power players of 1963–including Lyndon Johnson, Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro, and Jackie and Robert Kennedy–concluded that JFK was killed by his enemies, and not by one man alone.  Did these statesmen get it wrong, and the under-informed Warren Commission get it right?

The new documentary, Truth is the Only Client, says yes. The film, shown last month in the auditorium of the U.S. Capitol, features interviews with numerous former Warren Commission staffers. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served as a fact checker for the Commission in 1964, defends the lone gunman conclusion, saying, “You have to look at the new evidence and when you do, I come to the same conclusion.”

Justice Breyer, oddly, passes judgment on evidence he has not seen. The record of the CIA’s role in the events leading JFK’s assassination is far from complete. In 2013 I reported on JFK Facts that Delores Nelson CIA’s information coordinator had stated in a sworn affidavit filed in federal court, that the agency retained 1,100 assassination-related records that had never been made public.

A small portion of this material was released in 2017, including new details about the opening of the CIA’s first Oswald file in October 1959.

Yet thousands of JFK files remain secret.  According to the latest figures from the National Archives, a total of 15,834 JFK files remain fully or partially classified, most of them held by the CIA and FBI. Thanks to an October 2017 order from President Trump, these documents will not be made public until October 2021, at the earliest.

The assumption of Justice Breyer and many others is that any and all unseen CIA material must exonerate the agency. It’s an odd conclusion. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it hiding so much? While 95 percent of the still-secret files probably are trivial, the remaining 5 percent—thousands of pages of material–are historically pregnant.  If made public, they could clarify key questions in the long-running controversy about JFK’s death.

These questions have been raised most concisely by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a career CIA officer who served in senior positions. Now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, Mowatt-Larssen has implicated his former employer in the Dallas ambush. In a presentation at Harvard last December, Mowatt-Larssen hypothesized that a plot to kill JFK emanated from the CIA’s station in Miami where disgruntled Cuban exiles and undercover officers loathed JFK for his failure to overthrow Castro’s government in Cuba.

Mowatt-Larssen has yet to publish his presentation and documentation, so I can’t say if he’s right or wrong. But he asks the right question: “How can intelligence operational and analytical modus operandi help unlock a conspiracy that has remained unsolved for 55 years?” And he focuses on the right place to dig deeper: the CIA’s Miami office, known as WAVE station.

My own JFK questions involve George Joannides, a decorated undercover officer who served as branch chief in the Miami station in 1963. He ran psychological warfare operations against Cuba. In 2003, I sued the CIA for Joannides’ files. The lawsuit ended 15 years later in July 2018, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in his last opinion before ascending to the Supreme Court, tossed my case. Kavanaugh declared the agency deserved “deference upon deference” in its handling of Freedom of Information Act requests about JFK files.

Nonetheless, my lawsuit illuminated the extraordinary sensitivity of the psy-ops Joannides ran out of WAVE station. As reported in the New York Times, Fox News, Associated Press, and Politico, Morley v. CIA forced disclosure of the fact Joannides had received the CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal  in 1981. The honor came two years after he stonewalled the House Select Committee on Assassination about what he knew of Oswald’s contacts with pro-and anti-Castro Cubans in the summer and fall of 1963.

I believe Joannides was honored because he concealed the existence of an authorized covert operation involving Oswald that has never been publicly acknowledged. In CIA lingo, Joannides protected the agency’s “sources and methods” concerning Oswald.  And he might have done more. His actions may have also shielded other officers who knew of a scheme to kill the liberal president and lay the blame on Cuba.

Never been seen by JFK investigators, they contain details about his Joannides’ undercover work in Miami in 1963, when he funded Oswald’s antagonists among the anti-Castro Cuban exiles. They also detail his work in 1978, when he duped chief investigator Robert Blakey and the House Select Committee on Assassination. These records, the agency says, cannot be released in 2019 without risk of “irreversible harm” to national security.

It’s a bizarre claim, at odds with the law. These ancient documents, all of them more than 40 years old, meet the statutory definition of “assassination-related,” according to federal judge John Tunheim. He chaired the Assassination Records Review Board which oversaw the declassification of 4 million pages of JFK files between 1994 and 2017.  In an interview, Tunheim told me that, under the terms of the 1992 JFK Records Act, the Joannides files are subject to mandatory review and release. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said.

Yet the files remain off-limits to the public. Thanks to the legal consensus, articulated by Justices Kavanaugh and Breyer, the CIA enjoys “deference upon deference” when it comes to the JFK assassination story. As a result, the JFK Records Act has been flouted. The public’s interest in full disclosure has been thwarted.

Yet legitimate questions persist: Did a plot to kill JFK originate in the agency’s Miami station as Mowatt-Larssen suggests? The fact that the CIA won’t share the evidence that could answer the CIA man’s question is telling.

So these days, when people ask me who killed JFK, I say the Kennedy was probably victimized by enemies in his own government, possibly including CIA officers involved in anti-Castro and counterintelligence operations. I have no smoking gun, no theory. Just look at the suspicious fact pattern, still shrouded in official secrecy, and it’s easy to believe that JFK was, as Mowatt-Larssen puts it, “marked for assassination.”

Be seeing you

JFK-CIA

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How the CIA Invented ‘Conspiracy Theories.’ – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/ron-unz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theoriesamerican-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/

By

The Unz Review

Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers—from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption—could objectively be categorized as a “conspiracy theory” but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval…

These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America[2] was Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.

Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.

During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.

But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.

For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals[3] had been historian Charles Beard[4], whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that   some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.

However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper[5] and Leo Strauss[6], gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life…

Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.

Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own    case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern    liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple[7]. Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers[8] who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.

So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually    stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse…

To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my  own small webzine[13], have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as “crazy conspiracy theories” by our mainstream media organs. Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official[14] argued that the free discussion of various “conspiracy theories” on the Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to “cognitively infiltrate”  and disrupt them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly  controversial Cointelpro[15] operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

Until just a few years ago I’d scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of 20th century  American intellectual life[16]. But the more I’ve discovered the number of serious crimes and disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps Beard was correct all along in recognizing the respectability of “conspiracy theories,” and we should return to his traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss such notions without any serious consideration.

Be seeing you

COINTELPRO against The Black Movement (1970s) · I Love ...

 

 

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Is that Oswald standing OUTSIDE the TBD when Kennedy rode by?

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2011

I was going to go into Pearl Harbor and how FDR embargoed the Japanese to make it happen, yada, yada, yada.  Luckily I found a Kennedy assassination blogger that has piqued my interest.  I have never followed the various Kennedy assassination theories to any extent.  Read the rest of this entry »

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