Tag: FILM

with Frank Cassano

As readers will recall, Seamus Coogan did a long analytical piece on Hankey’s documentary, JFK II. That negative critique stung Hankey and his followers – yes, he does have some, though not quite as many after as before. Hankey posted a reply at the web site: JFK Murder Solved, and then Jim DiEugenio replied and there was then a rebuttal round.

On that forum, Hankey admitted that he was embarrassed by the sheer number of errors – over 20 – that he had made in an 85 minute film, that was supposed to be “a documentary.” He then said that he could not hire a fact-checker. Yet, as Jim pointed out: What had prevented him from going to the library and picking up say, three books on the JFK case? This would have saved him the subsequent embarrassment. He then tried to save the day by saying that the accumulation of mistakes exposed by Seamus did not touch on his major thesis. Anyone who reads Seamus’ essay will understand that this is a dubious and face-saving assertion.

At first, Hankey apparently did not understand the hit his credibility had sustained; though later he did, since he now has shifted tactics. He now says that he only made – please sit down before you read this – all of one error! This is simply a deception on his part. As anyone can comprehend by reading Coogan’s essay. The litany of errors he made is staggering. And understand, that essay was cut down by about 20 pages on the grounds of overkill. The total amount of pratfalls was more like 50. A fact Hankey cannot admit to today.

His other new tactic is to actually accuse Jim DiEugenio – again, sit down before you read this – of being a CIA operative. This is simply nutty. No one writing today has accused the CIA more often and more strongly of being behind the JFK murder. Can Hankey really be ignorant of this? If so, it indicates why his work is so full of errors. But because CTKA published Seamus’ essay, this is what Hankey is reduced to. Even though it was Coogan – not DiEugenio – who wrote the original piece.

Hankey’s new tactics were revealed on an Internet radio show called The Corbett Report. After his appearance, several readers let us know about what he had said. Frank Cassano (and others) wrote the host a letter and Jim DiEugenio left a call. On January 2^nd of the new year, Mr. Corbett then granted Jim and Seamus an opportunity to respond. (Click here to download an mp3 file of Jim’s and Seamus’ appearance on The Corbett Report.)

John Hankey’s statement below, made in an interview with podcast host James Corbett, shows the limited scope of his logic, and is a fine way to begin this brief examination of Hankey’s latest faux pas on the show of December 4^th, 2010. For those of you new to this debate, I refer you to my review of Hankey’s appalling documentary, JFK II and Jim DiEugenio’s reviews of Dark Legacy and Hankeyan clone Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets.

The Hankeyan Strategy:  “Everything I get – all the major points – are from Plausible Denial.”

Mark Lane’s book Plausible Denial was published in 1991. Since that time there have been many published JFK books and much updated research. Lane’s book is an important contribution that did much to sharpen the point that E. Howard Hunt did not have an alibi for where he was on 11/22/63. Which leads to the question: Why did he need one? When combined with the fact that his friend and colleague, David Phillips, admitted to his brother that he was in Dallas that day – well, that is quite interesting. When you add in a third point, that it was James Angleton that proffered the memo saying that Hunt did need such an alibi – well, that is even more than interesting. It’s compelling. Hankey, however, completely leaves out the latter two facts. He then tries to connect Hunt, not to Phillips or Angleton, but to Richard Nixon and George Bush. Even though Hunt did not work for Nixon until ten years after the assassination. And there is no proof that Bush and Hunt worked with each other at all. It is only a Hankeyan presumption.

Now, although Nixon figures prominently in the Hankey film as part of the JFK plot, contrary to what Hankey says above, he is not part of the plot – in any way – in Lane’s book. (Hankey seems to have borrowed his material on Nixon from Paul Kangas, a notoriously unreliable and sensationalistic researcher.) But Hankey tried to save the day by telling Corbett that Lane’s book also implicates George Bush in the JFK case – a distortion that Corbett seemed to accept.

The problem is that Lane does not mention George Bush in the main text of the book. And that is where he actually discusses his investigation of the JFK case. He only mentions him in the Epilogue. And he references here the famous Joseph McBride articles in The Nation. McBride, of course, talked about the J. Edgar Hoover memo which showed Bush’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. (And those of you familiar with my earlier treatment of Hankey will know he mangled that memo beyond all normal usage.) What Hankey did with Corbett was to extract one sentence from this Epilogue to provide as evidence that Lane and he are actually “soul brothers.” In this Epilogue, Lane was trying to jab up present interest in the JFK case. So he asked if there was any person on the scene today with a relation to the “Kennedy drama.” (Lane, p. 329) He then discusses Bush and the McBride articles. And he adds that Bush knew George DeMohrenschildt and Bush may have been involved in the Bay of Pigs. (Ibid, pgs. 332-33) And that is it. So for Hankey to state that somehow Lane’s book presaged his interest in, and use of, Nixon and Bush in the JFK assassination is simply not accurate.

Hankey has adopted an interesting strategy of naming respected sources such as Fletcher Prouty and Lane and then claiming that people like Jim DiEugenio and myself are unwilling to criticize them, choosing instead to pick on him – which is stretching things. Since in my original article, I did jab at Lane for using Marita Lorenz at face value. Hankey also tries to insinuate that we are antagonistic towards them, another patently false allusion since CTKA respects the work of both authors as seen in numerous articles. Finally, his last recourse is exceptionally creative: He seeks to combine these factors and then literally blame it all on Lane and Prouty:

In retrospect, we really shouldn’t have edited out some points in the original Hankey piece. But due to the originals mammoth 52 pages, some things went to the cutting room floor. One of the things deleted was another thing Hankey has failed to give serious thought to: If Prouty’s assertions about the Bush connection in the naming of the Bay of Pigs vessels as the Barbara and Houston are correct, Prouty never made a big song and dance about it. Nor did Prouty elevate Bush into the realms of the planners for the Kennedy assassination. But Hankey has. Prouty showed common sense with his allegations and didn’t go off on tangents. It is people like Hankey who inadvertently damage reputations like Prouty’s by taking Prouty’s positions to extremes that were never intended.

Finally, there is this: Prouty and Lane have brought to the table much of benefit to all serious researchers. Lane has written three valuable books on the case: Rush to Judgment, A Citizen’s Dissent, and Plausible Denial. Prouty has written a classic book on the CIA – The Secret Team – and a good book on Kennedy’s assassination and his intent to withdraw from Vietnam – JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. There is much, much more to both men than simply Hunt, Nixon being depicted with a rifle in hand, George Bush being named in a Hoover memo, allegations that Bush named some boats used in the Bay of Pigs, and the Christchurch Star. Hankey, who has brought next to nothing to the table, grossly misrepresented or overstated what they and other authors have said or written. This is a far more serious offense than any small differences of opinion with them over the naming of two ships used in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Another bizarre and immature Hankey strategy is to admit fault in his data collection, but then to say DiEugenio and I are either nit-picking over minor details that don’t threaten his main thesis, or to greatly minimize the number of errors he made in JFK II. These two issues intersect each other: because if you make literally dozens of errors, as Hankey did in JFK II, who can trust what you say at all? One thing that Hankey is aware of, and hoodwinks his few supporters into ignoring, is that every “minor” detail we pick up on, no matter how divergent (and he gets pretty diverse in his multiplicity of errors), is a building block to the foundation of his overall conclusion. And that he himself has included it, not us. When we include other pieces of information it is to show what Hankey has missed.

Let us give the reader an idea of how Hankey has tried to counter the exposé of his error-filled film. When my long review first appeared, a discussion of it surfaced at the web site: JFK Murder Solved. An indiscriminating radio host named Michael Dell tried to minimize the myriad errors Hankey had made. (Dell had hosted Hankey, and obviously was stung by the fact that somehow he had not caught any of his litany of errors.) Hankey joined the discussion and admitted that he should have done a better job in his fact-checking. But somehow he did not have the budget for a researcher. Jim DiEugenio chimed in and added words to the effect: Well, can’t you drive to the nearest public library and pick up a few books to prevent you from taking so many pratfalls?

On the Corbett show, Hankey has now organized a different defense against his failure to fact-check. He now tries to insinuate that the only mistake he made was that he said the CIA had killed Mossadgeh in the Iran coup of 1953. Let us call this for what it is: A deliberate lie to save face in public. That may be strong, but it is wholly justified. Why? Because just in that particular section of the early edit of JFK II, it was pointed out that he made another error: He implied that Jacobo Arbenz had died in the CIA coup the following year. Again, this was false. He did not die until 1971. Further, he also tried to imply that Prescott Bush was the guiding hand behind those two coups, plus the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 – which, for anyone who knows anything about the CIA, is patently false. Clearly, the Dulles brothers guided the first two operations, and Allen himself supervised the last.

To show just how dishonest Hankey was on the Corbett show in this regard, let us go back to the thread on JFK Murder Solved. In the exchange with Hankey and Dell, Jim DiEugenio examined only the first 45 minutes of the film. From my review, he extracted nearly 20 factual errors! Or almost one per minute. And, as Jim further noted, the second half of the film is even more error-strewn than the first half, e.g., Hankey puts words in Bill Colby’s mouth that he never told the Church Committee. So for Hankey to say in public that he made only one error is simply knowingly deceitful.

Another ploy that Hankey and some of his followers (like Michael Green) have developed is to call my essay “a hit piece.” This is ridiculous. In its traditional usage, that term means that a journalist or reporter is called in by his superiors and told words to the effect: Go out and wreck this story, or impugn this guy’s character – or both. In the traditional media, this often occurred. For example, the Los Angeles Times appointed a task force to go after the late Gary Webb and his generally accurate story about cocaine smuggling into Los Angeles by the Contras. Further back, in 1967, Walter Sheridan and NBC deliberately set out to wreck Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. (Click here for the details.) No such thing happened here. After watching Hankey’s film, I was appalled by the many factual errors in it. I relayed some of them to Jim DiEugenio, not telling him they were a part of Hankey’s film. After about four of these, Jim asked me “Where are you getting these whoppers from?” I told him. I then suggested I do an essay on the film. So the process was just the opposite of what is considered a “hit piece.” Hankey’s film was so just so poor that it inspired a writer to correct the record. I was commissioned to do so by no one. I just wanted to set the record straight, and I wanted to raise the bar for the research community to shoot for. The surprise is that it took so long for anyone to do that – which tells you something about the quality control in the field.

Another Hankey tactic is to portray critical comments as down-playing certain individuals’ roles or credentials, like say Oswald’s intelligence connections. I hate to tell him, but it isn’t a big deal anymore that Oswald was a low-level CIA operative and FBI informant. It’s no big deal Bush was associated with the CIA before he admitted he was; and therefore that the Hoover memorandum is not such a big deal either. Why? Because better researchers than Hankey have pored over this stuff for years and have drawn much the same conclusions. Conclusions utterly divergent from Hankey’s fantasies, e.g., fantasies like George Bush and two Cubans storming into Hoover’s office and threatening him with a flechette gun (a truly nutty proposition which Hankey prudently cut from the final edit of his film).

10:44: “No members of the Kennedy’s family ever alleged there was an assassination plot.”

Untrue, Kerry McCarthy spoke out about it at JFK Lancer in 1997.

This is shaping up to be a vintage performance from Hankey here and this is an utterly hilarious statement. In my review of Hankey, there’s a statement by The King of Comedy in which he attested to a fan that David Talbot’s book Brothers backed his findings in the case.

If you thought the above comments were a little exaggerated, then check this one out. It comes from an email exchange between Hankey and an online fan:

Does he really think that his video JFK II was the first to expose the CIA-Mafia plots and their possible coordination with Cuban exiles? Did Hankey ever hear of Anthony Summers’ valuable book, originally titled Conspiracy? It was first published many, many years – even decades – before JFK II began to circulate. Further, how was David Talbot’s Brothers inspired by Hankey’s research? You will not see Hankey’s name in Talbot’s index. But you will see Summers’ name. (p. 476) But even that gives Hankey too much credit. For the Talbot book does not really outline any such conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

There’s further evidence that Hankey has never even read Brothers. The entire book is based on the evidence from RFK’s closest confidants that he believed there was a high level conspiracy to kill his brother.

16:57: Dulles, the Chief Sponsor of the Kennedy Hit

The above section concerning Prescott’s dominion over Dulles (a key theme running throughout Hankey’s work) is very interesting stuff because Hankey soon back-flips and admits (extremely begrudgingly by the sound of his tone) that Dulles had been the king-pin of the JFK coup. This may be due to the drubbing given him by myself, Jim DiEugenio, and likely numerous others after his comments on Black Op Radio in 2009 that Dulles was Bush’s puppet.

19:44: “I’ve been attacked recently by some very, very reputable people.”

Apparently this is “rather chilling” because Hankey’s “evidence” is apparently “clear and overwhelming” – according to himself and “lots and lots of people who agree with me that if somebody’s challenging that, it throws into question their credibility.” This is astounding in its delusionary rationalization. The idea that Jim DiEugenio’s reputation in the research community, or at large, or CTKA’s credentials, or my own are in some way going to suffer when our work is compared to Hankey’s – well, what can one say to such nonsense?

21:33: James Jesus Angleton Memorandum about Hunt

Hankey gets something correct again. James Angleton did supply the Hunt memorandum about Howard Hunt needing an alibi for Dallas. But what he won’t like is that this is a correction that came from my piece. Re: 40:13 into his film:

Of course Hankey has no idea that this memorandum (purportedly dated back to 1966) was leaked out during the closing phases of HSCA; nor that by 1978 Helms and Angleton were not formally employed by the agency. I should also add that in the same sentence I mentioned above, I also recall that I have never heard Hunt admit that he was an assassin. Hankey makes this vacant claim at a later stage of his “documentary.”

23:34: Mark Lane writes, “All of the participants are dead except George Bush.”

As mentioned above, this is not accurate. When Plausible Denial was published in 1991, two figures considered prominently involved in the assassination were alive: E. Howard Hunt and Richard Helms. Lane says so in the book on page 235, a few sentences before he even mentions George Bush. He never named Bush as a participant in the plot. But in the “Kennedy drama,” which is not the same thing. Hunt’s trial occurred in 1987 (a year Hankey, the Mark Lane devotee, could not even name at one point). At the time of writing this book, Lane believed Bush was somewhere around the scene and he believes Bush named the boats (as we have said, fine, he has every reason to think so). But that is about it. And the idea that Bush was a businessman asset used in the Bay of Pigs invasion is something that is defensible and logical. Like Prouty, Lane didn’t offer much more than that. They both had bigger fish to fry. But Hankey wrote this in his bizarre and needlessly convoluted argument on JFK Murder Solved. It concerns the much vaunted CIA memo (which is discussed in-depth in my actual review):

I don’t know if John ever read the same book everyone else did, but as I said earlier, George Bush is not mentioned in Lane’s book as part of the conspiracy. He never forges any relationships in Plausible Denial between Bush, Marita Lorenz, Gerry Hemmings, Hunt, and Frank Sturgis. He actually corrected himself because of Jim DiEugenio, who posted this reply about Hankey’s above spiel:

25:03: Unintelligible Ramble

Okay he’s getting into his famous memo here but he’s misappropriated something. In fact, he’s babbling on about an imminent invasion of Cuba and that somehow Hoover knew all about it and that Fabian Escalante was a Cuban Intelligence Officer, etc., etc. Oh boy, where does it end? I ask anyone: Does the Hoover document he’s discussing mention an invasion anywhere? (Click here to read it yourself.) It mentions the possibility of an “unauthorized raid” by some misguided anti-Castro Cubans. But next up and true to form, he’s discussing an imminent invasion of Cuba after the Kennedy assassination as discussed by Fabian Escalante – or did he? It’s all very unclear. Escalante and Cuban intelligence thought there was definitely the potential for it. The CIA had been pumping a story that Castro’s agents did it and that Oswald was an operative. But in an odd twist, Hankey, who had said earlier that the Mafia was not involved, yet mentions that Escalante has the invasion backed by “the Mob and United Fruit.”

The invasion that Hankey discusses is not a central tenant of Escalante’s 2006 book, JFK: The Cuba Files, in any way, shape, or form. Escalante’s chief concern, indeed, the theme of his book, were the leads Cuban intelligence had developed in the case. The judgement by most researchers is that, though interesting in some regards, he was fairly off in terms of who organized it all. But Hankey picks up tidbits wherever he can.

27:42: Jim Di-you-hay-neo

John Hankey pronounces the surname of Jim DiEugenio (pronounced dee-you-jee-neo) in what seems like Spanish vowels. He obviously thinks Jim is Hispanic. The problem is, that with so many things, he is wrong. He overlooked that the DiEugenio surname is of Italian origin and is taken to mean “Son of Eugenio.”

Nor can he even say the name of DiEugenio’s book correctly. It’s real title is The Assassinations. He calls it The Assassins. He gives no indications that this is his second book, his first being Destiny Betrayed. Judging by his mispronunciation of DiEugenio’s last name, Hankey also has no idea that Jim DiEugenio was a consultant to Stone on the DVD re-release of JFK and featured in a segment on new evidence declassified by the ARRB. Or that he has appeared as a guest in several documentaries on this case. Or that he has done literally scores of radio shows.

28:00: DiEugenio, “The Operator,” and Mr. Bush Goes to Washington… Again

At 28:00 minutes we are greeted with this slanderous tirade from Citizen Hankey about Jim DiEugenio:

Now this is what we have come to expect from Hankey. Hankey say’s nothing negative about DiEugenio, except that he is “an operative.” In other words, that he is a CIA plant within the research community. And his evidence for this cheap smear? Well, it is that “he’s certainly attacking the conclusions that I’ve drawn in a wildly unprofessional and unintelligent fashion.” This is the sum of the evidence against DiEugenio. He disagreed with both the factual data in his film and the overall conclusion. Did Hankey ever read DiEugenio’s review of Ultimate Sacrifice? Say this for Lamar Waldron and Tom Hartmann: They never reduced themselves to slander to counteract a negative review. Further, is there anyone on the current scene who has accused the CIA more strongly and more often of being involved in the JFK murder than Jim DiEugenio? Finally, why is Hankey going after DiEugenio in the first place? He did not write that review of his film. I did.

Within seconds, Hankey then confuses himself by saying that Hoover is supervising the Cubans. Luckily for Hankey, Corbett corrects him once again (not for the last time). Hankey gets back on track, but then he goes back to the idea of this memo advocating an invasion of Cuba (which it does not do). And then get this one. Really lean back and concentrate. For we are now in for another Hankeyan leap of logic. Even though the Hoover memo does not mention any kind of USA sponsored invasion, Hankey then says does notand that Hoover is writing the memo because Bush is the guy in charge of the possible invasion! It then gets worse: Hoover’s report constitutes a warning to Bush saying, in effect, “You’re busted,” and to shut it down. Why else, according to Hankey, would the FBI contact him? At this point it is a good idea to provide another link to the document. Please read it closely. Now compare what it says to what Hankey is aggrandizing it into for his own solipsistic purposes.

Is there anything in the memo that mentions any kind of invasion? Or hints that it is CIA or state sponsored? What it actually says is that the FBI has heard that the State Department is worried that, in the wake of Kennedy’s murder, “some misguided anti-Castro group… might undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba… .” In fact, the memo goes on to say that the FBI sources in Miami say they “knew of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.” So what is Hankey talking about? This seems to be nothing but pure and irresponsible hyperbole.

Hankey clearly doesn’t understand how intelligence works. For if the memo really said what he is inflating it to say, some FBI heavy-hitter like William Sullivan or Cartha DeLoach would be sent out to talk with some CIA representative, say someone like Richard Helms or Tracy Barnes or Desmond Fitzgerald (all of them way above and beyond George Bush). And this discussion would be off the record. It would not be written up at all. As Warren DeBrueys told Jim DiEugenio in his home in Metarie, whenever the FBI stumbled across a CIA operation, they did not interfere with it. If the situation was volatile enough, the report from such a meeting would likely wind up in Hoover’s personal files and not routed through the system, as this was. Larry Hancock explained as much in my review. If Bush is so important and if this was word of an “invasion,” then why did it get written up in the first place?

Hankey then makes another enormous leap and mentions the utterly fictional meeting between Hoover and Bush at the FBI. This is precisely the angle he got attacked on by myself and which he erased out of Dark Legacy (before our first review appeared). But he brings it back up again. This encounter never ever happened. With regards to this, in his outing on JFK Murder Solved, he accused me of illicitly procuring a copy of JFK II, in which the demonstrably fraudulent meeting between Bush and Hoover is depicted. The joke here is that Hankey has numerous versions depicting this ridiculous scene all over the internet, and has done so for a rather long time.

31:28: Mallon and Bush Send for Dulles

What is it with official documents that John Hankey doesn’t get? Because the lies and distortions of the historical record just keep on a rolling in. In JFK II and Dark Legacy, Hankey unearths a letter from Neil Mallon to Allen Dulles. In the draft version of my review I had paid some attention to this. As I said earlier, it was one of the things that didn’t make it in. In the Mallon memo, which is by itself an interesting little document (if one can squint they can see it), Mallon is thankful that a friend, “Tiny,” (it’s what it looks like to me), has “convinced” Dulles to come to the Carlton (presumably the Ritz Carlton in Georgetown, Washington) at 7:00 pm to celebrate the Anniversary. (Not sure precisely what they were celebrating, but Hankey, in his zeal to prove a point, doesn’t recognize that the date appears to be mid-April, near enough to the date of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Needless to say, I regret bringing this up because Hankey will now change his tack and make numerous other claims.) This location was chosen by Mallon (who is going to stay at the DuPont Plaza) because it was the most convenient place for Dulles to go to. He also says he has someone else is coming, whose name is indiscernible, and he has also invited Prescott Bush. Mallon wants Dulles to “listen in” on their “Pilot Project in the Carribean.”

Hankey describes this memo as Bush and Mallon “sending” for Dulles, as if he is a notch above the hotel concierge in status. In JFK II, moments before we view the Mellon/Dresser Industries document, Hankey had shown a memo in which Bush had sent a letter to C. D. Jackson recommending his pal Mallon for a position, and he mentions that he had been recruiting people for Allen Dulles and the CIA. Allen Dulles is regarded as the father of the agency by any and all researchers (bar John Hankey). Thus most reasonable people would assume that Mallon was, for all intents and purposes, Dulles’ follower.

Most people would also clearly see that Mallon had pestered Dulles to come along. Of all the people attending, the location was named as being the most convenient for Dulles. As for Bush sending for Dulles, this is ludicrous. He’s been invited and seems to have had no problem wanting to be in Dulles’ presence. There’s nothing indicating Bush sent for him or demanded his presence in any way. If he had planned it with Mallon, which is a distinct possibility, they focused all attention on Dulles. Dulles was the man they needed, not the other way around. It’s as clear as daylight. Another thing that is pretty clear is the date of the document, which Hankey ignores while claiming to Corbett that the Pilot Project in the Carribean is “George Bush and the Bay of Pigs.” The problem here is that the document looks like it is dated in April of 1963. The Bay of Pigs occurred in 1961 – two years earlier.

36:40: Prouty Picked up a Newspaper in Australia

Part way through this ramble, Hankey says Fletcher Prouty was involved in NSAM 273, the order to withdraw 1000 troops from Vietnam by Christmas 1963. In fact, it was NSAM 263 which contained this order – and all troops by the end of 1965. NSAM 273 was the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s reversal of NSAM 263, which ultimately resulted in the deployment of 185,000 troops into Vietnam by the end of 1965.

Now Prouty figures fairly prominently in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Who can forget the scene where Mr. X encounters Jim Garrison in Washington and tells him about picking up a newspaper and instantly thinking there was a cover story put out about Oswald? As it turns out, Hankey can. He forgot what country Fletcher Prouty was in, and the famous name of the newspaper he picked up. Corbett had to correct him again. Prouty was not in Hankey’s Australia, but in New Zealand and the paper was the Christchurch Star. But Hankey isn’t done. He then calls Prouty a CIA operative. This is JFK 101 level stuff and Hankey is flunking. In the film, Mr. X explicitly denies this. Everybody knows that Colonel Prouty was a high-level liaison between the Pentagon and the CIA. If Hankey were as big an advocate of Prouty as he says he is, he would know that Prouty never worked for the Agency.

John, let’s stop here and take a quick breather. Are these horrific mistakes irrelevancies to you? Are these minor matters, or mistakes that do not interfere with your overall analysis that the Bush family orchestrated the assassination? If so John, let’s take you – no, let’s walk you – back to the start. The irrelevancies we discuss are the irrelevancies you bring up. Not us. Understand this. We simply clean up your errors – big and small. What has Fletcher Prouty in New Zealand got to do with anything regarding your grand scheme? Did George Bush send him there John? Well you seem to think so. Why on earth would you say stuff along the lines of: “It’s clear they moved Prouty out of the country to move Bush into Dallas to supervise his troops.” And later on when discussing Bush’s phone call to the FBI in Tyler, Texas, why would you joke that he should have placed the call from New Zealand?

Fletcher Prouty never actually said New Zealand got the story ahead of the rest of the planet. After spending five years examining the Star (unlike your 5 minutes), I agree with Prouty that there was a probable cover story. This went out around the world. None of the potential conduits of this information have any bearing on the Bush family. It has more to do with individuals like Joe Goulden, Hal Hendrix, and David Atlee Phillips. Persons you think are not relevant. While you are at it, please tell us that Prescott Bush invented Operation Mockingbird, which was a major part of the plot that day.

39:10: George Bush’s Impossible Phone Call in Tyler, Texas

Hankey’s mysterious conflict with documentation again rears its ugly head. But before we tap this rich vein of Hankeyism, let us note that he says that Bush cannot remember where he was that day. This is a myth. Paul Kangas is the spiritual father to Hankey, which, considering his grip on facts, makes perfect sense. He seems to have come up with the idea of “Bush, The Amnesiac.” In this excerpt from a draft for another project, Kangas provided no sources for the following 1991 diatribe in his piece The Kennedy Assassination: The Nixon Bush Connection:

Only Hankey could be influenced by someone who calls the most famous home movie ever, the “Zagruder film,” and then calls George’s dad “Preston.” And to make it a trifecta, Kangas says “Preston” (he, of course, should have said “Prescott”) ran his son’s non-existent campaign for the Senate in 1962. That Hankey and Russ Baker have both fallen for this line says much about their “rigorous research standards.” (And yes, Jesse Ventura was criticized by me as well for this.) Hankey then tries to say here that Bush was not really in Tyler, Texas at the time! How? He says there was only seven minutes for him to make a call to the FBI about Thomas Parrot. As if seven minutes were not enough time to call the FBI. Yet, the FBI document says that Bush called at 1:45. George Bush actually had something like 15 minutes to make the phone call. It is there in black and white in the document he so astoundingly says gave Bush 7 minutes to make the call. Hankey’s excuse – and he always has one – will be something like the call would have taken time to get through and so on. I’m sorry, but it’s all there and it looks like an extremely simple operation to any rational person looking at the document in question. (Click here for a view.)

56:07: Madeleine Brown, The Prostitute

Hankey’s right to be skeptical of Madeleine Brown. However, he’s not prepared to go all the way. He seems to believe that the mystical Murchison assassination-eve party occurred. It’s not clear to me if he does or not. But he goes all the way and smears the dead woman by calling her a prostitute. I have seen no evidence which suggests she was a prostitute. Yet based on the fact that she attended some upper-echelon Dallas parties, the woman is called a prostitute: “Why do you think they keep inviting her?” Hankey asks. In the midst of Brown’s purported whoring, Hankey, in his excitement, forgets the name of the prominent Wall Street figure on the Warren Commission who was supposed to be there also. John J. McCloy was the name you were after John. Gad, you “expert” you.

1:13:41: Hankey, The Eternal Victim

James Corbett clearly wanted Hankey on his show to discuss Dark Legacy. But what it turned into was a rambling diatribe against CTKA. The debate on Murder Solved is an interesting case in point. In the final stages of his interview, Corbett asks Hankey if he has formulated a response to “Delhayneos” CTKA “hit piece” on him. (Even though I – not Jim – wrote it.) Hankey’s reply, as per usual, was all over the place and yet deeply revealing:

Now, let us do our usual Hankeyan breakdown. First of all, Hankey has raised the issue on his web site. We have seen it. But what he does is quite slick. In order to preserve his fig leaf that he really didn’t make that many errors in the film, he eliminates any reference to Jim’s second post there. Why? Because Jim listed the 20 errors he made in the first half of the film. Secondly, as Jim later explained when he was allowed to reply on Corbett’s show, CTKA has a general rule that we don’t allow authors to counter the reviews we place, for the simple reason that we negatively review so many books, essays, and DVD’s that it would take up much too much time. (There has only been one exception to this rule, a reply to my discussion of Alex Jones.)

But let’s continue Hankey’s “comeback special” tirade, where he is a bit more candid:

Yes, John. That’s why you’re saying you’re hiding it when it’s a public forum. That totally makes sense. But in the next sentence you completely give the game away:

As we have explained, my piece was not a “hit piece.” It was a painstaking correction of a litany of literally scores of errors. If Hankey would have done his homework, he would not have been embarrassed, as he himself admitted at JFK Murder Solved. Incredibly, he never even turned the film over to a fact-checker who was more well-versed in the JFK case than he was – which is just irresponsible.

Hankey’s JFK II is not a little video by any account. In fact, by all accounts it has gone viral and brought Hankey quite a lot of attention. Thus, when Hankey plays victim, he’s either deluded or making a fantastic marketing pitch.

1:16:15: J in Latin is I-I

He then uses an example of CTKA’s correcting his use of the boat named Barbara in the Bay of Pigs. The boat we explained was the Barbara J, not simply, the Barbara. Now Hankey ignored the middle initial because it damaged his point. (Which he’ll blame now on Prouty and then us for going against Prouty-foul betrayers; we are as you will see in the grand finale). Barbara Bush was George Bush’s wife, but Barbara has no middle name. So perhaps he was wrong to insinuate the ship was named after her? He now tries to reclaim ground by making the bizarre claim that the “J in Latin is I-I.”

Hankey’s excuse for all of this:

Now, Hankey spent a good deal of time in his film discussing Bush’s association with Skull and Bones. In the CTKA review, he was roundly shredded because of his inaccuracies. Hankey, “the S&B expert,” should have known that Bush’s name was “Magog.” As for the conversion of ‘J’ into Roman numerals, it is a half truth. Is he really trying somehow to equate Roman numerals with the letter value of ‘J’ ? If he took a quick look on Google, it would have shown him that there was little numerical usage in replacing ‘J’ with an ‘I’ or ‘i’, and it definitely didn’t equal two of them.

Hankey reaches a new all-time low with regard to misappropriating Fletcher Prouty – who never ever said anything of the “codified” sort in his discussions about the Bay of Pigs.

In a field abounding with some truly bad research and researchers, John Hankey scoops the pool. To even call Hankey a researcher is to shame what the term means. Real researchers, when they are criticized, do not have to hide behind the skirts of their elders and betters, and then scream they are being singled out and victimized. They defend their work on its own terms.

Hankey cannot. So he hides.

“The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 1

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 2

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 3

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 4

As Seamus Coogan noted in his deconstruction of John Hankey’s deleterious and delirious quasi-documentary JFK 2, Hankey has since gotten some advice and pro bono work from Hollywood. This resulted in a more professional version of the film. The title of the redo is Dark Legacy.

This time around, at least the presentation is smoother and slicker. Some of the music has been improved. There are more modern graphics and effects, like fades and dissolves. The overall effect is to make the film easier on the eyes. And a little easier on the ear. (At times, Hankey still puts in his old acoustical folk song.)

And someone prevailed upon Hankey to remove three of the worst howlers in the film. First, the immortally camp scenario of George Bush going into J. Edgar Hoover’s office with two Cuban thugs and threatening him with a flechette gun is gone. Second, the phony dialogue put in the mouth of Bill Colby about knowing George Bush and Howard Hunt were involved in the assassination in Dallas is also gone. Another egregious error about Kennedy letting the Russians search for Cuban training camps in the USA after the Missile Crisis is removed.

Hankey has also added a new opening that focuses on the attributes of Kennedy’s presidency. He notes here the Steel Crisis, his civil rights program, his disarmament pledge, among others.

But, still, even after the technical improvements and the surgery on some of the worst segments of the first version(s), it’s surprising how many errors were left intact. In other words, after all those years it was out, Seamus Coogan was the only person who took the time and effort to go after the film with a fine toothcomb. Which, of course, speaks well for CTKA, and poorly for the rest of the research community. Are we the only people doing fact checking? It appears that way. Which, of course, doesn’t say much for the so-called JFK research community.

One would think the man would look up the proper spellings of names if one was going to depict those names on the screen. Hankey doesn’t, therefore names like Robert Blakey, and George Burkley and Aubrey Rike are spelled wrong. One would also think that the cutting of the film would match up correctly. Well, the two HSCA acoustic experts, Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy never testified before the Church Committee. And related to this, he depicts Dallas DA Henry Wade as Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr.

Hankey still includes the whole incredible 13 shot fusillade scenario. Unlike what Hankey intones as narrator, Richard Helms never testified at the trial of Howard Hunt and he never admitted that Marita Lorentz was a spy. (See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, pgs. 214-225)

With his usual penchant for overstatement, Hankey says that the above trial depicted in the Lane book showed that Hunt was guilty of killing president Kennedy. As Coogan showed, it did not. And Richard Nixon never said to Bob Haldeman that the whole “Bay of Pigs thing” message he sent to Helms meant the Kennedy assassination. This was a deduction later made by Haldeman. Guy Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts never testified to the Warren Commission. And she never told anyone she saw Oswald at the training camp at Lake Pontchartrain. Strangely, Hankey adds in this version that parking lot manager Adrian Alba was Oswald’s closest associate in New Orleans. Yet, reportedly, all he did was read some magazines in his office.

I could go on and on. But the point is that although three of the worst faux pas are gone, the great majority of the errors Coogan enumerated are still there. And let me add that concerning his case against George Bush, Hankey now adds the Parrott memorandum. I discussed this at length in my Russ Baker review. Bush at first denied and then could not recall his call about James Parrott to the FBI. My question: If you were an ambitious and successful Texas politician, would you want to admit you had some rightwing nut in your campaign headquarters a few months before JFK was killed? And that this man had threatened Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs? And unlike what Hankey insinuates, Bush was not in Dallas at the time of the shooting; he was in Tyler, Texas campaigning in front of a Kiwanis Club gathering.

All in all, although the new version is a slight improvement, this is still an inferior film that does not do our cause any good.

“The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

“Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 1

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 2

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 3

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 4

A response from Jim DiEugenio

posted by Bob (Fox) on Tue Mar 23, 2010 12:40 pm

Originally I was not going to reply to John Hankey’s response about Seamus Coogan’s incisive and well-researched critique of JFK 2. But since both he and his henchman Michael Dell could not confine themselves to the facts of that critique, but have now launched a smear of the personal motives and trustworthiness of myself, Lisa Pease, Seamus and the site in general, I feel it necessary to do so.

Why? Because on Black Op Radio, I have taken the time to praise this forum and to single out certain people on it. I have not done that with Spartacus, JFK Lancer, or DPF. Since I went out on a limb, I don’t want it sawed off below me by people like Hankey and Dell.

I had no idea that Seamus was going to submit that essay on that subject until it was almost completely written. But some hints conveyed to me in advance were questions like the following: 1.) “Jim, didn’t Kennedy know the Bay of Pigs was going to be launched in advance?” 2.) “Did Delphine Roberts know Oswald was at the Lake Ponchatrain training camp?” 3.) “Who hired Hunt at the White House?” and 4.) “Have you ever heard anything about Prescott Bush actually running the CIA while Dulles was DCI?” My answers in order were: Yes, No, Colson, and No. When I asked Seamus what he was working on, he said it was a review of Hankey’s documentary. Hankey’s answer to those questions were No, Yes, Nixon and Yes. I said, “Are you serious?” He said, “Yes, I am. Its that bad.”

I had seen Hankey’s video many years ago. I dismissed it as rather amateurish in technique, sophomoric in content, and specious in its scholarship. In the last it owed much to Paul Kangas, a man who I once lectured at a seminar with in San Francisco. And who Gary Aguilar warned me in advance about. He told me, “He’s our weak link.” In fact, Hankey’s penchant for accenting the dubious role of Nixon in the JFK case, and the false idea that Kennedy didn’t know about the Bay of Pigs invasion are borrowed from Kangas. Hankey does much borrowing, and all of it is indiscriminate. In fact the only things that may be actually Hankey’s are the things he makes up. Which I will discuss later.

Let’s take Hankey’s opening paragraph as an example of his slick rhetorical technique. He says Seamus “concedes” the Hoover memo was about George Bush. This is ridiculous, as he does no such thing. Everyone realized this was so after the Joseph McBride articles appeared in the Nation, way back in 1988. And I find it odd that Hankey has so much trouble giving McBride credit for first publicizing the memo and then writing two good essays about Bush and the CIA. Why is it so hard for him to write McBride’s name, and date and source the articles properly? He actually tries to attribute them to Mark Lane, when Lane actually properly sources them to McBride as appendixes in Plausible Denial.

He then states that “these misguided anti-Castro Cubans were in Dealey Plaza and shot Kennedy. Coogan pretends that I am alone in my position that this Bush-supervised group was directly involved. But that is precisely the principal thesis of mark Lane’s Plausible Denial…and Gaeton Fonzi….” This is pure balderdash. The Cubans Bush was allegedly associated with in the memo are never named in the memo. So what is the evidence that they are the same as those in Lorenz’s group? He produces none. And to conflate Fonzi with Lane on this issue is fundamentally dishonest. As Seamus pointed out, Fonzi in his fine book The Last Investigation, showed why Lorenz was not to be trusted on this point. He came to the conclusion she was trying to sell a screenplay. He explains why in detail on pages 83-107. Fonzi’s book came out in 1993, two years after Lane’s. Lane may have been unaware of this evidence against her. But Hankey should not have been. And used her tall tale anyway. After all, he needed some Cubans, any Cubans.

The third point Hankey pulls out of a hat. He talks about a call to the FBI by Bush that is related to the James Parrot matter. He then says that Seamus concedes the point with his silence. John: Take a look at your film JFK 2 again. The Parrot matter is not in it. That is why Seamus is silent about it. You didn’t mention it there.

As in his film, Hankey is very good at avoiding the central point: his film is full of factual errors, distortions, and illogic. To the point where he actually creates things that did not happen. In other words, as Seamus wrote, it is solipsistic, not realistic. How does he explain all these large and pitiful mistakes? In two ways.

He needed a fact checker and could not hire one. And second, the errors he made are not of substance, they are minor.

Concerning the first: Used books are not expensive, and neither is the Internet. I went through Seamus’ article with a fine tooth comb. The vast majority of his sources I found in my personal library or on the web. Somehow we are to believe that Hankey could not find out through any low cost source that there was no such thing as the “Senate Select Committee on Assassinations”? How about calling someone on the phone and asking them. He didn’t know that Delphine Roberts never claimed to see Oswald at that Cuban exile training camp? How about going to the library and checking out Tony Summers’ book Conspiracy. He really thought that the only source Hoover had about the CIA training camps in New Orleans was Oswald? How about calling up former FBI agent Warren DeBrueys and asking him if the Bureau knew about CIA covert ops and were warned to steer clear of them. None of these are expensive or time consuming. They consist of picking up a phone or driving to the local library. Hankey chose not to do them. He then complains about someone pointing out his myriad errors and blames it on lack of funds. When Seamus is a struggling graduate student.

From here, without any foundation, he then begins his smear of Seamus. He attributes the fact that Seamus found his video chockfull of major errors—like one every two minutes—to the fact that he must have a dark and hidden motive. He is –get this—protecting the Bushes!! No John, nobody with any knowledge of modern history will do that. And if they did so I would not print the article. Seamus was very clear about that issue at the end. And he named just one of their crimes, the election heist of 2000. Your film detracts attention from their true crimes, in trying to impaste upon them one for which there is no credible evidence. As he said, what McBride wrote about proves that Bush lied when he said upon becoming CIA Director that he had no previous relationship with the Agency. And that is all the memo proves. It was you who went way beyond the actual words in the memo. Hankey then tries to say that he never tried to take credit for something he did not discover. Take a look at the subhead in the essay, which says, “Did you really do all that John?” These are quotes that have Hankey’s name attached to them. So he cannot deny he wrote them. He says it was he who proved that Bush was the man Hoover referred to in the memo. Nope. It was McBride who did so. He then wrote that he pointed out that the memo names Bush as a supervisor of the anti-Castro groups. It does not. He then says that that David Talbot’s Brothers further corroborates the material in his film about CIA trained Cubans and the Mafia. Yet Hankey is not even mentioned in the Talbot book. And try and find either Lorenz or Bush Sr. in that book. Seamus was correct on this score.

He then tries to say that Mark Lane was the first to implicate George Bush Sr. in the JFK case. All that Lane did was reprint the McBride articles in his book. Period. He does not work them into the text. All he says is that Bush’s activities in the sixties are worthy of note. (p. 329) It was Hankey who took Lane’s sentence, and the memo, and accused the Bush family of being the prime movers behind the JFK assassination. He then tries to say that Fletcher Prouty was also a purveyor of this theory. All Prouty did was insinuate that Bush was involved in the Bay of Pigs operation. He probably was, but—as Seamus showed– Prouty was wrong about the name associations he used i.e. the ships and the name Zapata. So Lane made an error with Lorenz, Prouty did with the names. We all do. But instead of investigating those faulty points, Hankey built a false edifice from those errors. Which is one reason his film cannot be taken seriously.

He then says he won’t take up the many small and silly objections Seamus makes, since he terms them misdirection and distraction. Really? Making up a scene in which Bill Colby is talking about Hunt and Bush being in Dallas and part of the hit team on Kennedy—when in fact there is no evidence for him either saying this or thinking it? That is not small and silly; it’s a huge and serious falsification. So is making up another scene where Bush Sr. walks into Hoover’s office with a couple of thugs and threatens him with a poison dart gun unless he writes the memo about him. (Did Michael Dell miss that?) That is the climax to the whole video. And Hankey has not one iota of evidence that it ever happened. It is a huge and misleading invention on his part. And Seamus was right to call him on it. In fact, when I read the essay I could not believe what I was reading. So I watched the video all the way through. Seamus was right about that scene, and the rest of it.. And it was one of the things that convinced me to print the essay. Work this bad—like say Waldron’s Ultimate Sacrifice– should not go unchallenged. And this is a main function of CTKA. To show why certain conspiracy oriented material should not be trusted. Because it makes us look stupid and silly. Can you imagine what say, Sixty Minutes, could do with JFK 2?

Which brings us to Michael Dell. Who mysteriously showed up on the forum right after Seamus’ essay was published. And he started defending Hankey and attacking Seamus and CTKA. Why? Probably because he has had Hankey on his show more than once. And actually accepted these wild scenarios as credible. Dell did not ask Hankey: “John, what is your proof for Bush threatening Hoover with a poison dart gun after the JFK murder?” Or: “John, when did Colby ever say that Hunt and Bush were in Dallas and part of the hit team?” Or: “Why would Kennedy let the CIA launch the Bay of Pigs invasion without his approval?” Seamus did ask the questions that Dell did not. And for this, Dell attacks Seamus for doing what he should have done.

Which leads into the whole thing about questioning me, Lisa and CTKA. Hankey hints at this but Dell takes it the length of the field. I love this one: “CTKA has no legitimate standards and is susceptible to producing..inferior material..I will no longer trust them….” etc. etc. Mr. Dell, if you could not ask Hankey about his source for the Bush pointing a gun at Hoover scene, its you with no standards. Unlike forums, our articles are peer reviewed. By people like Gary Aguilar, Mili Cranor, Dave Mantik etc. You probably have not heard of them, since they are good researchers. We are the only such peer-reviewed site out there. Which is why we have a lot of stature and respect. We get many submissions. And we turn down many of them, since they are rejected in the vetting process. Hankey’s video would have been returned to him politely with a short critique pointing out a sampling of his major errors. And I wager he would have ignored the points and facts so elucidated.

And no we do not run rebuttals. Why? Because we negatively review too many articles, books, TV shows and DVD’s. I don’t want to spend anymore of my time—or my readers’– getting into point-counterpoint arguments with the likes of Lamar Waldron and David Kaiser. Or John Hankey. And Hankey’s reply here proves my stance correct.

Finally, let me add one last point. Dell tries to save the day by saying that Seamus is wrong about Hankey because Horne proved Lifton’s thesis in Inside the ARRB. I wonder if Dell actually read the whole series, or if, like many others in the research community, he is relying on what someone wrote as a post on a forum. I also wonder how much time Dell has spent studying the medical evidence in this case. Finally, I wonder if he has consulted with experts in that field, like Mili Cranor or Aguilar about Lifton’s theory. I doubt if any of the above are true. He just wants to smear Seamus. There will be a multi-part review upcoming on CTKA about Inside the ARRB. Yet we demand, unlike other sites, that the reviewer read the entire work, and show mastery of the material. Its very much up in the air if Horne did what Dell said he did. But, as I said, that doesn’t matter to Dell.

But it does matter to me.

JIM DIEUGENIO

Re: A response from Jim DiEugenio

by Michael Dell on Tue Mar 23, 2010 4:32 pm

Mr. DiEugenio,

Thank you very much for taking the time to enter the discussion. However, I will take issue with your referring to me as a “henchman.”

I’ve gone over this before, but the reason I “mysteriously” joined the message board was because I felt a wrong was committed, and I didn’t see anyone standing up for Mr. Hankey’s work. I didn’t start the topic. I joined it to voice my opinion. Nor did I “smear” Mr. Coogan. Again, I invite anyone to go back and reread the thread. My posts were nothing but respectful to Mr. Coogan. Yet he greeted my concerns with insults, personal attacks, and paranoia.

You’re right. I had interviewed John Hankey. And I found him to be a fine fellow. He has been nothing but kind and respectful in our dealings. He’s a high school teacher in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. He’s a good man trying to do what’s right at a great sacrifice. He deserves more respect than Mr. Coogan or CTKA afforded him.

If there are mistakes in Mr. Hankey’s work, it’s right and necessary to point them out. I want to learn what those mistakes are so I don’t repeat them. Yet it’s impossible to learn anything of substance when Mr. Coogan pens a review full of ad hom attacks, sarcastic comments, and condescension. Such a review would have been fine if it was on a personal blog. But I would like to think a serious investigative body like CTKA would have higher standards. That’s my opinion. You’re free to disagree with it. And, as you and Mr. Coogan have already displayed, you’re also free to insult me for it. But it doesn’t make that opinion less valid.

And, as you can clearly see if you’ve been reading the thread, I’m not alone.

You’re also correct in assuming I’m not a serious JFK researcher. Because I’m not, nor have I ever claimed to be. I actually have a life outside of this. I’m a student and a writer, both journalism and fiction. My interests are numerous and varied, from sports to Russian literature to consciousness studies to meditation and physics. I’m also fairly well read on countless conspiracy topics. However, I’m by no means an expert on JFK. That’s why I need to depend on, and am grateful for, the works of men like yourself, Mr. Coogan, and Mr. Hankey. That’s also why I need to know whom I can trust.

In the past, I’ve trusted you and CTKA. I trust Black Op Radio. I trust Jim Marrs. So when I hear those people talking about Doug Horne and his work, I know I can put my faith in it. Again, I’m not a professional JFK researcher, I don’t have the time to read every book that comes out on the subject. That’s why trust is so important. And that’s why your jab at me for probably not having read Horne’s entire work is so preposterous.

Exactly what were you trying to accomplish with that remark? So you’re saying I shouldn’t believe Doug Horne? You’re saying body alterations never took place? Because you realize that’s what Mr. Coogan said in his review of Mr. Hankey’s work, right? Yet you jump on me for believing Doug Horne without reading his entire work when my belief is based on listening to experts like yourself support Doug Horne. So once more, are you saying I shouldn’t trust you, Black Op, Jim Marrs, etc?

And let me single out this line from that same paragraph…

[i]”Yet we demand, unlike other sites, that the reviewer read the entire work, and show mastery of the material.”[/i}

Really? Like the way Mr. Coogan reviewed the latest edition of Mr. Hankey’s film? Oh, wait. He didn’t. And he stated as much early in his review, rendering the rest of it completely meaningless. But I guess that must have slipped through the ol’ peer review process too.

And your harping on the bit in Mr. Hankey’s film where he shows George Bush threatening Hoover with a poison dart gun is yet another strawman in your ever growing field of scarecrows. Mr. Hankey never says that’s what happened. He’s saying that’s what COULD have happened. It’s only his theory. And anyone watching the movie understands that. Trying to pretend otherwise is silly.

But getting back on topic, I want to still be able to trust you and CTKA. That’s why I need you to help me and others like me. Instead of meeting our concerns with insults and pride, how about some professionalism and understanding?

We’re on the same team here. Which once again brings me back to my original post on the subject. And I will ask the same questions of you that I asked of Mr. Coogan.

1. If your goal is truth, why wouldn’t you and your group of peers reach out to Mr. Hankey and express your concerns before writing such a review?

2. Why didn’t you ask Mr. Hankey to explain why he believes the things he does? If he’s wrong, you could help him understand why. It’s a teaching opportunity.

3. Why didn’t you present Mr. Hankey with a copy of the review to get his response before publication?

4. Why didn’t you even have the courtesy to inform Mr. Hankey the review was published?

Again, if your goal is truth, shouldn’t you be working with people like John Hankey? He’s one of the good guys. If you think his research is flawed or he’s going down the wrong path, extend a helping hand, not a closed fist.

Nothing you have said has changed my opinion of Mr. Coogan’s review. The quality of that piece remains the same and can be judged on its own merits. I still believe it to be an agenda-filled hit piece. The tone of the article and the language used makes it impossible for me to see it differently. My stating that opinion is in no way “smearing” Mr. Coogan. Besides, I believe Mr. Coogan has done a good enough job of that on his own with his behavior towards me.

Finally, I will gladly extend an olive branch. Our shared goal is finding truth, no? I want to work with people like you to achieve that goal. I’d like to bring the community together, not fracture it. So I would be honored if you could come on the little podcast I do and hash things out. We can even try and get Mr. Hankey to come on too, and we can bury the hatchet once and for all and put all this ugliness behind us. I realize you’re no doubt a busy fella, but we can work around your schedule and record something at your convenience. The invitation is there if you’re willing to accept it.

Namaste.

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by Bob (Fox) on Tue Mar 23, 2010 4:43 pm

This thread is why this forum is the best JFK assassination forum on the Net. Lots of great arguments and discussion here. I appreciated Jim D responding like he did. The same goes with John Hankey. I’m sure more will be said later as well. Most of you know this, as Jim has mentioned this on BOR (Black Op Radio), plus I’ve mentioned it here as well, but I will hopefully have an article that will be on CTKA soon. Jim has mentioned this forum on BOR as well, giving us some kudos for our work. As most of you also know, Seamus and I have had some pretty vigorous debates about the Bu$hes role in the JFK assassination and other events, like 9/11. Like I’ve said before…debate is good. That is what this thread is all about. Now, in terms of the article by Seamus, as I’ve said before, he did uncover some mistakes and some invalid assumptions that John had in JFK II. The story was long and well researched. Was Seamus a bit overzealous and harsh in his review of John’s film? Perhaps. To be fair to John, he has upgraded JFK II to a newer version called Dark Legacy, which I have only seen parts of. I think we all should view that film before we make any final conclusions. That being said, I do think John’s overall premise was correct in JFK II. Could it have been produced more effectively? No doubt. But that is why John has upgraded the film to it’s latest version. Now I do disagree with Seamus about the way he ended the article. This is what I said earlier in this thread…

Finally in his essay, Seamus sees no connection between the JFK assassination and 9/11. Seamus is also from New Zealand and not from the United States, so understand his perspective. But in my opinion, he is wrong. The biggest evidence of that CLEAR connection is Operation Northwoods…

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICL … woods.html

Take a good look at the plan. A REAL good look. This was a plan that ALL the joint chiefs wanted to take place. It was also endorsed by Allen Dulles and the Bu$h boys as well. This plan was given to JFK in March of 1962. JFK refused to implement this horrific idea. But an incompetent dolt that stole an election in 2000 named Dumbya Bu$h didn’t refuse. Operation Northwoods was almost a blueprint for the events that happened on 9/11/2001. Instead of Cuba in 1962, it was Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001. It is now 2010, and we are still there. The CIA is happy. The war profiteers are happy. The military industrial complex is happy. Meanwhile, the MSM still sleeps, just like they have since the JFK assassination.

Now that is my belief. Do I have any concrete proof? No. But there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle that fit.

Now in terms of Michael Dell, Michael did have John on his radio show. I think that is the biggest reason he defended the review by Seamus. Also, I have listened to a number of shows that Michael has done, and although the format of his show isn’t strictly politics, it is clear that Michael is on the CT team.

I was recently on one of his shows as well, and although we talked briefly about the JFK assassination, most of the show was about hockey and football. We talked about the magic bullet theory and how ridiculous it is, plus what Gerald Ford on the Warren Commission did to raise the wound on JFK’s back to make it fit the silly theory.

We also talked about the head wound the doctors saw at Parkland immediately after the assassination. It was clear to them that the large hole in the back of JFK’s head was an exit wound.

We talked a bit about Operation Northwoods and the Cuban Missile Crisis and also the great new books by Jim Douglass and Doug Horne.

No mention of Seamus’ article. No mention of John Hankey.

Bottom line, we all need to take a deep breath and remember we are all on the same team. Like I said earlier, the lone nut team never debates the disinformation they put out there. Why? Their heads are in the sand, they drink the kool aid and they are bought off.

We on the CT team however, are always searching for the truth. We have disagreements at times. We have theories that are laughed at…at first. But we keep digging. Folks like Mark Lane, Jim Marrs, Robert Groden, Jack White, Jim DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, Wim Dankbaar, Jim Fetzer, Tom Rossley, John Judge, Dick Russell, David Lifton, Michael Calder and company lead the way.

The new books by Douglass and Horne have gotten us closer to the real truth about 11/22/1963 then we have ever been before.

We have a political voice as well in Jesse Ventura.

Gil Jesus has done a fantastic job on You Tube and I’ve seen others there who also have put out excellent work.

The JFK assassination forums have done great work as well, especially ours. All of you should take bows.

We try to educate and learn. We also debate. That is what a forum does. All sides need to be heard. That is what this thread has done.

Just choose your words carefully and be respectful.

WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME TEAM.

And we are going to WIN!

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by Dealey Joe on Tue Mar 23, 2010 5:01 pm

Mr. Dell

Why not have John Hankee and Seamus Coogan on your show?

makes more sense to me.

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by Michael Dell on Tue Mar 23, 2010 5:33 pm

Dealey Joe wrote: “Mr. Dell – Why not have John Hankee and Seamus Coogan on your show? makes more sense to me.”

Well, from my past experiences with Mr. Coogan, I’m not sure he’d be open to such an invitation. But I have no animosity towards Mr. Coogan. And if he’d be willing, I’d be happy to have him on the show…

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by Michael Dell on Tue Mar 23, 2010 5:34 pm

Bob wrote: “Just choose your words carefully and be respectful. WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME TEAM.”

Well said, sir. And that’s the point I’ve been trying to make from the start…

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by ThomZajac on Tue Mar 23, 2010 6:04 pm

From my perspective, this mostly boils down to a matter of delivery.

Certainly there will never be complete agreement regarding every key point.

The real issue becomes how we choose to discuss and disagree and make our points.

As Bob has said many times, we can be passionate without being disrespectful.

Coogan’s hit piece on Hankey was disrespectful- and there was no need for it to be. I’ve been publishing a newspaper for 25 years and I couldn’t imagine writing a critical story about someone or some business without contacting them for comment before publishing. Hankey is accessible. For Coogan to write such a mean-spirited piece without the professional courtesy of contacting him so that he might address some of the criticisms is simply unforgivable. Add to that the policy of not allowing equal time or even a rebuttal, and you’ve got the lowest kind of ‘journalism’ that there could ever possibly be- no matter how valid the article’s points.

I’d like to think that we demand more of ourselves than that.

Let’s follow the fine examples set by Bob, and Michael Dell.

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by Michael Dell on Tue Mar 23, 2010 6:33 pm

ThomZajac wrote: “I’d like to think that we demand more of ourselves than that.  Let’s follow the fine examples set by Bob, and Michael Dell.”

Thank you, sir.

And Thom brings up an important point. Perhaps it’s merely a question of background and perspective. Thom has a journalism background. Bob is a journalist. I’m a sportswriter and a fiction writer. We’re seeing the review from that perspective. Mr. Coogan and Mr. DiEugenio are no doubt ace researchers, but perhaps they don’t understand or appreciate concerns expressed about the delivery of the facts they present.

I’m guessing Mr. Coogan and Mr. DiEugenio are rather focused in their pursuits, and maybe they don’t pay as much attention to the use of words and language as they should. By the same token, perhaps Mr. Hankey doesn’t know as much about their respective strengths in researching and sourcing.

But to bury Mr. Hankey for his flaws and then take no responsibility for your own is, in my opinion, reckless. And it doesn’t advance our shared cause.

Which brings me back to my original point. I simply don’t understand why CTKA wouldn’t reach out to Mr. Hankey and work together. It would seem to be a natural pairing. Mr. Coogan and Mr. DiEugenio have the expert knowledge of obscure source material and researching skills. Mr. Hankey knows how to present things in an easily accessible, entertaining way. Why not work together and help each other out?

And I’m sorry, but the decisions to not reach out to Mr. Hankey, to not contact him about the review, and to not even alert him the review was published, to me, all betray an agenda. Like Thom said, that’s not how journalism works. And if you conduct yourself in such a way, you must be willing to accept criticism for it.

I just hope everyone, myself included, can learn from this entire exchange. And remember, we’re in this together. Be the change you want to see in the world. If you want people to treat you and your colleagues with more respect, extend that same respect to others, even those who disagree with you.

Namaste.

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by Bob (Fox) on Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:29 am

This will be the final post on this thread. It’s the last reply from Jim D. After this…I am done with this subject. We have had our chances to voice our opinions in this thread. They are here for all to see. I would like to say more as well…trust me…but decorum prevents me from doing so. It’s time to move on. Jimmy Files would appreciate this…this isn’t Joliet…but we now have a lockdown here at our forum…

Mr. Dell, I really do not see how anyone can take seriously your resistance to being called a henchman for John Hankey in this affair. Especially when you state that “a wrong was committed” against him. In my view, after editing Seamus’ long essay, and checking his sources thoroughly, the wrong was by Mr. Hankey and the victim was the historical record. Which is clearly something you did not check before you had him on your show. But, now you attack Seamus because he did check the record. Hmm.

And what is the reason you are so outraged against Seamus and CTKA? Because you met Mr. Hankey and “I found him to be a fine fellow. He has been nothing but kind and respectful in our dealings…He’s a good man trying to do what’s right at great sacrifice. He deserves more respect than Mr. Coogan or CTKA afforded him”

Mr. Dell, what is deserving of respect is not a man’s charm, or niceness, or his job. What deserves respect in CTKA’s eyes is the quality of a man’s work. That is, the thoroughness of his scholarship, the rigor of his logic, the quality of his perceptions, the number of important interviews he does, and the important documents he uncovers. In that regard, Hankey’s film is so mistake riddled, so illogical, so full of deductive errors of reasoning, that what is shocking is that no one had skewered it sooner. Certainly, you were not going to. Hankey is just too nice.

How do you deal with the sorry string of errors in JFK 2? With this: “If there are mistakes in Mr. Hankey’s work, its right and necessary to point them out.” So you want to have it both ways. You say “If there are…” Which in light of Seamus’ essay is a ridiculous statement. There are literally dozens of errors of every kind in the pseudo documentary. So many that it is actually shocking. Just consider:

1. Mossadegh and Arbenz were not killed in CIA overthrows.
2. Ganges was not a doctor in 1963
3. Who believes that 13 bullets were fired in Dealey Plaza, and what is the evidence for that ballistically or acoustically?
4. Roy Kellerman was not looking in the back seat at the time of the shooting.
5. What is the evidence for Connally seeing Kennedy choking on a bullet and being shot in the head?<
6. It is not true that there was no evidence against Oswald by the evening of the murder.
7. The mystery of who shot JFK is not “easier to answer than you think”.
8. The CIA memo about supplying an alibi for Hunt on 11/22/63 was not written by Helms.
9. Operation Zapata was not named after Bush’s oil company.
10. There is no evidence that either the ships Barbara or the Houston were named by Bush Sr.
11. Nixon did not bring Hunt into the White House.
12. There is no credible evidence that Nixon was in on the JFK plot, so why picture him with a rifle pointed at Kennedy in the limo?
13. The Rubenstein document is very likely a forgery. And it was not “recently discovered”.
14. There is no evidence, let alone proof, that LBJ blackmailed Nixon about his role in the JFK case on a phone call.
15. There is no evidence, let alone proof, that Nixon hired Connally because they worked on the JFK hit together.
16. Hoover was not a crack investigator or heroic anti-Fascist. Just look at what he did in the Palmer Raids. Or the McCarthy years.<
17. Hunt was not found guilty of murder at the Liberty Lobby trial.
18. There is no evidence, let alone proof, that Prescott Bush picked Nixon out of crowd and decided to be the prime backer of his early political career.
19. There is no evidence, let alone proof, of any sinister connection between Nixon and Hunt in 1963 on the JFK plot
20. There is no evidence, let alone proof, that Prescott Bush was the real power behind DCI Allen Dulles at CIA.

Let me digress on this last point. Because it reveals Hankey’s methods in the use of evidence. As Seamus showed in his essay, there is no mention of this Bush for Dulles substitution in either of the two standard reference books on the CIA. So what does Hankey now do? He says that Prescott Bush was on a committee of inquiry in the Chou En Lai assassination affair. Dulles asked him for the status of the inquiry and Prescott declined to tell him. Therefore Prescott was really the power behind Dulles at CIA. Which is a totally illogical deduction. Every so often there is an internal inquiry at CIA. During the Dulles years there were, for example, the Bruce-Lovett report and the Lyman Kirkpatrick report on the Bay of Pigs. If Dulles has asked David Bruce, Robert Lovett or Kirkpatrick to divulge anything from their reports before it was done, and they had refused, would that mean that these three men were really in charge at CIA and not Allen Dulles? Of course not. The very question seems ridiculous. But these are the illogical lengths that Hankey will go to in twisting evidence to buttress his baseless theory.

Now I stopped at 20 serious errors. Yet I only got halfway through the show. I would have gotten to about forty in an 88 minute presentation. And I should note, I edited Seamus’ essay down from 54 pages to 34 pages. Simply because I thought it was overkill. So unedited, it would have come to at lest 50 errors. Which is simply unacceptable and intolerable for an 88 minute documentary. And that is the key word. This is supposed to be a documentary. Which is what makes the error rate shocking. So for Dell to use the phrase, “If there are mistakes in Mr. Hankey’s work”, this is simply an attempt to whitewash the truth. There are so many errors that they should offend any serious person’s sensibilities. Yet they are not offensive at all to Mr. Dell. After all Hankey is a “fine fellow” who has been “kind and respectful in or dealings”. And that excuses an academic debacle like JFK 2.

I don’t know what he means about Horne’s work. CTKA has not published any part of the upcoming five-part review of Inside the ARRB. And I have said very little about it on Black Op Radio. To read a book(s) that long takes weeks, maybe a month. And then to compose one’s thoughts and write it out, that takes almost as long. But having read much of it, and having followed the controversy about Lifton’s book for many years, it’s not correct to say that somehow Horne’s book “proves” Best Evidence. Only someone with sub standard scholarly standards would say so. And only someone who has not consulted with the best medical people in the field. And, although I like him and Crossfire is a good overview book, Marrs is not a medical authority. (Ever hear of “The Signal and the Noise”?)

I love how you tried to score us on not reviewing Dark Legacy with JFK 2. Seamus explained this upfront. If you read his essay—which you are trying to ignore the contents of, he said many, many more people have seen JFK 2 than Dark Legacy. Because it has been around much longer and since it is online. So I told Seamus that I would buy Dark Legacy later and review it with Baker’s Family of Secrets. Since the whole Parrot episode that Hankey uses there is dealt with at length in the Baker book. So CTKA will have reviewed the whole Bush trio at length and in depth. Who else has done so? (By the way, you broke your own rule here. You did not ask me beforehand if I planned on reviewing Dark Legacy before you attacked me. Strange double standard you have.)

This last point relates to you rather odd view of critical procedure. You take me to task for not consulting with Hankey or “reaching out ‘ to him before publishing Seamus’ article. Or giving him a copy of the review beforehand. I don’t know where you learned this strange procedure. There have been about 13 reviews published of my two JFK books. In not one instance has anyone ever consulted with me beforehand, reached out to me, or even sent me a review. Never. This is why publishers have clipping services.

I love the point you make about the Bush threatening Hoover scene with a poison dart gun being excusable since it only “could happen”. Mr. Dell, almost anything “could happen”. I mean Roscoe White could have been firing at Kennedy from the roof of the TSBD with a uranium bullet in a sabot. He could have then jumped down into a rubber blanket held by three accomplices on the Dallas police force in civilian clothes. That “could have happened”. Do you think it did happen? Would you like to see it in a documentary on the JFK case? It is the job of the documentary filmmaker to show us what DID happen, or if not, the closest approximation of what happened with the best and most reliable evidence available. What evidence is there for this preposterous product of a fevered imagination? Is it in any book on Hoover? Are there witnesses who saw it? Are there witnesses who heard about it? Was it in Hoover’s appointments book to meet with George Bush after the assassination? Did his longtime secretary Helen Gandy ever tell anyone about it? Did Tolson? Did DeLoach? So why use such a wild and fantastic scene at all? Especially in a documentary film? And why would you defend it, and then say that its CTKA that has no standards? Wow.

Finally, I will pass on the podcast. I don’t think we are “on the same team here.” Not by a longshot. Just wait until you see my review of Dark Legacy.

Over and out. No more posts by me on Mr. Dell or Hankey.

JAMES DIEUGENIO

Re: Seamus Coogan on John Hankey

by John Hankey on Thu Mar 25, 2010 9:55 pm

There isn’t now, nor has there ever been any issue raised by DiEugenio or Coogan that is worth discussing except one:

Does the evidence support the finding that George HW Bush was involved in the assassination. All else is obfuscation.

DiEugenio and Coogan concede that the Bush of the memo is our very own George HW. McBride (all praise and glory to him; blessed be his name) located another George Bush at CIA and got a statement from him that he wasn’t the Bush of the memo. That, says, DiEugenio, settles the question and “proves” it was our George. Fine and dandy. I felt it wasn’t sufficient, and tried to gather the circumstantial evidence to prove the point more definitively. But fine. It was him.

DiEugenio and Coogan (henceforth D&C) say that’s all it means. It doesn’t connect Bush to the assassination or to the “misguided anti-Castro Cubans”. So let me ask you, Jim, or Seamus, and any one else, to take up these following points, which are relevant to the issue; and to skip the bullshit:

1) The title of the memo in question is, “Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy”. The title is NOT “Misguided anti-Castro Cubans”; or “Response to State Dept. Inquiry”; or any of dozens of other possible titles. Hoover thought it was relevant to the assassination, obviously. D&C don’t think so; they don’t want you to think so; and they attack me for drawing what seems to me a starkly obvious conclusion: that a memo, titled “Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy”, that named Bush as a member of the CIA, ties him to the assassination. I mean, are these not ludicrous points for me to have to make? Why the Bleep do you, D&C, think Mark Lane saw fit to include the memo in his book??? Why The Bleep did he feel it was relevant to a book about Hunt, Lorenz, and the assassination??? I may have holes in my socks. My underwear may need changing. I haven’t vacuumed my carpet in a couple of weeks. Attack me for that. But good grief!! For me to suggest that this memo links Bush to the assassination is not something that deserves to be attacked with the air of disregard both of you have brought to this debate. I think the entire discussion group should be offended. And say so. For an important number of researchers, the minute Hunt told the Washington Post “I’m a CIA assassin,” their immediate reaction was “OMG. He killed JFK!” I was a teenager when I attended a speech by Donald Freed entitled, “From Dallas to Watergate.” He connected Hunt to the misguided anti-Castro Cubans and then to the assassination; and he did it without the benefit of the Hoover Bush memo.

2) The Hoover Bush memo says that the FBI requested that the CIA send representatives to receive this report. If the report had been presented telephonically, Hoover’s memo would have said so. Bush received the report in person. No reasonable doubt. The report was given by a man in the FBI’s upper echelon. I presume, therefore, that it was given at FBI headquarters in Washington. That would be standard. If it was given somewhere else, I think we might assume that Hoover would have mentioned it. But it’s not an important point. The critical point is that if the FBI calls you up and says they want to give you a report, you don’t send the teenager who walks your dog. Jim is a school teacher. If the FBI calls the principal and says that they have a report that the English teachers are using bootleg copies of some textbook, and they want the principal to send someone to receive their report of the results of their investigation, who is the principal going to send? The janitor? A PE teacher? Or the English Department chair? Duh! Again, it is an obvious point. Not quite so obvious as the first. But it is an extremely reasonable extrapolation to say that the memo powerfully suggests that Bush was supervising these Cubans. So why the attack upon me for doing so?

3) “So!” say D&C, “what is the evidence that they are the same as those in Lorenz’s group? He produces none.” (That is an exact quote, by the way) Well, if I had provided no other evidence than the implications of the memo itself, I think the points 1&2 above are sufficiently powerful so as to suggest that the allegation of Bush’s connection to the assassins is worth considering. Don Freed figured that if you were in the CIA in ‘63, you were suspect. D&C characterize the following as “none”.

a) Bush and Hunt came to the White House within a few months of each other, to work for Nixon. Bush insisted on a White House office, very unusual for a UN ambassador. Again, regardless of D&C’s objections and obfuscations, Haldeman says that no one could figure out how Hunt got an office in the White House. OK. They both worked in the White House at the same time. DiEugenio would not dispute that Watergate was a CIA operation. He probably would dispute that Bush was a high ranking CIA officer at this time. But it’s obvious that he was. I’m sure DiEugenio would say, that doesn’t connect him to Hunt! He would have you believe that Bush had nothing to do with Watergate. Or if he did, that doesn’t connect him to Hunt. Or if it did, that doesn’t connect him to Hunt in Dallas in 1963. We’ll get to that in a minute. D&C both continue to ignore Haldeman’s statement that when Nixon told the FBI not to investigate Hunt, because “you’ll uncover the whole Bay of Pigs thing”, that Nixon was talking about the Kennedy assassination. Come on Jim. Take this up. It links Nixon to the assassination. It shows that he knew Hunt was involved! But DiEugenio tries desperately to make the point that Colson, not Nixon, hired Hunt. The implication is that Nixon knew nothing about Hunt, because Colson hired him. Well who the Bleep told Nixon that Hunt was connected to the Kennedy assassination? Jim? Can you help us out? Do you want to suggest that Colson told him? Based upon what? Colson had no connection to CIA operations. But, as I point out in the movie, Bush was involved in the same operation, the Bay of Pigs, at the same time, in the same location, that Hunt was. DiEugenio, on Black Op radio 463, raises the strawman, that I said Nixon hired Hunt; and that means, according to DiEugenio, that I say that Hunt was serving Nixon’s interest. Of course I never said any such thing. If I were asked, I’d say that Hunt was working for Bush during Watergate, as he was at the Bay of Pigs, and in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Well, there can scarcely be any doubt whatsoever about two of those. In the context of the Hoover memo, its title, and its naming of Bush, there can scarcely be any doubt about any of them. How can anyone honestly characterize this as “no evidence”. They can’t. DiEugenio is not who he pretends to be; he is not who I, until a little over a week ago, I thought he was. At very least, he’s vastly dishonest in the defense of Bush.

b) I linked Connally to the assassination. Well, you buy that or you don’t. The day of the assassination, Connally said he saw the president slump before he was shot. That was a lie. The film shows he did not see Kennedy before he was shot. He said it, I supposed, to counter the numerous witnesses who said JFK was thrown violently backwards by a bullet from the knoll. And then months later, on cue, Connally changed his story to accord with the single bullet theory. In addition, Connally says the recognized the first shot as an assassin’s rifle shot; but the Zapruder film shows him sitting there calmly, holding his Stetson. You make of that what you will. D&C thinks it means nothing. I think it links Connally to the assassination. And Haldeman says Connally said, “You can’t bring me to the White House until you find something for Bush.” Ok. Pretty weak. I’ve actually cut it out of the latest version. But it’s not nothing. It’s clutching at straws. And it’s a straw. But it’s not nothing. It’s worthy of discussion. It reveals an otherwise invisible, that is secret, connection between Bush and (to me) a clear assassination participant.

c) Bush’s co-founder in Zapata Oil, Bill Liedtke, provided the hush money that was paid to Hunt. It’s another connection between Hunt and Bush. No doubt. Well, no doubt in anyone’s mind but D&C. They can’t even see it. To them, it’s not weak evidence. To them, it doesn’t exist.

d) When CIA agent Felix Rodriguez went to Ramon Rodriguez, the cocaine money launderer, to ask for money, he said, “Bush sent me.” Ramon had written the checks for Hunt, with the money from Liedtke. Felix didn’t know Ramon. But obviously Bush did. How? I suggest that Bush knew Ramon because he was in charge of getting the hush money for Hunt from Liedtke, and to Hunt through Ramon Rodriguez. If it weren’t for all the other stuff, this would be pretty slim. Taken altogether, I think this wraps up Bush pretty tightly with Hunt, before, during, and after Dallas ‘63. The Kennedy assassination is the most tightly held CIA operation in all of history. Given that, we should expect to find nothing. In that context, this is a load of evidence. But forget all that.

e) The FBI memo, recording Bush’s phone call the day of the assassination, claiming he was in Tyler Texas, but explaining that he would be in Dallas that night. Russ Baker in Family of Secrets, reveals that the Dallas Morning News carried an ad saying Bush was speaking in Dallas the night before. DiEugenio called this truly wonderful book “vaporous”, whatever that means. But it’s not a nice word. I raised this book and the evidence in it in my first response. And what is DiEugenio’s response? Read for yourself:

“He (Hankey) talks about a call to the FBI by Bush that is related to the James Parrot matter. He then says that Seamus concedes the point with his silence. John: Take a look at your film JFK 2 again. The Parrot matter is not in it. That is why Seamus is silent about it. You didn’t mention it there.”

No Jim? I suppose. I needed Wim Daankbar to hook me up with this FBI memo (thanks Wim!). And in every rehash, of the four or five I’ve done the last six years, it’s been there. But, OK, Seamus didn’t see it. He’s off the hook on that one. But you’re not. Where’s your response to this memo, putting Bush in Dallas, on duty, the day of the assassination??? Your response is to call this powerful list of connections between Bush and Hunt “none”. What are we to make of this? What are we to think about a person capable of such lies, and in such a dubious cause.

I have, until this episode, been a huge fan of Jim’s. When it comes to dismantling the Warren report and it’s defenders, he is incomparable. No? Or that was my opinion. What the hell happened? Why is he defending Bush in this insanely dishonest fashion? Mike Ruppert was my hero before he persuaded me he was an evil prick. DiEugenio actually makes a favorable mention of Ruppert on Black Op radio 463. I thought I was going to be physically ill when I heard this. So on Black Op he promotes Ruppert. But in his rebuttal in this forum, he doesn’t make any mention of Ruppert, or my charges against him and Lisa Pease for their role in denying Gary Webb an autopsy. How about that, Jim? Care to weigh in on a Bush critic who shoots himself in the head twice, with a .38, and doesn‘t get an autopsy? No. You’re right to shut the bleep up on that score.

In his rebuttal on this forum DiEugenio makes this stunning remark: “So Lane made an error with Lorenz.” This remark is stunning on a number of counts.

1) It is stunning, for a person of Diegueno’s (now-apparently ill-deserved) status to be so evasive and deceptive. The issue is not really Lorenz credibility. It is Mark Lane’s. It is Lane who says Hunt is guilty; and Lane cites Lorenz, as part of a vast array of evidence in support of that finding. I said this in my original remarks, that it is Lane who said Hunt was guilty. DiEugenio misdirects your attention away from the primary “Lane says Hunt is guilty” thesis towards the “Lane believes Lorenz” thesis. Lorenz is a distraction. And DiEugenio, for good reason, avoids confrontingm Lane’s central thesis in order to harp on a single piece of evidence for that thesis: Lorenz.

2) DiEugenio gives us “So Lane made an error with Lorenz;” and what does he offer in support? Zip. We are to discard Lane in favor of DiEugenio based upon what? DiEugenio’s incomparable credibility? Not anymore, I hope. Destroying DiEugenio’s credibility is my central goal at the moment. Have I accomplished it yet?

3) DiEugenio was on Black Op radio to promote Coogan’s attack on me on Feb. 28 (463), But a week later, Lane was on, minutes before DiEugenio came on (this is 464). They shared the same show (though not simultaneously). During his portion of the show, Lane pointed out that Lorenz had cited Sturgis and Hemmings as being in the cars that drove to Dallas for the assassination. And Lane, on the show, says that both Sturgis and Hemmings have corroborated that story, saying that they were there and involved in the assassination. So Jim, Mark Lane has the statements of two of the killers to back up his belief in Lorenz’s story. And you have what?

Finally, during his time on Black Op Radio #463, Jim also attacks somebody’s website for not allowing rebuttals. He laughs about it. It’s ridiculous to him. And then he writes in his rebuttal to me “And no we do not run rebuttals.” Well, I won’t dispute the wisdom of that policy when applied to Warren Commission defenders. However, I’m not a Warren Commission defender. But I’m interested in much more than attacking the Warren Commission. I’m interested in getting beyond the obvious point that Oswald didn‘t act alone, getting at who was behind the killing, and going after them. How can you possibly fail to distinguish between the two? I think that is an essential question for us, your former fans, in trying to divine your motives. Everything you have said on the subject of Bush’s guilt is fundamentally dishonest, in that even when you are right on some minor point, you utterly misrepresent the significance as being somehow fundamental. The good thing is we have learned something important about who you really are. The terrible thing is that you have been a spokesman for the assassination community on important other matters, and you have utterly undermined our faith in your honesty.

******************

That’s a rousing close; and I hate to bring this up, instead of ending there. But in divining who Jim DiEugenio is, and what is going on, I think it’s worth noting: The person representing themselves as Seamus has gotten his hands on a disk that doesn’t contain the Hoover memo, and does contain all this other stuff about Oswald and ice darts and whatnot. That’s interesting. There probably never were more than a dozen such disks on the planet. Maybe fewer. I sent one to Kris Millegan; who offered some suggestions for corrections, which I incorporated; and he referred me to Wim; and I sent him one. And he made some additional suggestions, including getting rid of the Bush-with-the-ice-dart story; and incorporating the Ruby Nixon memo, and the Bush FBI memo from the day of the assassination. And I immediately incorporated those changes, before offering the disk to the public at large, ever. So I would guess that absolutely no one who actually dragged themselves all the way through to the end of Seamus’s hatchet job recognized what he was talking about. Now I know Seamus didn’t get this early early version from Wim. Or from Kris. He’s in bleeding New Zealand for Krike’s sake; or so the story goes. But I smell a big fat rat. And I call on Seamus to explain himself. Where’d you get it Seamus? From the FBI? It reminds me of Bush’s phone call the day of the assassination. I love it when smart asses screw themselves up, being so damn clever. By the way, I’d be happy to sell a copy of the latest version. Wait! He knows the latest version exists. He knows it’s “slick”. So why the hell is he using a six-year old version? To what purpose? And where’d he get it?

***************************************

Anyone who cares to can take up for themselves the myriad irrelevant details that DiEugenio raises in objecting to my work, and decide for themselves if they have any merit. But he raises four as being major, and they’re easily dispensed with, so let me take them up, after pointing out that they indict him more than me, for suggesting that they in any way relate to the case against Bush.

He says 1.) “Jim, didn’t Kennedy know the Bay of Pigs was going to be launched in advance?” This is an utterly irrelevant distraction from the question at hand; but it is a vitally important point, I think, in terms of understanding History, and current affairs. And for that reason, it seems appropriate to me that DiEugenio should rail about it, from the wrong side. That is, I see him as a key disinformer, so if he portrays this as key, it might be – just not in the way he suggests.

I understand that the vast majority of expert opinion is that Kennedy approved the invasion and then refused to provide air cover. This includes experts like Fletcher Prouty, who had a very inside view from which to judge. But I don’t find the story that Kennedy approved the invasion plausible on a number of scores. But my opinion is beside the point, in the face of cold hard evidence:

Days after the assassination, Kennedy called Maxwell Taylor out of retirement and assigned him and Bobby to conduct an investigation into what happened at the Bay of Pigs. They conducted a series of depositions with leading players, including frontline CIA officers on board the Houston and the Barbara J, and Cubans, and cabinet officers. The transcripts of these depositions was published under the title Operation Zapata, about 20 years ago. I think I encountered a reference to it in Fabian Escalante’s book, or in ZR Rifles. In any case, I found the actual US Gov. publication in the local library. The transcripts reveal that when the CIA proposed the invasion, Kennedy turned it down flat. He said he didn’t want any “D-day sort of invasion” (his exact words), but that if the agency wanted to sneak some guerillas into the mountains at night, that would be acceptable. One of the cabinet officials tried to claim that the large invasion had been approved at one particular meeting, and Bobby interrupted him to let him know that he (Bobby) was there and there was no such discussion. One of the CIA officers in command of one of the ships explained that he had been instructed to tell the Cubans, after they were all loaded up and on their way, that the invasion had been called off; and to make sure that they mutinied and went ahead with it anyway. There is real drama in all this. Dulles is sitting there. His underling is ordered, by Maxwell Taylor, the highest rank in the military, to rat Dulles out. The underling looks at Dulles, then at Taylor, and then tells this detailed story of how Dulles planned to get around Kennedy’s rejection of the invasion by pretending to call it off at the last minute, and then blaming it on a Cuban “mutiny”. The officer explained how he had been instructed not to wear side arms, and to be sure to encourage the Cubans to mutiny. But, he said, the Cubans weren’t having any part of a mutiny, and he had to explain the entire scenario to them and assure them that it wasn’t really a mutiny, that they had the complete backing of the US, and that had to proceed. Which they reluctantly did, now unnerved by this attempted charade.

You could argue that this document is somehow dishonest. But I don’t find this plausible on a number of counts. First, why would create this false document, and then tell absolutely no one. I have never encountered anyone who has heard of it. Second, I find the story more than plausible. The Pentagon had approved the CIA’s plan, stupid as it was. But none of the generals got fired. If Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell got fired, it could not have been for offering a bad opinion, could it? You see, if the President agreed to the invasion, it was his opinion too. That’s just not how things work. You don’t fire knowledgeable people because you and your advisors all decided to take their advice. But if Dulles etc. went ahead with an invasion plan that Kennedy had explicitly rejected, that’s quite another matter, isn’t it? The notion that Kennedy would approve the invasion in the first place is also implausible. Kennedy believed in the right of people to choose their own form of government, and he was sympathetic with Castro’s populism. Bobby, in particular, would have been hugely sympathetic to what Castro did to the Mafia. This first is a critical point. Kennedy was not willing to fight a popular movement in Vietnam, even if it was communist; because it was popular. Kennedy was genuinely pro-democracy. He was also against murdering foreign leaders, whether it was Diem or Castro or Khruchev. And finally, Kennedy objected to the notion that the giant power of the US should be brought to bear upon this tiny little island. He said so, in so many words.

This is not a small deal. It is thoroughly revealing about the extent to which we watch a shadow show, and the extent to which 99.99999999999% of the population may be left in the dark about really large and critical issues (like whether Kennedy approved the initial invasion or not). I think it relates to a number of issues. Clinton says he knew nothing about the genocide in Rwanda. Romeo Dillaire and many others attacked Clinton bitterly for his failure to take low-cost zero-threat actions to scare the killers (like jamming their radio station, threatening the leaders by name over their own radio, and buzzing the treetops of the capital with jets). Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, a Kissinger protégé, apparently didn’t tell Clinton, though Lake had complete information on events in the first minutes that they began. I believe the Fort Hood shooting was an op. But I think the evidence shows powerfully that Obama wasn‘t involved in it. Obama has been attacked by the PNAC crowd for refusing to call this Islamic Terrorism; and he ordered the FBI to investigate itself about how they could have failed to open a file on the shooter, Malik Hasan. And the day Obama received their report, he took one sniff and called William Webster out of retirement (see Maxwell Taylor above) to conduct a new investigation, and ordered everyone involved to stop leaking the manufactured background of Hasan-as-Islamic-terrorist. I think this shows that Obama, like JFK at the Bay of Pigs, was not in on the plot.

DiEugenio’s ignorance on this point would be excusable if I hadn’t shown the title of the book, Operation Zapata, and the actual pages with the quotes, in my video. As I’ve said, I held him in the highest regard, but he’s just half-assed on this point.

(There is a point I have to make parenthetically. JFKMURDERSOLVED fans will appreciate it. James Files describes how Nicoletti told him that the CIA had called off the assassination at the last minute, but that he and Nicoletti decided to mutiny and go ahead with it anyway. Ring a bell? This is totally Dulles’ modus operandi.)

More from Jim

2.) “Did Delphine Roberts know Oswald was at the Lake Ponchatrain training camp?” I said she knew and that she said so. I spent 20 minutes online and can’t find the source for Delphine Roberts saying this. I spent another 20 going through my books. Garrison didn’t say it, Lane didn’t say it, Marrs didn’t say it. I didn’t just make it up. Perhaps Sutton or Hinkle. But it’s the most very minor point. Peter Dale Scott says Oswald was there at the camps. (www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/JA/DR/.dr10.html – Deep Politics – 251) Scott may have gotten the information from Robert Tanenbaum, the original Deputy Chief of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, who resigned saying the HSCA wasn’t interested in the truth. He says he saw a film of Pontchartrain showing Bannister and Oswald. http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/JA/DR/.dr10.html Explain to us, Jim: If Oswald was there, if such rock solid sources say he was, why are you even raising this point, much less making a huge issue out of it? (D&C: “I said, ‘Are you serious?’ He said, ‘Yes, I am. Its that bad.’) That’s pretty bad. I said the secretary said. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she lied. Maybe she didn’t. But Tanenbaum is vastly more credible, and says he saw incontrovertible evidence. I should have used Tanenbaum instead of Robets. OK. Score a big point for D&C for misdirection.

More from Jim

3.) “Who hired Hunt at the White House?” I said Nixon. DiEugenio says Colson. Colson worked for Nixon. There can be no dispute about that. Did Colson hire Hunt on behalf of Nixon? Of course. So were dealing with misdirection here, as usual. And now check this from Haldeman’s The Ends of Power:

p. 12 Erlichman to Haldeman the morning after the break-in “He (Colson) doesn’t know anything (sic) about Watergate, and he hasn’t seen Hunt in months.”

Colson to Haldeman: “he (Hunt) was off my payroll. You gotta believe me, Bob. It wasn’t me. Tell the President that. …Hunt left my office months ago, like I said.” So to say that Colson hired Hunt, as DiEugenio does, is useless. In what sense did Colson hire him, if he didn’t pay him? and Hunt didn’t work for him? And more to the point, MUCH MORE to the point, who was Hunt working for? Who was he answering to? Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that Hunt was answering to the CIA? And what CIA officer was closest to him, with a White House office? Bush. No possible question. Now D&C want to insist that somehow this doesn’t constitute a connection between Hunt and Bush. And in order to distract you from this obvious connection, they raise silliness like “Nixon didn’t hire Hunt. Colson did.” Which is not only silly; and not only a dark misinformative piece of misdirection; but it’s essentially wrong.

and finally from Jim 4.) “Have you ever heard anything about Prescott Bush actually running the CIA while Dulles was DCI?” And if Prescott ran the CIA from the shadows, you’d expect to have heard of it? I answered this in my first rebuttal, to Coogan. Briefly, then, Joseph Trento tells how, when Dulles inquired about Prescott’s activities investigating an assassination attempt by the agency against Chou En Lai, Dulles was told he didn’t have sufficient security clearance. But how is this an important question? First of all, I never said Prescott was Dulles’ boss, though I suggested that it was possible. So saying I did is more misdirection and straw man-obfuscation. But if I had said it, so what? It’s not essential. There’s evidence to support it. But the real question is, which of these men, Dulles or Prescott, is highest rank in the Rockefellers’ army? Because that’s all the CIA is or ever was, the publicly funded, officially sanctioned, covert army of the Rockefellers. So does Dulles or Prescott Bush rank higher? Answer that and you will have answered the question, “who was the boss of whom?” But who the hell cares?

I thought I’d include that, reviewing Haldeman’s book, I encountered an incident where Connally calls Nixon and says “burn the tapes.” Bush Jr. did burn the Nixon tapes, in case you missed it. When experts suggested new technology might be able to recover the erased segments, little George ordered the 18 minute segment removed and destroyed. Go ahead, Jim. Explain how that one doesn’t connect George Sr. to Hunt or to the “whole Bay of Pigs thing.”

“The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

“Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 1

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 2

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 3

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 4

The Dark Legacy of John Hankey

Alex Jones and John Hankey

Alex Jones is the perennial king of internet conspiracy mongering. He has views on innumerable events. Even those he knows little about. The Kennedy assassination is but one subject he knows little about. For instance, Jones has endorsed the very suspicious Barr McClellan and his book of “faction” Blood, Money and Power. He has also chosen to endorse a video on the Kennedy case. This is called JFK 2: The Bush Connection. The original – which can still be found online – is a low-budget, poorly produced production by a self-proclaimed 30, 40 or 50 year researcher named John Hankey. Hankey has cobbled together footage from Oliver Stone’s film JFK, the series The Men Who Killed Kennedy, the PBS program Nova, and other productions. The latest version – Dark Legacy – is more slickly done and has some newer information in it. But since the original has been around much longer and is available online, I will concentrate my critique on that.

Hankey has rehashed his product a number of times. JFK 2 seems to have been re-edited at least 3, and possibly as many as 4 times. This is the version I have utilized in my review.

I should note: there are at least two other versions of this first production available. One of them gives more credit for source material and cleans up some crude language. Another version spends about 20 more minutes toward the end on Oswald and the FBI. We will discuss that version later.

Hankey and Prescott Bush

In JFK 2 it is implied that Prescott Bush was the main – or one of the main – architects of the CIA, and its operations to overthrow foreign governments and assassinate foreign leaders. In an earlier version of the film, Hankey used Howard Hunt’s connections to Averill Harriman and Nixon to link him to Prescott Bush. Then, Hankey detailed the overthrow of three prominent leaders via CIA-Prescott Bush (?) backed coups.

No 1: Arbenz: Contrary to what the film tried to say, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala was not killed after this particular coup. That implication is false. The coup occured in 1954, after which Arbenz fled the country. He died as an exile in Mexico in1971. (Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, p. 232) I should add here, the Schlesinger/Kinzer book is still considered the best work on that overthrow. You will find many, many references to Allen and John Foster Dulles in it. (see page 312) You will not find any at all to Prescott Bush, or the Bush clan.

No 2: Lumumba: Why Hankey would place Patrice Lumumba of the Congo next in line to Arbenz escapes me. But Lumumba was not overthrown until 1961 and he actually did die at that time. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 69) Mahoney’s book is one of the best treatments of the whole Congo episode. Again, you will find several references to the Dulles brothers in the index. (p. 333) You will not find any to Prescott Bush, or the Bush clan.

No 3: Mossadegh: Why Mossadegh should be listed third, when the CIA action against Iran came first, in 1953, also escapes me. But unlike what Hankey tried to say, he was not killed in the coup. Mossadegh was placed under house arrest at his estate and died there in 1967. (NY Times, 12/7/09) And in the chronicles I have seen of that coup, you will again read the names of the Dulles brothers. You will not see the name of Prescott Bush. (For example, see The CIA: A Forgotten History, by William Blum, pgs. 67-76. We will examine this preposterous claim of Prescott Bush’s invisible but all-encompassing influence on the CIA in greater depth later.)

Thus after viewing Hankey’s video, reading his comments, and listening to his views with regard to political happenings, it would seem wise to take what he says or writes with caution. I mean, how could anyone take a guy who is pals with ‘Henry Makow PHD’ seriously? Makow is an advocate of the ancient conservative conspiracy theories in which Feminism is seen as an integral part of the new world order, that the Rockefellers are socialists and the classic one about Freemasons controlling the world banking system. Those interested in high comedy can visit his website and or read about his banking thesis in his 2008 book entitled Illuminati: The Cult that Hijacked the World.

Did you really do all that John?

John Hankey has made a number of statements in which he seems to adjudicate himself as the source of all the discoveries concerning George Bush’s supposed relationship to the Kennedy assassination. Here are some snippets which show his modesty in that regard. They appear in an April 2009 piece by Hankey entitled “Same Killers – Different Day”:

“I will give myself props for destroying Bush’s claim that the memo did not refer to him. As the video JFK – the Bush Connection outlines, in college, Bush was a “brother under the skin” to the son of the head of hiring for CIA; he left college and went to work for a man his father identified as a CIA recruiter; and he then set up shop in the middle of CIA preparations for the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; which puts him squarely in the middle of the “misguided anti-Castro Cuban operations referred to by Hoover’s memo and on and on and on.”

The memo he refers to can be seen here.

It plays a major – perhaps the major – part in his thesis. And, as we will see, he claims that he was the first to out Bush as a supervisor of anti-Castro Cubans.

(For more of his views click here).

Where does one begin with an error-ridden mouthful like the above paragraph? First, Hankey was not the first to point out that the memo in question mentioned Bush. This FBI memorandum was first discussed at length in The Nation on July 16, 1988. (In another version of JFK 2, Hankey incorrectly says it was made public in 1992.) The author of that article was writer Joseph McBride. In that essay, he said that this one page memo had been declassified by the FBI back in 1977. Since then, to name just one example, Mark Lane reprinted McBride’s original essay plus a follow-up Nation piece in his book Plausible Denial back in 1991 (pgs. 371-78). Secondly, when Bush’s representatives tried to say the memo did not refer to him, contrary to Hankey’s claim, it was McBride who tracked down a man with the same name in the CIA and showed it was very unlikely the memo related to him. (ibid, Lane.) Why and how Hankey would even begin to take credit for all this is a little bizarre. Third, the memo mentions nothing about Bush being “a supervisor” of these Cuban exiles. Fourth, to prove his thesis, Hankey tries to show just how the CIA had used the Cuban exiles in the Kennedy murder. As we shall see, it is not convincing. Fifth, the memo does not say that Bush went to FBI headquarters to be briefed on November 23rd. It just says that Bush-along with another man – had been orally issued information that Cuban exiles may stage an attack on Cuba in the wake of Kennedy’s murder. It does not say how he was orally informed. The idea that on 11/23 Bush would be flown to Washington to hear information that was not in any way unusual or surprsing, and which he could have been briefed by phone about, makes little sense. So although Hankey did not in any way discover this memo or first publicize it, he is the first to aggrandize it way beyond its literal meaning. To the point that he is actually implying that it somehow involves Bush in the assassination of President Kennedy. Which it does not.

If you thought the above comments were a little exaggerated, then check this one out. It comes from an email exchange between Hankey and an online fan:

Does he really think that his video JFK 2 was the first to expose the CIA-Mafia plots and their possible coordination with Cuban exiles? Did Hankey ever hear of Anthony Summers’ valuable book, originally titled Conspiracy? It was first published many, many years – even decades – before JFK 2 began to circulate. Further, how was David Talbot’s Brothers inspired by Hankey’s research? You will not see Hankey’s name in Talbot’s index. But you will see Summers’ name. (p. 476) But even that gives Hankey too much credit. For the Talbot book does not really outline any such conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

Where did you get That?

In JFK 2 Hankey has utilized a well known dubious document to implicate a well known politician with a famous Dallas based Chicago mob hoodlum (which is explored later in this review). But Hankey doesn’t stop there. Hankey has also made statements to the affect that the CIA has declassified files that ‘reveal’ Oswald was a CIA agent.

Now John Newman has assembled a paper trail clearly showing CIA interest in Oswald. And a number of key stops and disappearances of information in Oswald’s file indicate the Agency was monitoring Oswald. Which, when combined with his nefarious activities in New Orleans at corresponding times indicates that he was of operational interest to the CIA. And, according to Newman, he was probably being run by James Angleton himself. (John Newman: Oswald and the CIA 2nd ed. pg. 637)

But I hasten to add there is nothing with regards to released CIA documentation that says outright that Oswald was an agent of the CIA. And the Rowley/Secret Service document that has allegedly done so, is generally considered a clever fraud or hoax. (Click here for more.)

I’ve been researching for how long?

Hankey can’t quite decide how long he has been researching the Kennedy case. In the third version of his video, close to the 59 minute mark, he states:

Is he really trying to say he has researched the Kennedy case for forty years? He sure kept a low profile if he did. Because before his video appeared, no one had even heard of him. And if he was working that long, why didn’t he find that FBI memo on Bush way back then when it was declassified?

In his unfunny semi-autobiographical song that he features in all 3 versions, Hankey mentions that a friend showed him the Zapruder film and it “Gave him a slap!” Maybe Hankey saw a bootlegged copy of the Zapruder film prior to Geraldo Rivera’s first national showing of it on Good Night America in 1975. But copies before that time were rare. They originated with Jim Garrison letting Penn Jones copy the film he was given by Time-Life for the Clay Shaw trial. But again, no one ever heard of Hankey at that time.

Then how recently did he actually get started? A clue might be in this interview he gave from last year.

You can see that his beginnings ‘9 years ago’ suddenly grow by an enormous 31 years in the space of the same interview.

John, let me reiterate: you didn’t find the memo. If you did, do you mind proving that you had it before McBride wrote his essay? And what you say that FBI memo means is not what anyone else does. As for that 40 year odyssey, no one recalls you back there working with Vince Salandria, Ray Marcus, and Sylvia Meagher. Let alone talking about George Bush in 1969. You also need a review of basic arithmetic, since 40 plus 10 equals 50. Yet the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death will be in 2013. So it is impossible for anyone to have been on this case that long.

Also, have I missed something? Where, when, and how did he “hang Kennedy’s murder around Bush’s neck”? Is JFK 2 evidence of this? Not on your life. The evidence would suggest that Hankey first got into his research around 1999, with the death of John Kennedy Jr. After that, around 2004, his video was cobbled together. Hankey seems to have had a mere 5-6 years of investigation under his belt before the film. But that’s no excuse for 1.) The errors that riddle his work and 2.) His penchant for taking credit for things he did not achieve. 3.) His need to distort things both large and small.

A review of Hankey’s JFK 2 is below. It represents a rather frightening statistic. As until now, it is one of the few pieces critical of Hankey’s research efforts on the web.

A Close look at the Film JFK 2

05:49 I have to say ‘so what?’ if ‘Pulitzer prize winner’ Tom Wicker of the New York Times initially agreed with the statements of the Parkland Memorial Hospital Doctors about the size and extent of the head wound. (New York Times, November 23, 1963 p.1)

Any Kennedy assassination researcher should know that Wicker was hardly a crusader for the truth. Yet Hankey tries to makes him out to be some kind of accidental hero and vainly clung onto this concept in his 2006 COPA speech.

Hankey doesn’t tell the viewer that Wicker severely criticized Oliver Stone’s JFK upon its release. (New York Times, 12/15/1991) and lovingly endorsed Gerald Posner’s Case Closed.

Furthermore, Hankey misses a crucial piece of evidence concerning the bullets and shots that is contained in Wicker’s New York Times article, which appears at around the 18:43 mark.

Hypocrisy Looming

08:45 The reader may well have previously come across the story of Mac Kilduff, Kennedy’s press liason having his hand gestures indicating a shot from the front purposefully edited out by ABC’s Peter Jennings in his appalling 2003 special.

11:49 Hankey now becomes sanctimonious in his anger about the ABC’s splicing of footage to fit their story.

But if you want to, you can fast forward this critique to the 27:33 minute mark where you will see an example of Hankey’s splicing of footage.

Six or Seven Wounds?

18:43 Hankey tries to sell the idea that, in all, there were 6 wounds in Kennedy and Connally. Yet you may recall that at the time of 14:23 Hankey had already utilised the iconic courtroom clip from JFK in which Garrison (Kevin Costner) utilises Alven Oser (Gary Grubbs) and Numa Bertel (Wayne Knight) to demonstrate the trajectory of the 7 wounds in both Kennedy and Connally. Hankey somehow missed the fact that, most of the time, entrance wounds leave exits.

But he doesn’t stop there. His limited logic skills then lead him into believing that his 6 wounds mean 6 bullets. Thus it is clear that he never carefully read the aforementioned Wicker article he bragged about minutes before, because Connally’s surgeon Robert Shaw clearly states that Connally’s wounds were caused by one bullet. Indeed Shaw himself makes a rather dubious claim about this bullet’s trajectory that Hankey never bothered to pick up on.

What Shaw said would obviously become one of the cornerstones of the Magic Bullet theory. Despite the seeming unfeasibility of Shaw’s statement, the mistaken notion that 6 bullets caused 6 wounds in Kennedy and Connally without any interference in such cramped confines is quite clearly ludicrous, as indicated by the wound to Connally’s thigh which judging by the superficiality of it meant that a bullet or a fragment likely took a deflection from somewhere around the rib or the wrist area.

Medical Student Turned Doctor

19:01 Hankey claims that one of the Parkland doctors saw a bullet hole through the windshield of JFK’s limousine. I agree that there was likely a bullet hole there. The problem is that the person whom he refers too is Evalea Glanges, who openly stated that she was not a doctor but a 2nd year medical student at the time. (The Men Who Killed Kennedy ’40 Year special’) By not explaining the full context of Glanges’ real status, it leads to an insinuation that she was also one of the Parkland doctors involved in Trauma Room One. But further, right after this, at about the 19:40 mark, Hankey actually states that there were likely 13 bullets involved in the assassination. A figure that is about twice as high as most estimates made previous to him. Hankey cannot understand that bullets can fragment, and they can also ricochet.

Secret Service

24:25 A few moments later Hankey claims that both Secret Service agents were turned around and looking at Kennedy as he got shot stating “They are both completely turned around watching the President die“. At the time of the headshot we can plainly see that only the driver Bill Greer is turned around to the rear of the vehicle, and not Roy Kellerman who has his head looking forward.

Furthermore, by trying to implicate these Secret Service agents, Hankey, who minutes before was trying to account for every shot and bullet supposedly taken that day, ignores the massive problems Kellerman’s testimony had for the Commission, in that he seems to describe a volley of bullets landing in the vehicle. Yet Hankey ignored this. Had Hankey done any real research he would have discovered that, judging by the clipped comments made to a friend, agent Kellerman also believed in a conspiracy. (Vince Palamara Survivors Guilt, Pgs 1-3)

Conspirator Connally: Caught In a Slump

25:47: At this point, Hankey’s video gets even worse.

He now tries to insinuate that, after the assassination, the conspirators began changing the language of the situation to create conformity in the cover up. He picks out the use of the term ‘slump’ as evidence of this sinister ploy.

In his use of other people’s archival material, he never bothered to think about the unlikelihood of Connally – a man who had received perhaps multiple gunshot wounds and had undergone rather intensive surgery immediately upon his arrival at Parkland Hospital – being able to discuss the issue that day. Hankey clearly has no idea what bullets do to a person, nor does he seem to realize how much of a hole he has dug himself into; because his ‘Minutes later’ line in which Connally says he saw Kennedy ‘slumped’ came about from an interview on the 27th of November some five days after the assassination. (Martin Argronsky interview with John Connally 11/27/63)

Now, Connally did indeed turn around and may have seen Kennedy clutching his throat and moving forward. But Hankey now regales the viewer with the exact definition of the term ‘slumped’, the word that according to Hankey goes straight to the dark heart of the conspiracy. While it’s apparent Kennedy never technically slumped forward when Connally says he did, its clear that Kennedy had at least ‘stooped’ forward and at a slightly downward angle after receiving a shot to his throat. Seconds later we see the head shot where Kennedy is thrown back and to the left via a shot from the right front, after which Kennedy proceeded to slump forward and to his left.

You may be asking: “So what if Connally had used the incorrect term, and anyhow Hankey did eventually admit Kennedy slumped.” Well actually it’s quite an issue. Because Hankey uses the slump to launch into a diatribe about Connally seeing Kennedy ‘choking on a bullet and being shot in the head’ when there is no evidence for this on the Zapruder film. As adjudged by the Z film, everybody in the world-except Hankey – can clearly determine that Connally only gives Kennedy a brief glance. And he is clearly turning back around at the time of the fatal headshot.

27:15 According to Hankey, Connally was placed in the limousine by the conspirators so he could lie about the direction of the shots and what went on in the car. Between 27:15 and 28:52 Hankey utilizes two of Connally’s most well known press conferences after the assassination: the aforementioned one on the 27th of November 1963 at Parkland Hospital, and the one he gave in 1964 after his testimony to the Warren Commission. This is to show that Connally had changed his story to fit the official version.

We don’t know why Connally never mentioned seeing Kennedy slump forward in his second press conference. But Connally was adamant that he was not hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy in the throat. This is made clear in both interviews. This testimony created all kinds of problems for the Commission. Hankey, whom you may recall had earlier berated Peter Jennings for editing out bits of information contrary to his own angled story, now fades out Connally’s statements made at the Washington press conference and also Connally’s earlier interview at Parkland when he admitted yelling “My god! They’re gonna kill us all” and mentions Jackie crying “They’ve murdered my husband they’ve murdered my husband.” (Ibid, Argonsky)

So if Connally was rehearsed by the conspirators, someone blew part of the script. But later, building on this unsound foundation, he then tells us to remember Connally when he starts ‘naming names’. Yes, the likes of John McAdams are truly trembling at the thought of these revelations.

The Body Snatching Caper

29:07 After some standard descriptions of the Secret Service violating Texas law in taking Kennedy’s body out of Parkland Hospital before an autopsy was done, Hankey now borrows David Lifton’s body alteration angle. I think he does this to show how powerful the conspirators were. You know, they supposedly mangled the body whilst en route to Bethesda Naval Hospital to make Kennedy’s wounds more compatible with the lone assassin deception.

29:53 Hankey tells the viewer “The evidence is overwhelming but it might take some courage on your part to believe your eyes and ears”. Hankey is no stranger to wild hyperbole. First he says he has hung Kennedy’s murder around George Bush’s neck (a statement that is not even in the ballpark). Next, he steals credit for the CIA-Mafia-Cuban exile angle. Now he says the evidence for the body alteration theory is overwhelming and uncontested.

Sorry John, it is neither.

Hankey overlooks the fact that for JFK, Oliver Stone, Zachary Sklar, and chief research assistant Jane Rusconi plowed through the available literature and found Lifton’s body alteration theory lacking. Which is why it is not in the film. Further, no medical doctor researching this case advocates it. And this is not just the doctors on the official story’s side, like say Michael Baden. But doctors who have severely criticized the Warren Commission’s version of events, e.g. Cyril Wecht, Randy Robertson, Gary Aguilar, and Doug DeSalles. And there are other critics who have done work in the medical field who do not buy Lifton’s ideas e.g. Harrison Livingstone, Robert Groden, William Law, and Roger Feinman.

A point not mentioned by Hankey is partly depicted in Oliver Stone’s film. Why would the conspirators have to hijack the body if they controlled the autopsy at Bethesda that night? This was proven by the testimony of Pierre Finck at Clay Shaw’s trial. Part of which is shown in Stone’s film. But for a more complete version of that testimony see Jim DiEugenio’s book Destiny Betrayed. (pgs. 288-309)

I hasten to add that some of the best reading about the irregularities surrounding the military controlled autopsy is by Garrison critic Harold Weisberg in Never Again (pgs 283-307). In which he describes in great detail the US military’s presence at the autopsy. And in this section, even Weisberg gives Garrison’s staff their due.

But Hankey seems to back Kennedy’s body being secretly smuggled off of Air Force One for some posthumous surgery (a central tenet of body alteration scripture). But the long suppressed testimony of Richard Lipsey suggested that a decoy plan involving two ambulances was used to throw the media off of the scent. (Deborah Conway: Transcription of HSCA Interview with Richard Lipsey 1-18-78) (The full transcript itself makes for some interesting reading.)

Air Force One transcripts mention bringing a crane to the opposite side from where Jackie Kennedy and entourage disembarked. Now, decoys are understandable considering the incredible press generated by the public nature of the crime. As for the cranes, well as we know the Air Force One transcripts and recordings are notoriously incomplete and as one can clearly see from the grim footage of Air Force One’s arrival in Washington it appears that only one crane was used.

I have to wonder how many people have ever watched the arrival of Kennedy’s coffin? It’s virtually impossible for anything to have gone on. Now while the runway suddenly goes black and there is mention of a power cut as the plane comes in, the plane is still very much in motion when the lights are restored making it pretty hard to disembark a ton worth of casket.

What most authorities believe today is that there was post-autopsy fakery in the x-rays, and perhaps the photos. And clearly, some of the photos are missing. (See for example, Gary Aguilar’s excellent essay in Murder In Dealey Plaza, pgs. 175-218)

“Nobody Claims to have seen the President’s killers.”

38:23 While Hankey is correct about the dubious circumstances in which Oswald’s description came to the police, he is slightly misleading. He doesn’t name Howard Brennan. Brennan became the Warren Commission’s star witness in identifying Oswald, and it is supposedly via Brennan that Oswald’s description came out. Brennan’s credibility problems would have only taken Hankey a moment to explain.

38:42 As for there being no evidence against Oswald by that evening, a point that Hankey makes a short time later, this is again dangerously simplified. Although Hankey later touches on the posthumous appearance of Oswald’s fingerprints on the Mannlicher Carcano after his death, some aspects of the shameful use of evidence against Oswald could have been explored here. Hankey then states at 39:13 that the conspirators knew they had to alter the body at the time they arrrested Oswald. This is incredible, since neither he nor Lifton nor anyone else has ever come close to proving this remarkable thesis. Hankey should have remembered an important axiom for any Kennedy assassination researcher: extraordianry claims require extraordinary evidence. In fact, as we shall see, he should have that rule tattooed on his forearm.

Ignorance is Bliss Part 1: Angelton, Helms and Phillips

40:13: Hankey prefaces this part of the program, which he entitles “Who killed JFK?”, with a truly remarkable statement, one seemingly borne of a combination of ignorance and arrogance. He actually says that the mystery of who shot President Kennedy is easier to answer than the viewer thinks. It has taken most serious researchers years-even decades – to come to any kind of real conclusion about who killed Kennedy. And even then, they cannot prove their tenet to a court room standard. Others, like Bob Groden, still are not certain after forty years of work. But somehow, Hankey has us all beat like a drum. He knows. Except its not his own material. Like almost everything in this production, its borrowed from someone else. Straight from Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial, he gives us Howard Hunt’s legal action against Liberty Lobby. And he begins this segment with two errors. First, he says that the famous CIA memoradum explaining how they must provide Howard Hunt with an alibi for 11/22/63 was written by Director of Plans Richard Helms. Yet according to his own source, it was written by James Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence. (Lane, p. 145) He then calls Howard Hunt a CIA assassin. Yet, to my knowledge, Hunt has never actually admitted to being a hit man.

This is important because, after these distortions, Hankey does not tell the reader that the famous James Angleton memo was designed to be a limited hang-out operation by Angleton. It was meant to deflect attention away from himself – since he was likely running Oswald – and onto Richard Helms and Hunt over at domestic covert operations. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 197) Angleton is one of the three key players in Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial who barely exist in Hankey’s film. Which is odd, since writers like John Newman and Lisa Pease have shown Angleton is a quite important character in the Oswald story, and therefore the assassination saga. The man who Angleton sent his none to subtle message to, Helms, is provided the briefest of mentions here. Angelton features again in this essay when we encounter George DeMohrenschildt’s “suicide” at 1:08:20

Further, Hankey seems to buy Marita Lorentz a hundred per cent. She and her “caravan story” of an assassination team into Dallas headed by Howard Hunt is probably the weakest part of Lane’s book. And the fact that the late Jerry Hemming went along with that tale makes it worse, since he had a reputation for marketing disinformation. Apparently, Hankey never read Gaeton Fonzi’s sterling The Last Investigation. For Fonzi raises severe reservations about the credibility of Marita Lorenz. (pgs. 83-107) In fact, Fonzi came to the conclusion that she was using that story to market a film production deal. But Hankey needs a Cuban connection in Dallas to market his “Bush connection”. This does the trick for him.

David Phillips

Another important name in Lane’s Plausible Denial that Hankey forgets to tell the reader about is David Phillips, who said there was no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City. (Lane, pg 82). Phillips is an important (if somewhat overstated) figure in the assassination. Yet he does not even warrant a mention in the entire hour and a half. In an interview as recently as 2009 on the Maria Heller show, Phillips is paid mere lip service by Hankey as Lee Harvey Oswald’s recruitment officer. (Hankey on the Maria Heller radio program 7/15/09.)

Yet that is an extremely tenuous accusation. Neither Jim Di Eugenio, Lisa Pease nor John Newman have ever been so bold as to venture an opinion as to who recruited Oswald. But judging by the general consensus surrounding John Newman’s writing, Oswald was likely ONI before his defection to Russia. In which case, he came under the scrutiny of the CIA upon his arrival there.

A further nail in this recruitment coffin is that Phillips’ main area of operations was not Russia at all, but Latin American affairs. Phillips could have played an indirect role in helping sheep dip Oswald in New Orleans. We know he was likely guilty of framing Oswald in Mexico City, and he may very well have met him in person on August of 1963 in Dallas under his cover of Maurice Bishop. (Fonzi, p. 141)

Indeed, if the following information is indeed true, Phillips confessed to a private investigator that Kennedy could have been done in by rogue intelligence operatives. Furthermore he also told his brother that he was there in Dallas the day of Kennedy’s assassination. But none of this is deemed important by Hankey. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked. Pgs 181-182).

Ignorance is Strength

Why does Hankey ignore or downplay these three looming figures? It may be that Hankey and other Bush revisionists have deliberately tried to make Bush out to be directly under the control of Dick Bissell. Bissell was the CIA’s Director of Plans in 1961. By doing this, they suggest that Bush was somehow a major part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. One way they do this is by connoting that the official name of the invasion, Operation Zapata, was borrowed from Zapata Petroleum, the name of Bush’s oil company. This ignores the rather important fact that the codename Zapata was actually taken from the peninsula due west of the Bay of Pigs. The bay formed the eastern limit of the peninsula. Another linkage mentioned by Hankey is also dubious. Namely two of the landing craft were named Houston and Barabra J. The latter is supposed to denote the name of George Bush’s wife. Hankey milks this for all its worth by saying that Bush also named his planes after his wife when he was a pilot in World War II. The problem is that the planes were named in numerical order, Barbara I, II, and III. No middle initial involved. That is because Barbara Bush apparently has no middle name. So where did the “J” come from in naming the Bay of Pigs boat? Hankey knows he has a problem here because he skips over the middle initial when he names the boat. (At the 1:00:20 second mark.) I won’t even comment on the pretense of Houston being the location of Bush’s oil company. Because it was the location of scores of oil companies at the time. All this name association is much ado about nothing.

The other serious problem in associating Bush with the Bay of Pigs is this: Bush’s name is nowhere to be found in the major literature on that operation. It is not in the two book-length studies of the debacle, by Peter Wyden or Trumbull Higgins. Nor is it to be discovered in the two offical reports on the matter: Lyman Kirkpatrick’s CIA Inspector General Report, or the Taylor Report done by the White House. There are literally scores of names listed in the command structure of the operation in those four studies. Those many veteran OSS-CIA individuals working alongside people like Howard Hunt would have outranked Bush straight off the bat.

In all likelihood, Bush was one of many business assets involved whose company (like others) probably provided some sort of cover for Cubans involved in the operation. This is because his Zapata Offshore had oil rigs positioned 30 miles north of Cuba near Cay Sal, which was “an island the CIA used as a service station for covert operations.” (William Turner and Warren Hinckle, Deadly Secrets, p. xxix) And again, in all likliehood, it was the relationship between Bush and those Cubans that Hoover was referring to in the memo that McBride publiicized.

John Hankey & Dick

43:12 As if Hankey’s manipulation of Connally was not bad enough, thanks to Lane’s outing of Hunt, Hankey puts two and two together to make five. As we know, E. Howard Hunt was the senior member of Richard Nixon’s infamous Plumbers Unit. So, if you can believe it, Nixon somehow becomes a participant in the assassination. This is where the program goes completely off the rails.

Hankey seems to have fallen into the same trap that many new researchers make when they start out. Because someone has been as vilified as Nixon, one can latch Nixon’s name onto any event, no matter how outlandish, and he sounds like a reasonable culprit. The problem is that with all the post-assassination and Watergate hype, there have been a number of over the top and downright dishonest accounts of Nixon’s life and career, with few works being objective, incisive, or cool-headed. Hankey now joins that line.

For instance, Hankey states that Nixon brought Howard Hunt into the White House. Not accurate. As Jim Hougan points out in his brilliant and revolutionary Secret Agenda, prior to being hired by Charles Colson – not Nixon – Hunt worked at a CIA front called the Mullen Company. This was ostensibly an advertising and public relations firm. It was closely aligned with Howard Hughes. It was presided over at the time by CIA asset Robert Bennett. It was Bennett who mentioned Hunt’s name to Colson; Hunt then offered his services to him; and then Colson hired Hunt. (Hougan p. 33) It was an act that Colson came to regret. Why? Because Hunt appears to have been a CIA infiltrator in the White House who, along with James McCord, deliberately sabotaged the Plumbers at Watergate and helped collapse Nixon’s presidency. (ibid, pgs. 270-75) By misunderstanding this cause and effect sequence, Hankey misconstrues Watergate. By doing so, he puts Hunt at Nixon’s service in 1972. When the real story, as Hougan details it, is that Hunt was really working for the CIA at the time. Further, and a question that any reasonable person would ask, what is the evidence for Hunt being close to Nixon in 1963? He was working for the CIA, along with David Phillips. Hunt biographer Tad Szulc even has him temporarily running the Mexico City station while Oswald was allegedly there in 1963. (Compulisve Spy, pgs. 96,99) And through his function of organizing the Cuban exiles in New Orleans, Hunt almost had to have known about Oswald. So instead of tracing Hunt on a logical upward line within the Agency, where he was working at the time, Hankey does this incredible zigzag-in both time and space – out to Nixon. And then, as noted above, he doesn’t even get that association right. But yet, he then depicts Nixon with a rifle pointed at JFK in his limousine! (45:08) I’m not kidding. See for yourself.

45:23 Hankey seeks to further cement Nixon’s role in the assassination by enlisting the aid of a dubious document that links Jack Ruby to Nixon in 1947 as part of Nixon’s House Un-American Activities Committee purge. One problem is that Nixon was a freshman in the role as junior counsel in 1947. He would make his spurs prosecuting Alger Hiss the next year, which led to his vice presidential nomination in 1952 (Richard M Fried: Nightmare in Red. The McCarthy Era, pgs 17-22). The Ruby document has come to be treated with suspicion by practically all but the most questionable researchers today. For instance, it refers to “Jack Rubenstein” living in Chicago in November of 1947, when he had moved to Dallas by that time. Second, Rubenstein had changed his name to Ruby the year before. (Seth Kantor, The Ruby Cover-Up, pgs 203, 208) Also, the document carries a zip code when they did not exist at the time. (Some, have tried to explain the zip code problem as the document being a composite, since the letterhead is from the FBI but the information seems to originate with the HUAC. This ignores the fact that the FBI worked with the HUAC hand-in-glove; to the point of lending the committee assistants and even staffers. Whoever forged the document understood that. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, p.354) Finally, Hankey says that this document which allegedly has Ruby working for Nixon in the forties, was “recently discovered”. In fact, it surfaced decades ago

46:26 Hankey, like Paul Kangas, believes that Nixon lied about his whereabouts that day. So let’s look at some of the allegations. Nixon is reported as saying in an FBI memo that he had been in Dallas two days before the assassination (Don Fulsom, Crime Magazine, 3/22/09). Not on the day of the murder. One has to question the credibility of this document. Nixon was photographed in Dallas stating he was there on business with Pepsi Cola on the 21st of November. He made comments about Johnson possibly being removed from the ticket. (Dallas Morning News 11/21/63) Later that night, he was seen dining out with famous actress and Pepsi Cola heiress Joan Crawford. (Dallas Times Herald, 11/22/63) The next day he was photographed in a New York airport after arriving from Dallas after hearing the word of the assassination. (Minneapolis Star, 11/22/1963).

Thus either the FBI or Nixon were really dumb, or so was the person who made up the document. Now Nixon may well have made some diverse calls about when or where he heard word of Kennedy’s death that day. Two of his stories involve a taxi cab. One in an August 1964, Readers Digest article in which Nixon says he remembers hearing word of the assassination while stepping out of the airport and into a waiting cab. The other was from Esquire magazine circa November 1973, in which Nixon says he heard a screaming woman, stopped the cab, and wound down the window.

So what is he really guilty of? Well he seems to have embellished his story, and made it slightly more dramatic with the retelling. But that’s really the sum of it. Furthermore the stark reality is that Nixon was in the air at the time of the shooting. He heard the word either on the plane or as he got off it. He sat down, and was photographed. Thus Nixon was not on the ground in Dallas, as is implied by Hankey, who throughout JFK 2 depicts Nixon with that ridiculous rifle in hand.

But now, what does Hankey do? He states that his conspiracy now includes Hunt and Nixon. (46:50)

What He Did Buy Into

In a self penned 2007 article on the rather odd Jeff Rense website entitled “Comment: Hunt’s Death Bed Confession Ignored by the Mainstream Media” Hankey utilizes H. R. Haldeman’s recollections in his diaries to further incriminate Nixon. This time it’s Nixon’s phone conversation with former President Johnson. Here, Nixon tells Johnson to keep his allies in the press off of his case during the 1973 Watergate scandal. And he threatens to reveal Johnson’s bugging of their telephone conversations prior to the 1968 elections. Johnson apparently reminded Nixon of his own past indiscretions and the conversation, according to Hankey, is conveniently deleted at a crucial point.

Hankey insists that this was deleted because it had to have mentioned the Kennedy assassination. But there is one little problem, he has no evidence to prove this. (Which, as the reader has seen already, is not a real problem for Hankey.)

Outside of Hankey’s world, what was really happening between LBJ and RMN? Johnson had begun bugging Nixon because of his involvement in undermining Johnson’s first peace talks with the North Vietnamese in 1968 (Robert Dallek, Lyndon B Johnson: Portrait of a President, pg. 369) Johnson, who was well aware of the public pressure mounting on the Nixon presidency, was prepared to call Nixon out on the fact that Nixon had broken the law. If Nixon made the mistake of mentioning Johnson’s bugging, Johnson was threatening to reveal how Nixon had thwarted his efforts to end the Vietnam War before the 1968 elections. (Charles Taylor: The Traitor. Salon.com 01/09/2010)

It’s also apparent that Hankey has mistaken a number of different events that culminated in the illegal removal of some 18 minutes of tape from the Nixon White House. These removals were most often based around conversations Nixon was having with his top aides about the Watergate break-in. Whether or not they contained information about the Kennedy assassination is speculative at best. (Tim Reid: “Mystery of Watergate tapes missing 18 minutes may be Solved” The Times 07/30 /2009)

Richard Nixon, as Vice President to Eisenhower, was involved in anti-Castro operations, and was involved in the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Nixon, in his search for Republican party power, certainly encountered the Bush family. It’s more than likely the CIA used the Bush oil business to further aspects of their operations against Cuba. But the point is that Nixon would have seen the Agency utilize a number of individuals, companies, and fronts to further their aims. Thus the Bush family was hardly unique in this aspect. (Larry Hancock Email 10/22/2009)

This is one of Hankey’s major problems. He completely forgets to mention the assistance given to the CIA by certain individuals which far surpassed what the Bushes were doing at the time. People like Howard Hughes, and his right hand man Bob Maheu; or the Luce family; or the Pawleys. These are but three examples. Hughes, in particular, looms large in the Nixon story if one cares to fast forward to 1:04:00

Conspirator Connally: 2. Holding Hands with Nixon

47:16 Hankey now drags in his third conspirator, the one he already warned us about. To join Hunt and Nixon we now have John Connally – you know, the guy who almost got killed that day. Hankey tells us that when Connally was appointed by Nixon as his Secretary of the Treasury, this ‘shocked’ political observers at the time. What Hankey does not say is that Connally did not serve under Nixon till some 8 years after the assassination. Furthermore he overplays this seeming betrayal of Connally’s Democratic principles.

Hankey should know that the Southern Democrats have long been much more conservative than their northern counterparts. And Connally’s innate conservatism was well known in many Democratic circles. His Democratic party rival, Senator Ralph Yarbrough, was considered one of the last great progressive Southern Democrats, and a fervent supporter of Kennedy. He disliked both Connally and Johnson. (Randall Bennett Woods: LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, pgs. 415-416) In 1969 Connally resigned as governor and became a lawyer for a Texas firm. He was then appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Nixon in 1971. He then resigned that post by joining the Democrats for Nixon campaign of 1972. By 1973 he had become a full fledged Republican candidate (Douglas Harlan, Texas Monthly, January 1982 pgs. 114-119)

47:24 Hankey tells us that it was Connally “Who held Kennedy’s hand and pretended nothing was going on as he led him into the killing zone.” The inference here is that Kennedy was lured to Dallas by Connally and the conspirators. But that’s not true. Kennedy’s trip to Dallas was discussed with Johnson and Connally in June and formal planning began in September of 1963. It happened for a variety of reasons. Two of them were to raise funds for the upcoming election in 1964, and to heal the rift between between Connally and Yarbrough (WCR pg. 27)

It’s a little known fact that Connally, who encouraged Jackie to come along, was not keen on the idea of the president coming to Dallas. Why? Because Kennedy divided Connally’s centrist conservative constituency which represented the accumulated wealth of Texas. Thus rather than enthusiastically organise rallies and functions, Connally dithered and seems to have done all he could to get the trip over and done with as quickly as possible. (Jim Reston, The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally pgs. 240-260)

Connally opposed a parade route. The parade route was specifically organised by Secret Service men Winston Lawson and Forrest Sorrels, who overrode the Dallas authorities they were supposed to plan it with. Connally loudly voiced security concerns about the final venue’s size, referring to the Trade Mart’s balcony and 53 entrances. He was also uninformed of the actual parade route (WCR pgs 27-30; Vince Palamara: Survivors Guilt pgs 2-9)

Is Hankey implying what I think he’s implying here? That Connally was willing to place himself and his wife in harm’s way and almost have himself killed, just so he could lie about the direction of the shots? When in fact there was confusd testimony about this anyway? Why risk one’s life over something like that?

Hankey’s History Part 2

47:35 Hankey reminds us that it’s important to remember that Nixon, Hunt and Connally are really “small devils” in all of this and to name the real bad guys we need a little historical perspective.

47:53 Hankey then tries to give the audience a little lesson about Americana history. Using a clip from the film Little Big Man he shows how cruelly the leaders of the United States had treated its indigenous population. This massacre he describes as being on par with the genocide of the Jews by Hitler.

48:13 What is Hankey up to? Well, he uses this unbalanced history to form a bridge to the Nazi genocide programmes. See, they were partly funded by US business. And that starts him naming the big names in the Kennedy assassination and their links to the Third Reich. Namely, the Harrimans and Rockefellers. But we are also introduced to another assassination figure of ill repute. But he’s OK with Hankey.

Hankey’s Heroes: Hoover the Ace Investigator

Hankey is actually trying to portray Hoover as a.) Some kind of crack investigator, and b.) Some kind of anti-Fascist. When the record adduced by his most recent and most complete biographers proves the opposite in both categories. (By the way, the USA did not enter the war in 1942, but in 1941.)

But there are more problems for Hankey using Hoover’s investigation of American businessmen trading with the enemy, which he believes led to the annexation of the Union Bank. It was actually the office of the Alien Property Commission that more often than not examined and documented the cases of corporate collusion with enemies of the United States. (This was explored in a scholarly fashion by Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, The Guardian 9/25/2004)

It was these reports which found their way to the FBI which was bumbling around trying to find communist spies and Nazi saboteurs. Further, as can be seen from myriad reports, nothing of consequence really happened to Union Bank’s directors like Harriman. And most importantly nothing happened to Prescott Bush, George Senior’s father and George Junior’s grandfather.

E. Howard Hunt Found Guilty of Murder in Liberty Lobby trial?

49:37 Nixon and Howard Hunt now return. We are now called upon to remember the trial of Howard Hunt depicted in Lane’s Plausible Denial. Hankey now says “Where the jury found Hunt guilty of the murder of president Kennedy”. Could Hankey really have confused a criminal homicide trial with a civil case involving defamation? The jury decided that Hunt was not defamed by the writings about the famous “Hunt memorandum”. That is all. No one knows where Hunt actually was that day. Let’s get real: if this had been a criminal case, the standard of proof, rules of evidence, and the actual procedure would have been much different. To say the jury found Hunt guilty of killing Kennedy is a ridicuous overstatement.

49:50 Hankey then goes on to say that, at that trial, Hunt ‘testified’ to being in direct contact with Harriman in Paris after the war. If you can believe it, this is true. But Hankey, by inferring that Hunt came onto the scene via Averill Harriman, conveniently forgets to tell the viewer that Hunt had begun his intelligence career in the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) in 1944. This was four years before serving as US Ambassador Harriman’s ‘press aide’ during the Marshall plan in Paris circa 1948. (Davies & Roberts: An Occupation Without Troops, pg. 230) Hunt didn’t stay long in his job and was back in Washington working for the CIA (established in 1947) by 1949. (Lane, pg. 251).

Timewarp

50:26 Hankey now shows a picture of a congenial Prescott Bush adjusting the hat on a smiling Richard Nixon (both adorned with faux swastikas). We are now told that Bush turned his attention from supporting Hitler to supporting Nixon after his bank was closed down.

At this point, I would not be surprised at anything Hankey writes or says. It’s correct that Nixon first made it into the senate in 1946 – that’s where it ends. So let’s number and catalogue the inanities in this paragraph.

One: “Four short years later he found another young man to sponsor in politics, Nixon.”

Despite the large amounts of accusations on the internet, in the literature available to us on Nixon, it appears that Prescott Bush was not significantly involved in Nixon’s early political rise to power prior to 1946. Nixon’s most prominent early sponsor was a wealthy bank manager by the name of Herman Perry and his law firm Wingert ∓ Bewley, who also represented California’s oil and business interests. Reporter, Joel Beers wrote a clever piece on Nixon and his odd relationship with his old childhood stomping grounds in a piece titled “Dick Nixon’s Orange County”. (Orange County Weekly, 8/12/1999)

Nixon’s grandfather was good friends of the wealthy Bewley family and Nixon represented Wingert & Bewley from 1937-1942. (Bela Kornitzer: The Real Nixon. pgs.127-128. 141) After his return from the war he took his opportunity to enter politics by answering an ad by prominent Californian Republicans looking for a candidate in the 1946 elections. (Ibid pgs. 154-158)

The evidence suggests that Prescott Bush – who was based in Connecticut and who never resided in California to the best of my knowledge for any length of time – was not one of California’s prominent Republicans.

So who does Hankey ignore?

Howard Hughes.

Howard Hughes took an active interest in Nixon in the mid-fifties. His financial investments in Nixon and his brother from this period would cause Nixon problems in the years ahead and could well be one of the motivations behind the Watergate saga. Indeed, Hughes’ involvement with Nixon is arguably the most scandalous of any of Nixon’s relationships with the United States business leaders (and is discussed in slightly more depth a little later on). Hughes also had dealings with Bush’s oil business, as he leased them the islands in the Bahamas, some thirty three miles off of the coast of Cuba, which was then used by anti – Castro raiding parties.

Edwin Pauley.

Edwin Pauley was arguably the pre-eminent California oil man of his day. Pauley had been treasurer of the Democratic National Committee in the 1930’s, and served as President Roosevelt’s petroleum coordinator in the European theatre of the war. He was also close friends with Harry Truman and negotiated for the United States at Yalta. (Biographical Sketches: Edwin W. Pauley. Truman Library)

Indeed, Pauley was a powerful figure whose interests spanned the gamut of the United States energy industry. He was much more powerful and influential than Prescott Bush at the time. The reality is that he enjoyed closer relations with other powerful figures like Hughes, whom he engaged in a number of business dealings. The most prominent being in 1958 when Hughes partnered him in Pauley Petroleum operations in the Gulf of Mexico (Pamela Lee Grey: in James Ciment, Thaddeus Russell (eds)The Home Front Encyclopedia: United States, Britain, and Canada in World Wars I and II. Volume 1 p. 691)

Pauley was so influential he even engaged John McCone of the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover in support of quashing free speech on his old University of California campus. (Seth Rosenfeld: San Francisco Chronicle 06/09/2002) Pauley would later create a Mexican slush fund for Nixon’s campaigns in 1968 and 1972, which it seems the Bushes contributed campaign monies to. Thus it is Pauley who provides us with a solid link to Bush monies supporting Nixon’s campaigns.

Two: “Who was documented as employing Jack Ruby a year after this photo was taken.”

We already know that the document linking Ruby and Nixon is dubious. Secondly, and most importantly for Hankey’s falling credibility, the photo in question was not taken in 1946 but in 1953. You can see for yourself at the Corbis Images site.

Three: “Nixon who hired Hunt, who hired Connally was created and sponsored from the very beginning by Prescott Bush – are you surprised?”

As proven above, Nixon did not hire Hunt. Colson, egged on by CIA asset Bob Bennett, hired Hunt. But is John Hankey trying to tell us that Nixon hired Hunt who in turn hired John Connally? He really should watch his scripting because that’s what it sounds like from this statement. What’s truly insidious about Hankey’s argument is that for it to have relevance to the Kennedy murder, Nixon would have had to hire them all under the auspices of Prescott Bush prior to the Kennedy assassination. This is a piece of conspiratorial logic that Hankey has to ignore.

I would like to reiterate that it’s highly improbable that Prescott Bush, if he was involved with Nixon at the very beginning of his political career at all, was likely not the sole interested party. His involvement likely began around Nixon’s ascendancy within the Republican party, by his vice presidential years. But it’s hard to say how deeply involved he was in Nixon’s actual Presidency because, by 1971, Bush was in extremely poor health and died in 1972.

The Magical Mystery Memoranda Part 1

50:44 Hankey now makes reference to the Bush/Hoover memorandum from The Nation. It confirmed Bush was CIA prior to his appointment in 1975. And that was really all there was to it. Indeed, Joseph McBride was wary of developing the memo any further and wrote:

In support of McBride’s comments, Larry Hancock described for me the lack of excitement generated by a memorandum of this type in the FBI offices.

Kind of deflates Hankey’s imagination doesn’t it? But, imaginations do need to be kept in check when dealing with such issues, because there’s some good evidence that Hankey didn’t use which further supports the angle that Bush was involved with both the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban exiles. The problem for Hankey is that the evidence we have, and you shall see, of Bush’s involvement does not back the rather more extreme ‘Bush family did it’ angle that the likes of Hankey advocate.

Thus it is clear from statements made by Brigadier General Russell Bowen (and others) that Bush was at the very least affiliated with operations in the Gulf of Mexico and Miami.

Bush’s role it seemed was as a facilitator of some operations. And as pointed out by McBride, there is debate about Bush as to whether or not he was a CIA man who ran a business front, or a businessman who let the CIA use his facilities. Generally speaking the evidence appears to favour the latter view. The Wikipedia is unreliable with information concerning the Kennedy assassination. However its entry dealing with the Zapata Offshore Drilling company is one of its better entries. And though I often find Joseph Trento a little wayward with his appraisal of the Kennedy assassination, it’s hard to argue with what he has accumulated concerning Bush’s role in the scheme of things. It’s important to note the role of Allen Dulles in the manipulation of the younger Bush, as this has a bearing later on.

William Corson: “George’s insecurities were clay to someone like Dulles”. (Bush was) “Perfect, at talent spotting and looking at potential recruits for the CIA. You have to remember, we had real fears of Soviet activity in Mexico in the 1950s. Bush was one of many businessmen that would be reimbursed for hiring someone the CIA was interested in, or simply carrying a message.”(Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 14)

John Sherwood of the CIA: “Bush was like hundreds of other businessmen who provided the nuts-and-bolts assistance such operations require… What they mainly helped us with was to give us a place to park people that was discreet.” Trento, then gives Sherwood’s account of Bush starting out as “a tiny part of Operation Mongoose the CIA’s code name for their anti-Castro operations.” (ibid, p.16)

Another well established writer on the web page, John Loftus, writing independent of Trento adds.

John Loftus: “The Zapata-Permargo deal caught the eye of Allen Dulles who, the “old spies” report, was the man who recruited Bush’s oil company as a part time purchasing front for the CIA. Zapata provided commercial supplies for one of Dulles’ most notorious operations: the Bay of Pigs Invasion.” (John Loftus: Secret War, pg. 368)

I decided to get the independent appraisals from other researchers to see if they also matched what had been written on the subject of George Bush’s role in the CIA at the time of the Kennedy assassination. They were more or less very compatible.

Larry Hancock:“I think it’s very possible that Bush started doing favours for the Agency even before 1963 and allowed his business to be used for clandestine activities…that could be said about virtually any business operating off shore in the Gulf.” (Larry Hancock: Email 23/10/2009)

Greg Parker: “Bush it seems was some kind of facilitator before and after the assassination for the agency. People forget that agency work in the field is pretty tightly compartmentalised. Just because our friend George was involved in one area doesn’t necessarily mean he knew the big picture. Basically he did the jobs he was given – possibly by Tom Devine whose departure from the CIA may have been faked for the purpose of running George and by extension, Zapata Offshore …

The reality for the ‘Bush done it’ mob (who seem to have emerged from the 9/11 crowd) is that … the planning of the assassination was out of his league at the time. It’s odd isn’t it? … .But making the Bushes out to be the kingpins of the Kennedy hit strikes me as more than a little naïve. It’s just flat out not true.” (Greg Parker email 8/12/2009)

Ignorance Is Bliss Part II: Allen Dulles who?

52:58 In an attempt to impress upon us that it is really George Bush in the memo, and to prove that Bush was a ‘supervisor’ of the Cubans, we are introduced to Allen Dulles, a man whom Hankey clearly knows nothing about. There is often little consensus in the JFK research community. But Dulles, like Jim Angleton, Phillips and Helms, is widely regarded as an essential ingredient to understanding the Kennedy assassination. So for Hankey to distort his relatively brief mention of him should not go unscored.

“Dulles worked closely with Nazi bankers during World War II. That somehow qualified him to become the director of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.”

First, it would seem that Hankey wants to make out that Dulles was the first CIA Director. Not true. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter became the head of the CIA upon its creation, and ran it from 1947-1950. Walter Bedell Smith then ran the Agency from 1950-1953. Dulles became his Deputy Director in 1951, and then became its longest serving director in 1953. Now Hankey, one would hope, had learnt a few things from when this debacle of a project first came out. But on Black Op Radio (show # 424) as recently as May of 2009, Hankey still dismissed Dulles. Going as far as to make one of the most unbelievable implications in JFK research history: that Dulles was a cut out for Prescott Bush.

“Prescott Bush is the guy who during WWI was with Army Intelligence. Dulles was not with army intelligence during WWI and it’s a little bit surprising that he would be put in charge of the CIA instead of Prescott, given that they are more or less parallel in their power up until that time.”

He then repeated this in an interview with Joseph Green in July of the same year whilst banging the drums for his JFK 2 revamp entitled Dark Legacy.

“GHW Bush worked for the CIA and was clearly involved in the assassination; so closely that his name shows up on a memo signed by Hoover and titled “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy”. His father was also very deeply involved in the CIA. It can in fact be argued that Prescott Bush was the real power at CIA, that Dulles was a front; and that it was Prescott, not Dulles, who masterminded the assassination.”

(Much of what we have already discussed and criticised thus far is contained within this interview and answers the question for the reader whether or not his revamp is an improvement or indeed worth paying for? The simple answer is that is no in either case.)

Returning to the above quote, even for Hankey, this is shocking. Let us repeat the axiom to live by: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. This Bush for Dulles substitution surely qualifies as an extraordinary, over the top, claim. The problem is the usual one for Hankey: there is simply no evidence for it. For instance, the standard reference work on the Central Intelligence Agency is John Ranelagh’s The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. That book was published in 1986, well after the death of Prescott Bush. Ranelagh took four years to write it. He interviewed hundreds of people. (p. 12) His bibliography runs to twelve pages. The book runs to almost 800 pages of text and notes. You will not see one reference to Prescott Bush in his index. Somehow, none of the hundreds of people he talked to knew that Allen Dulles was really a puppet and that Prescott Bush was pulling his strings. I mean Richard Helms didn’t know that? Dick Bissell didn’t know it? Dulles’ own deputy Charles Cabell didn’t know it? Although less a straightforward and systematic history, the other standard reference book on the Agency is The CIA: A Forgotten History. That book has over 60 pages of footnotes. But I guess Bill Blum was also decieved, since there is no reference to Prescott Bush in that volume either. Did Hankey discover something that, in all their long toils, these two men did not? I doubt it. Or maybe he will now claim that every single person and source was instructed to lie to these two men. By who? Well, Hankey’s kingpin behind the JFK hit of course: George Bush Sr.

What this bit of patent mythology indicates is the same phenomenon that David Brock pointed out in his book Blinded by the Right. He termed the irrational extremists he encountered in the conservative bastions of the nineties as the Clinton Crazies. Whipped up into a frenzy by the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife and his agent Christopher Ruddy, they were ready to blame the Clintons for anything: the murder of Vince Foster, illegal real estate deals, fathering illegitimate children and covering it up etc. Well, in about 2004, when the presidency of Bush Jr. began to really unravel, a reaction similar to Clinton Craziness began to set in against the Bushes. It was more soundly based than the one against the Clintons. And in that regard, it more closely resembles the reaction against Nixon during and after Watergate, which I alluded to above. But in some ways, the reaction against the Bushes has perhaps been even more extreme than the one against Nixon. And Hankey’s attempt at an Orwellian rewrite of the history of the CIA, inserting Prescott Bush for Allen Dulles, is surely a part of that fevered delirium. A fevered delirium that has given birth to the likes of Gary Allen, the late Aaron Russo, Alex Jones and cross pollinated with the liberal fringe in which David Icke, and Jason Bermas are now joined by John Hankey.

And it goes hand in glove with Hankey’s bizarre attempt to implicate George Bush Sr. in the middle of the Kennedy assassination. What it amounts to is rewriting history in order to facilitate a personal agenda. What else can possibly explain it? Perhaps this was his thinking: “Many people believe the CIA was involved in the murder of Kennedy. If I substitute Prescott Bush for Allen Dulles, then I bring the Bush clan closer to the Kennedy murder.” The only problem is that it’s not true. In other words, it’s a solipsism (the philosophical idea that one’s own mind is all that exists). A solipsistic approach always makes for bad – and deceptive – history.

With that in mind, let us take apart the above Hankeyisms. In addition to implying that Dulles was the CIA’s first Director, which he was not, Hankey tries to say that his only qualifcation for that job would be his assocaition with Nazi bankers during World War II. It’s true that Dulles’ firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, worked with German bankers up to the beginning of the war, and with affiliates of German businesses during the war. But to say that was the one and only reason Dulles was appointed CIA Director in 1953 is just daffy. Or incredibly ignorant.

Dulles was trained as a spy well before he became a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell. It is a small matter of debate between Jim DiEugenio and myself as to when Dulles was actually recruited into spy work for the US (this is something of a black hole which I hope we can resolve at a more appropriate time). What we do know however is that during WW I & II he ran America’s biggest and most important spy rings, both centered in Switzerland. At the end of World War II, he became the OSS chief in Germany. There, he recruited the Gehlen Organization into American intelligence. Allen Dulles was also instrumental in the post-war creation of the CIA and then had an advisory role in its development. In 1948 he helped write the Jackson-Dulles-Correa report which suggested reorganization of the Agency. That report was read by Director Smith. Smith then called Allen and made him Deputy Director in order to partly implement that report. (See Part 8, Sections 4-6, of Jim DiEugenio’s review of Reclaiming History.) All of this crucial information is left out by Hankey. It is all important. More important than the idea that Dulles’ association with Nazi bankers impressed Smith so much as to make him his deputy.

“Prescott Bush is the guy who during WWI was with Army Intelligence. Dulles was not with army intelligence during WWI and it’s a little bit surprising that he would be put in charge of the CIA instead of Prescott given that they are more or less parallel in their power up until that time.”

Actually, in World War I, Prescott Bush received intelligence training and he also worked as an artillery captain. His intelligence duties were as a laison officer with the French. Prescott did not serve in World War II. As noted above, Allen Dulles was an intelligence officer in both wars. And he was not simply a staff officer. He ran operations out of Switzerland. And at the end of World War II he rose to head of the OSS in Germany. After the war, he was then actively involved in the creation of both the National Security Act and the Central Intelligence Agency. He also ran a CIA sponsored operation out of the law offices of Sullivan and Cromwell to subvert the Italian elections of 1948. (Christopher Simpson, Blowback, p. 90) At the end of the war, he helped found Radio Free Europe and helped write a report about reforming the CIA. To compare the intelligence background of Dulles with Prescott Bush is a little like comparing the Arkansas State football team with the University of Texas Longhorns.

I don’t quite know what Hankey means by the second part of the sentence. What does “parallel in their power” mean or matter in something like this? But just to point out who Dulles was involved with at the time, here is a list of companies represented by Sullivan and Crowmwell in the forties: JP Morgan & Company, Dillon Read and Company, Brown Borthers Harriman (Prescott Bush’s company), Goldman Sachs, New York Life Insurance Company, The American and Foreign Power Company, International Nickel, Overseas Securities Corporation, United Railways of Central America, United Fruit, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Electric, US Steel. It is not an exaggeration to say that Sullivan and Cromwell represented a large part of the Eastern Establishment at the time.

Furthermore, Dulles was more or less a natural choice for Director in 1953. He had been in intelligence since World War I, he was Deputy Director at the time, and his brother was Secretary of State. And although Walter B. Smith liked being Director, he was ill. (Ranelagh, p. 230) What would have been really surprising is if Eisenhower had appointed Prescott Bush as Director.

“GHW Bush worked for the CIA and was clearly involved in the assassination; so closely that his name shows up on a memo signed by Hoover and titled “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy”. His father was also very deeply involved in the CIA. It can in fact be argued that Prescott Bush was the real power at CIA, that Dulles was a front; and that it was Prescott, not Dulles, who masterminded the assassination.”

The first sentence is, in large part, sheer hyperbole bordering on sensationalism. George Bush Sr. was not “clearly involved in the assassination”. If he was, someone would have discovered his role many years ago. Say in the first 25 years of research on this case. As per his name showing up in a memo by Hoover, we have shown what that was for. And it was not about Kennedy’s assassination. (Which Hoover was not really interested in.) And thousands of FBI documents are headed at that time with “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy”. Or did Hankey forget that the FBI was the prime investigative arm for the Warren Commission? If Prescott Bush was so involved with the CIA, why is his name not in Ranelagh’s book? The rest of the quote is just so bizarre and unfounded that it really makes one wish Hankey would disappear. Prescott Bush, as just proven, was not the “real power” at CIA. And for Hankey to now say that Prescott was the real mastermind behind the JFK murder, well it makes me wish that McBride had never discovered or written about that Hoover memorandum. We would be spared these outrageous and completely unfounded wild accusations based upon a foundation of quicksand.

Hankey’s History:  Part 3

54:48 Hankey claims that Prescott Bush’s Army Intelligence employees during WWI turned into the CIA. This is pure fiction. The intelligence units that Prescott Bush served in were the precursor to what would one day become the NSA. The OSS was set up by Roosevelt and is the direct ancestor of today’s CIA. (See here.)

55:04 Hankey again twists reality by insisting that Bissell like Hunt had worked for Harriman “for 10 years“. This is just wrong. Howard Hunt did not work for Harriman for anything like that period of time. Nor did Dick Bissell, who was recruited by Harriman in 1947 and Hunt in 1948.

Though they knew each other prior to working together, Bissell only worked directly for Harriman for a few months on the Marshall Plan. He worked under him sporadically over a period of some 4 years prior to his employment by the CIA. In real terms, if Bissell and Hunt had worked for Harriman for 10 years, Bissell would have been working for him until 1957, and Hunt until 1958. The problem with this is that Bissell was recruited by the CIA in 1953 and Hunt in 1949. Which, unless Harriman was running the Agency (which he clearly was not) renders Hankey’s accusation false. (See Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D, McKinzie: Oral History Interview with Richard M. Bissell Jr. 07/09/71; Ralph E Weber: Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in their own words. pgs 43-45)

Hankey Scores An Irrelevant Point

55:08 Hankey gets something else right, but it’s kind of peripheral. William Casey and Prescott Bush did form the National Strategy Information centre to apply pressure on Kennedy’s Cold War policies and support the CIA’s endeavours in 1962. But this says nothing more than Prescott was a cheer leader for the Agency, something that 1.) has been established for decades, 2.)Many wealthy Republicans were.

Skull and Groans

55:32 What would any bad post Kennedy assassination, 9/11 documentary be without mentioning the infamous Skull and Bones society? Skull and Bones seems to have become the all seeing evil society since 9/11. George Bush figures rather heavily in all that.

The problem with mentioning Skull and Bones as the root of all things evil and the driving force behind the Kennedy assassination is that it leads to the whole Secret Society fallacy. For example, on the Freemasonry Watch website, members of the Warren Commission are named as masons who covered up the crime. Sen. Richard Russell, a well known Mason, is named as one of the guilty parties. However, Russell was the only Commissioner who launched his own investigation and at least tried to find the real facts of the case. Though not quite as visceral as Russell the other dissenting Warren Commission member was a fellow by the name of John Sherman Cooper (Gerald McKnight: Breach of Trust pgs. 293-295) who was himself a well known Bonesman. Though by the time of Cooper’s testimony to the HSCA (in which he seemed to have caved a bit by outwardly supporting the Commissions efforts), he still gave a number of statements which indicated a certain amount of indecision on his behalf (HSCA Vol III, pgs. 599-610). Let’s be frank about this issue: If you have to devote a fairly long section of your video to the Skull and Bones society, it means you don’t have much real evidence at hand to make your thesis stick.

The Roll Call

55:58 Time for a roll call. As we have seen, Hankey has a habit of tying people together in a singular group, when in reality their interactions are separated by years and sometimes decades. In fairness, with a group like Skull and Bones these interactions can span the generations. Thus I have no ‘bone’ to pick with that nor do I have a problem with his naming Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, and Bush’s uncle George Herbert Walker who all check out as Bonesmen.

But he runs into trouble this with his use of Robert Lovett.

“Robert Lovett, architect of the CIA, was a bonesman selected for membership by Prescott himself”.

Lovett was a Bonesman and played a role in the establishment of the CIA. However it would have been impossible for Bush to have picked him, because individual members cannot handpick individuals. It is decided upon by the group. Which, of course, makes perfect sense.

Let’s turn back to Lovett and ‘the occult’ before I leave this time slot. It’s ironic that Salvadore Allende, the President of Chile, was a 31st degree level freemason and that didn’t stop him from getting taken down by some dark forces. Also, Bonesman Lovett filed a report on the CIA some twenty years before Allende’s overthrow. This report was scathing of what Dulles had made out of the CIA at the time. (See Part 8 of Jim DiEugenio’s review of Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History.) So you can’t rely on secret societies to make your case.

56:14 Hankey’s next target is one F. Truby Davison whom Hankey describes forthwith.

“F. Truby Davison was also selected for membership in Skull and Bones in 1918, the year Prescott did the picking. Davison was in charge of hiring for the CIA in 1948, the year George Herbert Walker Bush left Yale in search of a job.”

As you have seen Bush was not privy to selection of Lovett in 1918, thus it would make it difficult for him to have selected Davison. Furthermore, George Bush is not widely regarded as beginning his tenure at the Agency until the early fifties. Thus it’s hard to see how immediately going to work for Dresser Industries (a Harriman subsidiary) upon graduation puts him in the unemployed category, nor under the recruitment of Davison. Since he was already in contact with Henry Neil Mallon, a seeming recruiter of business executives anyhow. (Baker & Larson: “Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed” The Real News Project, January 8, 2007)

56:32 We now move onto Davison’s son, a fellow with the unfortunate name Endicott Peabody Davison. Hankey claims that Peabody Davison was in the society the same year as George Bush. This is also wrong. He was a Bonesman from 1944-45 some 2 years before Bush was tapped.

History with Hankey: Part 4

58:46 Hankey now discusses Operation MONGOOSE as a commando team in the same breath as Operation Forty or Alpha 66. In fact, MONGOOSE was the name given to the overall Cuban initiative of 1961-62, into which it seems elements of both Operation Forty (formed prior to the Bay of Pigs) and Alpha 66 (formed in its aftermath) were incorporated. This is an important distinction which any Kennedy researcher should be able to make.

58:57 At this point, Hankey seems to claim that Howard Hunt helped stage the Bay of Pigs invasion from the island of Cal Say off of the coast of Cuba. In reality, the invasion actually took place from Guatemala and Nicaragua (Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure, pgs. 125-27). And at the time of its launch, Hunt was stationed at CIA HQ, where he monitored its progress with David Phillips. Because of his Spanish speaking skills, Hunt was scheduled to fly to Florida, when and if the invasion succeeded. From there he was to accompany the Cuban exile leadership to the beachhead. It’s hard to believe that Hankey missed all this. Because Hunt writes about it in his valuable book on the Bay of Pigs invasion Give Us this Day (pgs. 190-95). Hankey may be, in his usual way, straining to stitch together some kind of clandestine relationship between Bush and Hunt.

History With Hankey: Part 5 – The Bay of Pigs

58:16 Hankey claims that planning for the Bay of Pigs was begun by Dulles in 1959, forgetting to mention that this was also the year that Castro came to power. He then uses this as the catalyst for George Bush to move closer to the Agency. Zapata did split its interests up in the same year and Bush did go solo as the president of Zapata Offshore. But the cause and effect relationship Hankey is hankering for is problematic. Because the planning for the invasion did not start in 1959. As Higgins notes, in early 1960 Eisenhower was still using embargoes and trade cut offs against Castro. (p. 48) The actual early planning for the Bay of Pigs did not begin until March of 1960. (ibid, p. 49) By the way, this is also the point where Hankey brings in the so-called parallel between the code name of the invasion Operation Zapata, and the name of Bush’s oil company, which as we have seen is specious. He then asks, well what kind of an idiot would name a CIA operation after his oil company? He then answers George Bush. I’ve got a better question: What kind of researcher would not know that the name of the peninsula right next to the Bay of Pigs is called Zapata?

1:01:06 This is a vintage Hankey moment. He claims that both Hunt and Bissell left Harriman’s office at the same time to go work on the Bay of Pigs at exactly the same time as George Bush. If this muddle of mistakes has altered your memory I refer you back to 55:04. Honestly I shake my head.

1:01:40 “Hoover’s memo names Bush as a CIA supervisor of the Bay of Pigs invaders, the anti Castro Cubans, there can be no reasonable doubt about this connection. George Bush was working for the CIA assisting in their operations at the Bay of Pigs, working for Bissell, working with Hunt, working with Sturgis supervising the CIA’s misguided Castro Cubans.”

As you have clearly seen the document does not say this. Yet, Hankey somehow “forgets” that Hoover’s memo says absolutely nothing about naming Bush as a “supervisor” and nothing about the “Bay of Pigs.”

1:02:10 Hankey now reaches even further in his dramatic creation. A second earlier he made the dubious call that Bush “was working with Hunt”. He now suddenly changes his mind and-out of nowhere – he says that Bush was “Supervising Hunt.” Again, there is no mention of George Bush in any of the major literature on the Bay of Pigs. But Hunt is mentioned in almost every book on the ill-fated invasion. If Bush was supervising Hunt, his name would be somewhere. It’s not even in Hunt’s memoir entitled Give Us this Day. And in that book, Hunt mentions many, many people both above and below him who were involved in that operation. So: Where was George?

Nobody Had Connections To CIA Operations In the Nixon White House

1:02:16 Hankey then discusses Bush’s arrival in the White House stating.

“After Bush got beaten up in two elections, Nixon bought his sorry butt into the White House trailing E. Howard Hunt behind him. Halderman said no one could figure out who brought him in to the White House. But it isn’t that hard to figure out because not only did Hunt and Bush come to work for Nixon at exactly the same time but no one in the White house had any connections to CIA operations…No one had any connections! While Bush on the other hand, was directly involved in exactly the same CIA operations in the same area at the same time that Hunt was.”

This is another Hankeyian mouthful. Let’s break it into bite-size indigestible gulps.

“Nixon brought his sorry butt into the White House trailing E Howard Hunt behind him.“

As proven earlier, Bush did not bring Howard Hunt into the White House. Hunt was brought in by Charles Colson at the urging of Bob Bennett and Hunt himself. Bush was offered the job of UN Ambassador by Haldeman and Nixon in December of 1970, about 6 months before Hunt was offered employment by Colson. (Hougan pgs. 32-33) And since Hunt concentrated on domestic matters, the employment chain for Hunt went in a different direction from Bush’s. It went from Colson to John Ehrlichman (ibid) So the idea that Hankey tries to convey, that somehow there was a cause and effect relationship, or that somehow Bush caused Colson to hire Hunt, is simply not grounded in the discernible facts.

“But it isn’t that hard to figure out because not only did Hunt and Bush come to work for Nixon at exactly the same time”

As we have seen this is inaccurate.

“..but no one in the White House had any connections to CIA operations. No one had any connections!”

What about Henry Kissinger? Kissinger worked hand in glove with the CIA on the overthrow of Allende in Chile. What about Alexander Butterfield? Butterfield was a deputy to Haldeman who set Nixon’s schedule, provided him with briefing papers, and was instrumental in setting up the taping system in the White House. Butterfield’s exposure of that system to the Senate Watergate Committee helped impeach Nixon. Fletcher Prouty exposed Butterfield’s ties to the CIA during the Watergate scandal. (See Haldeman’s The Ends of Power pgs. 109-10.) What about Hunt and James McCord? Jim Hougan builds his wonderful book Secret Agenda around these two characters, who were allegedly retired from the CIA and denied knowing each other. In fact they were not retired and they knew each other from many years before. (Hougan, pgs. 3-26) And in fact, Hougan writes that McCord, from his position at the Committee to Re-elect the President, secured jobs for a few of his CIA friends at the White House. (ibid, pgs. 58-59) A statement like the above reveals that Hankey is not only ill-advised on the Kennedy assassination, but he doesn’t know very much about Watergate either.

“While Bush on the other hand, was involved in exactly the same CIA operations in the same area at the same time that Hunt was.”

The viewer may have noted that in skipping over the nefarious American activities in Latin America at the time. Hankey has presented absolutely no evidence of Hunt and Bush working together on anything other than the Bay of Pigs, and even that is an unproven and indirect relationship.

1:03:01 Conspirator Connally Part III: Time Warped

Hankey here tries to insinuate that Bush got his job as UN Ambassador by blackmailing Connally about his involvement with the Kennedy assassination. In reality, the previous UN ambassador, Charles Yost, had resigned. As had the previous Treasury Secretary, David Kennedy. Bush actually wanted Kennedy’s job at Treasury. But Nixon liked the idea of appointing a high profile conservative Democrat to a Cabinet level posiiton. So he gave that job to John Connally. Bush then settled for the United Nations. (See The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, Chapter 11). Which, besides undermining Hankey’s assassination plot, also tells you that Connally was higher in the pecking order than Bush in 1970.

This makes it hard to believe that Bush could have been controlling Connally seven years previous. Indeed, in Douglas Harlans article “The Parties Over” in the Texas Monthly of January 1982 he described the bitter feuding between Connally and Bush in which he often belittled and humiliated Bush at every opportunity (pgs 114-119).

Now, after all of Hankey’s accusations, does he really have anything at all to convict Connally with? Well, in one blog dated as recently as 1/2/2008, a fan of Hankey’s called ‘Boulderdash’ in a piece dating from February 2008 called “Clinton, Obama, JFK and the next terrorist attack’ excitedly writes.

“There is a tape of a phone conversation, available on the web, between John Connally and LBJ. Connally was demonstrably involved in JFK’s murder. And he called Johnson and said, “Oswald was a Cuban agent.”

For Hankey and his followers this is evidence enough that Connally was clearly in on the plot. The inference is that Connally was trying to convince Johnson that Oswald was in with Castro. What Hankey failed to tell his good friend ‘Boulderdash’ is that this phone call actually happened in 1967 four years later, in which Connally reveals to Johnson that he had heard the rumours from some journalists. I’ll leave up for yourself to find the link if you can be bothered. Boulderdash like his hero Hankey never stopped to think why were these rumours were being circulated? Well this link explains how they emerged in light of the Garrison investigation.

Time Warp IV

1:03:42 Hankey now makes the dramatic call that Nixon, Bush, Hunt and Connally all meet up in 1970. Hankey soon after portrays them as making their steps to power over Kennedy’s corpse. Yet as usual he has no credible evidence to show how any of them were actually involved in his murder. But he also leaves something else out that is important: By 1970, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X had also been murdered. Maybe I should not have noted that. I might give Hankey an idea for his next mockumentary.

Watergate in and out of a nutshell

1:04:00 Nixon was widely considered to have resigned rather than face prosecution over his obstructing justice in that case. The coup de grace came for Nixon upon the release of tapes dating from the 23rd of June 1972 implicating him in the scandal and discussing the hush money involved in paying off the burglars. Hunt was, on the surface, one of the many problems Nixon was faced with concerning hush money to the Watergate burglars.

Now one has to know something about the background and complexity of Watergate to understand how outlandish the next Hankeyism really is. For he now claims that Nixon was paying Hunt because Hunt threatened to implicate him in the JFK murder. So let us get this straight: First, Bush blackmails Connally to get a job at the White House; then Hunt blackmails Nixon; and they both use Kennedy’s murder as a the pretext. To go through all the problems with this double blackmailing scenario would take a short essay in itself. But how about this for starters: There is no credible evidence that Connally or Nixon was involved in Kennedy’s murder. So how could they be blackmailed? Also, no other credible author has ever attributed those motives to either Bush or Hunt.

How does Hankey insert Bush into this then? Through a guy named Bill Liedtke. Liedtke and Bush were business partners from Texas in the fifties. Liedtke ended up being part of the Republican team that put together some of the hush money for Hunt once he was in jail for Watergate. The problem here is that several people were involved in this effort. Liedtke was one of the underlings. But the actual effort was run at the top by Herbert Kalmbach and Haldeman. (Stanely Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, p. 275) The reason the White House paid up was because Hunt was threatening to spread the Watergate scandal to Ehrlichman and Egil Krogh, who supervised his particular Plumbers Unit of break-in artists. (ibid p. 276) Maybe Hankey can tell us how Ehrlichman and Krogh were linked through Bush to the Kennedy murder?

Massive Bush Cover up?

1:06:21 You probably thought this could not get any worse. Like me, you may have even thought that it’s this kind of goofiness that gives people who write about conspiracies, even obvious ones like the JFK case, a bad name. Well, you were right in the second assumption. You were wrong about the first. Hankey has not stopped scaling the heights of dreadfulness. Like Captain Kirk, he is now about to go where no man has ever gone before. But unlike Kirk, Hankey fails to discover anything of any real use.

“In 1975 the Senate Select Committee on Assassinations began to investigate the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination. The Committee uncovered the CIA internal memo that Spotlight magazine wrote about which says that Hunt was in Dallas the day of the assassination. William Colby was director of the CIA at the time.”

Hankey now does another frail and childish imitation of Colby saying (these are underlined): “Oh yeah, Hunt was there alright. He and Bush were in charge of the shooters” And he was cooperating with the committee “But they weren’t really in charge, they were just taking orders” and supplied the committee with the Hunt memo. The problem is the usual with Hankey: No such thing happened. This is nothing but a creation of Hankey’s fevered imagination. Hankey should have been a playwright.

“Colby was suddenly fired and out of the blue supposedly with no CIA experience George Bush Sr. was appointed to take over as head of the CIA. Why, what could qualify Bush for this job? One thing: Bush could be relied upon better than Colby to cover up the facts of JFK’s murder because Bush knew that the trail led straight to him. He had to cover it up and he did, he ended CIA cooperation completely with the Committee and shut down the investigation”

Okay, let’s break this Hankeyism down as we have before.

“In 1975 the Senate Select Committee on Assassinations began to investigate the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination.”

Firstly, anyone who has studied the JFK case – which Hankey says he has been doing for about 40 or 50 years – knows that there was never any such thing as the Senate Select Committee on Assassinations. There were actually two Senate committees that sprung up in the wake of Watergate: the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee. Neither of them had the name attributed to it by Hankey. The first did do a whitewash of some of the circumstances around the Kennedy murder. The second only investigated the performance of the intelligence agencies in their support of the Warren Commission.

It was the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which actually did a long inquiry into the murder of President Kennedy. These are easy things to check. Hankey didn’t.

“The Committee uncovered the CIA internal memo that Spotlight magazine wrote about which says that Hunt was in Dallas the day of the assassination.”

Not true. In Lane’s book it is stated that the source for the memo was Victor Marchetti, a staff assistant to Richard Helms. The stir over the Hunt memo came about during the HSCA. (Spotlight August 15th 1978) It was Joseph Trento writing for the Sunday News Journal on August the 20th 1978 who made note that a 1966 memoranda placing Hunt in Dallas was in the hands of the HSCA. Joseph Trento later testified as to seeing the memo signed by Helms and Angelton. The Hunt memo was never submitted into evidence by Colby or anyone else to an offical body.

William Colby was director of the CIA at the time?

Not really. Colby served as the Director of Central Intelligence from September 1973 to January 1976. He had made disclosures to the Pike and Church Committees during 1975. But there is no evidence he had anything to do with Hunt and the Spotlight magazine article, since he was not the DCI of the Agency during the HSCA. Now I shall not go into detail discussing Hankey’s inane and immature voiceover of Colby’s. Namely because there is absolutely no evidence for any of it in the first place. Nor did Colby ever say anything like this publicly or privately to anyone.

“Colby was suddenly fired, and out of the blue with supposedly no CIA experience George Bush Senior was appointed to take over as head of the CIA. Why, what could qualify Bush for this job? One thing Bush could be relied upon better than Colby was to cover up the facts of JFK’s assassination because Bush knew that the trail led straight to him. He had to cover it up and he did; he ended CIA cooperation completely with the Committee and shut down the investigation.”

As per Bush closing down the investigations, this is again wrong. As Jim DiEugenio so clearly states at the end of Part 8 of his Reclaiming History series, Gerald Ford, and the CIA used the murder of CIA officer Richard Welch to begin to squelch the Pike and Church Committees at the end of 1975. Bush’s role in that maneuvering was minor. The major players were Ford, Kissinger, Colby, and David Phillips. It was the House Select Committee on Assassinations that really investigated the Hunt memorandum. And the HSCA was brought into existence in September of 1976. Its report was issued over two years later in 1979. George Bush served in the role of DCI from January 1976 until January 1977. George Bush ran some obstruction against the previous inquiries, but would have only 5 months to run any interference against the HSCA. And he was not around for the revelations of the Hunt memorandum. So how was he in a position to cover up his own role in the JFK murder? The answer is evident to everyone except Hankey: He actually wasn’t. This is all another Hankeyism.

George De Mohrenschildt

1:08:02 George De Mohrenschildt, nicknamed the Baron, is a subject one would not expect Hankey to get right. And true to form, Hankey does not.

1:08:12 His first claim is that De Mohrenschildt got Oswald the job at the “Dallas School Book Depository”. John, please, it’s the Texas School Book Depository. And as Jim Douglass so wonderfully demonstrates, it was not the Baron who helped get Oswald his job there. It was Ruth Paine. (JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 171) In fact, it would have been quite difficult for DeMohrenschildt to attain that job for Oswald since he was in Haiti at the time. (ibid, p. 168)

1:08:20 Hankey, the self proclaimed veteran gumshoe, again invokes the fictional ‘Senate Committee on Assassinations” (refer to 1:06:20)

“The night before he was to be questioned by the Senate Committee on Assassinations, his head was blown off”

Hankey is off to another bad start here. George De Mohrenschildt died in Manalapan Florida on the afternoon of the 9th of March 1977. The Church Committee was ended by then. So the interview was with the HSCA, the ‘House Select Committee on Assassinations’.

1:08:28 Hankey now reveals that De Mohrenschildt had the contact details of Poppy Bush in his address book. Hankey for once downplays the evidence remarking:

“By itself this proves nothing. Taken in context however it is one more amazingly direct link to Bush and the assassination.”

It is no such thing of course. Consider the following from Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin’s Unauthorized Biography of George Bush:

“After De Mohrenschildt’s death, his personal address book was located, and it contained this entry: “Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.” There is of course the problem of dating this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from Midland to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the number: “4-6355.” (This was the number of ‘Poppy’s’ office)

In a place like the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which Midland is due west of, an individual as gregarious as De Mohrenschildt would have found it hard not to ingratiate himself with the likes of George Bush. Particularly considering the facts that the Baron was an oil geologist and Bush owned an oil company.

Returning to De Mohrenschildt, it seems that he had been more of an observer and incubator for Oswald prior to his involvement with the Paines – who Oswald met via his interactions with the White Russian community. And it was the Baron who provided Oswald entry into that commuity. Further, the death of DeMohrenschildt, which came at the end of a rather bizarre and long ordeal at the hands of Willem Oltmans and Edward Epstein – who was working with and for James Angleton at the time – deserves a film of its own. It should not be just cheaply tacked on as a “direct link to Bush and the assassination” when it is not any such thing. To use just one point: How does Bush connect with the Paines or the White Russian community?

Hankey as DA

1:10:29 After a mindless monologue about the weight of the evidence against Bush, and the connections they pose to the JFK case, Hankey now intones: “If he stood trial in Texas he would get the electric chair”. Which shows just how much Hankey knows about the legal system. Because most people who know anything about both the JFK case and the law would reply: What competent DA would sit through this risible presentation without rolling their eyes and looking at their watch several times?

What then follows is a bizarre tune utilizing South Park animations and a puerile unfunny cover version claiming Bush as the controller and Hunt as the triggerman and contains a number of references to crawling inside someone’s behind. The only good thing about this sequence is that it gives us hope that the film is close to being finished.

It is but a fleeting hope. Hankey still has some 10 plus minutes to abuse one’s sensibilities with.

Hankey and Oswald

1:14:13. Now comes a little intro into Oswald’s background, which Hankey does not screw up too badly, since he appears to have taken the information from the film JFK. But he does manage to say that three men close to Oswald when he returned from Russia-David Ferrie, Guy Banister, and DeMohrenschildt-all died “shortly after the assassination.” Well, yes, Banister did. But Ferrie died in 1967, and the Baron died ten years after that. That’s not “shortly after” John.

1:14:57 While Hankey is explaining Oswald’s FBI informant status, he tells the audience that through “Declassified secret documents of the Warren Commission” we know they were told by the Dallas DA and the Attorney General of Texas that Oswald was an informant. Hankey clearly wants to portray himself as an avid reader of this declassified information. Yet, there was nothing really secret about it. First, the story came out in a newspaper, and second, researchers like Mark Lane wrote about it back in 1966. (Rush to Judgment, pgs. 370-74) But even before that, Gerald Ford wrote about it in 1964, in his book Portrait of the Assassin.

Time Warp V

1:15:27 Hankey now distorts another memo written by Hoover.

“In 1960, 3 years before the assassination, J Edgar found time to write a memo regarding a lowly insignificant lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald. What the hell did Hoover find so interesting about this guy 3 years before the assassination? Hoover’s memo complained that someone was using Oswald’s identity while Oswald was in Russia to buy trucks for CIA trained anti Castro Cubans”

What Hankey does here is to combine two memos into one to create a false picture of what was going on and Hoover’s knowledge of it. The multiple Oswald saga began in June of 1960 when Hoover wrote in a memo to the State Department: “There is a possibility of an imposter using Oswald’s birth certificate”. (George Michael Evica, A Certain Arrogance, p. 42) If Hoover was running Oswald at this time, he would not need to be writing such notes. And in this memo there is nothing about “buying trucks”.

But since Hankey ignores it, it is worth taking into account the strange story behind how this memo came into being. When Oswald left the Marines, it was under the pretext of attending the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland. But Oswald had deviated and gone on to Russia instead. His mother was deeply confused about his turning up in the Soviet Union rather than in Switzerland. As a result she spent much of her time contacting the various agencies associated with the State Dept and the college itself in the latter part of 1959. (John Newman: Oswald and the CIA, pgs. 166 -167)

The FBI eventually investigated the college to find out if someone was attending the school under a false pretext. What the FBI discovered was that 1.) The school was no ordinary institution of higher learning, and 2.) Oswald never showed up there.. The college was so obscure Swiss authorities had to be contacted. And even they took two months to verify its existence. (Evica, p. 49) So how did Oswald know about the place?

Now, months later, in January of 1961, Oswald’s name was being used for the purchase of vehicles in the United States. The problem was he was in Russia at the time. But at the Bolton Ford dealership in New Orleans, salesman Oscar Deslatte encountered two individuals from the Friends Of Democratic Cuba organization (FDC). They tried to purchase a number of Ford pick up trucks. After bartering for a price with Deslatte, one of the individuals, a large Cuban who identified himself as one Joseph Moore, requested that he put the name of his partner on the receipt. The name was ‘Oswald’. Deslatte immediately went to the FBI after the assassination with this information. (Jim Garrison: On The Trail of The Assassins. pgs 57-59)

Deslatte was interviewed on the 25th of November 1963. In this interview he did not identify the man as the Oswald arrested on the 22nd. As evidence Deslatte furnished the receipt he had laid out for them. (Deslatte: FBI interview 11/25/1963) It was flatly ignored by the FBI, and it was not until 1979 that the receipt, clearly showing the name Oswald, was released by the Bureau. (Anthony Summers: The Kennedy Conspiracy, pg. 446).

One of the key reasons why the FBI ignored Deslatte’s compelling claims and suppressed the evidence was probably because the FDC had Guy Banister, a former ONI agent and also former head of the Chicago office of the FBI, on its Board of Directors. Banister had set up his own private detective agency in New Orleans and has since been clearly linked to Oswald’s CAP leader David Ferrie. By conflating the two incidents, Hankey distorts the complexity and the actual context of who Oswald was.

Hankey on the Bay of Pigs and Oswald

1:16:19: “Kennedy awoke and discovered that the CIA had launched a major invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.” Is Hankey saying what I think he is saying here? That Allen Dulles-or in Hankey’s world, Prescott Bush-somehow launched the Bay of Pigs invasion on his own, without Kennedy’s knowledge? To use a phrase that too often comes up with Hankey, this is preposterous. And it is hard to believe that Hankey didn’t know it was so. All one has to do is read Trumbull Higgins book The Perfect Failure, to see that Kennedy attended meetings about the invasion beforehand. (p. 97) In Robert McNamara’s book, In Retrospect, the former Secretary of Defense actually describes the meeting at which Kennedy polled his cabinet on whether or not to OK the invasion – which they did. (pgs. 25-27)

1:19:10: According to Hankey, as a result of the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kruschev insisted that all Cuban exile training camps be shut down and the the Russians be allowed to inspect them. He does not cite a source for this. Probably because he cannot. I have never seen it in any book on the subject, including the standard reference work, The Kennedy Tapes. The idea that Kennedy would allow the Russians to inspect former CIA training camps on American soil is another Hankeyian leap. But there appears to be a reason for it. Hankey is now going to ask: How could Hoover locate these camps in order to close them? Well John, probably because the FBI offices near the towns they existed in knew about them. They had to in order not to arrest the operatives involved during MONGOOSE. Hankey could have learned about this by interviewing some FBI agents. Apparently, he didn’t. What he wants to do is now say that Hoover learned about at least one of them through his super agent in the field: Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Oswald was seen at the training camp at Lake Pontchartrain Louisiana by the secretary of the former FBI agent who ran the camps. This camp was raided and shut down days after Oswald visited there.”

Banister’s secretary was Delphine Roberts. Oswald was not seen at the training camps by Roberts. He was seen by her handling communist literature on the street near Banister’s office. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 40) There is some evidence that Oswald visited the New Orleans training camp in question. But no one knows precisley when. So how can Hankey make the deduction that it was shut down days after Oswald visited there?

Now the declassified record, combined with various interviews does indeed suggest that Oswald was likely some type of informant for the FBI, and Jim Douglass and others have long suggested a connection. (op cit pgs. 333-338) I agree that there was such an involvement with Oswald. But unlike Douglass and DiEugenio, I don’t think Oswald’s role as an informant is actually that dramatic. But it is other researchers who came up with this information in the first place. Furthermore it is quite doubtful that Oswald was “Hoover’s most important agent in the field.” On what information could this judgment be based upon anyway? I tend to feel he was just one of a network. But Hankey makes him his top agent because he wants to make Hoover into some kind of hero again. Hankey says that on November 22nd, Hoover immediately understood that the CIA had murdered Oswald, and that they had framed his top agent in that crime. What does he base these assumptions on? Nothing that he has shown the viewer.

1:21:03 Now Hankey does the usual. He puts together a childish skit and then overplays his cards. Utilizing a cut out of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski with Allen Dulles’ head attached, we are greeted to the CIA honcho holding and threatening J. Edgar Hoover in a dress. The message is the CIA had Hoover over a barrel because they had managed to frame Hoover’s top agent as the assassin. And this made sure Hoover would be silent during the Warren Commission cover up. This may or may not be true. But even if it is, is it crucial? No. For the simple fact that Hoover would have gone along with the cover up anyway. Since, as many biographies of him show, he despised Robert Kennedy. He was happy to be free of him since RFK was planning to fire him in a second Kennedy term. Further, he was good friends with Lyndon Johnson and liked working with him. (See, for example, the biographies of Hoover by Anthony Summers and Curt Gentry, respectively at pages 316, and 536))

1:22:29 Hankey gives a bunch of background about Operation 40, largely based on the Marita Lorentz tale. And it goes on and on: “And according to the memo the CIA asks Hoover to tell them what he knows of the misguided anti Castro Cubans, why? You yeah you sitting there thinking about it” This is one of the lowest points of this dismal production. Because the memorandum says no such thing. Hankey is demanding that we think of the significance of non-existent wording on a non-existent document.

1:23:07 Hankey now builds to a crescendo that is so beyond the rules of evidence, logic and deduction – i.e. normal comprehension – that it is a little stupefying.

“Remember that Bush called the FBI the day of the assassination. He told them he was in the Dallas area and he got in a plane and flew to Washington. If he really wanted information on the anti Castro Cubans why didn’t he go to Miami and talk with the FBI agents who were actually involved in investigating the Cubans? If he wanted to hear it from headquarters why didn’t he just call? And he already knew the answer to the question so why did he go through all this trouble? There’s something going on here. What? These are important questions if you want to try and understand the world you live in you can’t just shrug them off. Science and criminal justice say that you have to come up with a better explanation than me or else you have to accept my explanation … And my answer is pretty ugly.”

If you have been following along, you know that Hankey is again reading things into the memo that are not there. It does not say that Bush flew to Washington. What the memo says is that Hoover (possibly via a middle man) contacted both Bush and another man about possible attacks on Cuba in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. In other words, the initiative came from Hoover. The idea that Bush had to go to Miami to receive this info is ridiculous. Hankey apparently doesn’t know that the FBI has offices in every major city in America. Or that they had ways to get info to those cities. Ever hear of a telex machine John? Unlike what Hankey says, what’s going on here is not something we need to comprehend. It’s something that Hankey needs to comprehend about himself. That in his half-mad pursuit of George Bush, he has fallen off a cliff. And he has taken people with little understanding of the case with him.

The Plot to Kill Hoover

1:24:51 I don’t even want to describe what Hankey does next. But for the sake of this depressing essay I have to. Hankey literally invents a scenario where the plotters are now mystified about what Hoover’s intentions are in the Kennedy case, and have to meet with him to sort the situation out. This is again, preposterous. For within hours of the assassination Hoover was on board with the lone asassin scenario. (See DiEugenio’s Reclaiming History review, Part 7, sections 1 and 2.) Hoover was glad to see JFK gone, since it would mean that RFK would now be off his back. And anyone who knew Hoover would have known and predicted this. But Hankey has not read up on it. Or, if he has, he wants to keep it from the viewer for the benefit of his piece of theater.

“It’s obvious these guys don’t know for sure what Hoover’s gonna say or they wouldn’t have to get on a plane to Washington to ask. So now here they are in Washington, but what are they supposed to do if Hoover gives the wrong answer? How hard a question is that? They just whacked the president the day before so answer it! What are they gonna do if they get the wrong answer? Are they just gonna shoot him in the head right there in the FBI headquarters? Well here’s a hint.”

Cue picture of Senator Frank Church holding a pistol used by CIA operatives for assassinations.

“The CIA had developed a pistol that shoots a dart made of ice, the dart contains a drug that gives the victim a heart attack. The ice dart goes into the body, melts and the only evidence of a murder having been committed is a small pin prick left by the entry of the dart”

Its not quite clear, but Hankey now has Bush, or one of his thugs, holding the gun.

“These thugs probably had such guns in their pocket. If Hoover gave the wrong answer these two guys would kill him.”

The message: George Bush was in Hoover’s office right after Kennedy was killed. He threatened him with death unless he went along with the cover up. And that is why Hoover did what he did.

This single scene ranks Hankey with the worst of the worst in the JFK research field: Lamar Waldron, Craig Zirbel and John Davis among them. Hankey’s climax is that a gun firing what looks like flechettes laced with heart-attack inducing poison was used to threaten J Edgar Hoover. And this was done by George Bush in Hoover’s office. This is apparently the ultimate earth shattering conclusion we reach. Yet of course there is utterly no evidence that such a meeting took place at all. And, for that matter, this is the first I have ever heard of anybody ever going into Hoover’s office and threatening to shoot him. Call me old fashioned, but it seems like fantasy to me. Indeed, more like science-fiction.

Hankey’s Hero: J. Edgar Hoover?

1:26:09: Hankey now calls Hoover a great investigator. He then tells us “Hoover was a master of intelligence. When he destroyed the Black Panthers for Richard Nixon, the head of security for the Panthers was an FBI agent. When Hoover destroyed the Communist Party for Eisenhower, the man in charge of the party’s own membership list was an FBI agent; and he certainly got the goods on the Nazi collaborators in this country.” Uh, John, Hoover did not destroy the Panthers for Nixon or anyone else. As Gentry and Summers detail, and the Church Comiittee did also, that was Hoover’s own private campaign. And his war on Black Nationalist leaders went on through the presidencies of both Johnson and Nixon. (Gentry, p. 602)

And for Hankey to call Hoover a great investigator is simply appalling. If you read Gentry’s book, Hoover framed many people who probably were not guilty of crimes, and he used many, many illegal and unethical means to do so. (See Jim DiEugenio’s review of Reclaiming History, part 7. Especially the first two sections.)

Son of A Nazi Bitch

1:26:37 “So what does Hoover do when this Son of A Nazi Bitch comes to threaten him? He writes this memo, that’s what he does. Creating a written record of George Bush’s role in the assassination and hiding it in plain sight in a memo to the director of the CIA. This memo deserves the close attention we’ve been giving it. You see even with a CIA secret weapon in your hand, killing Hoover in his own office is an enormously risky project. Who would do such a thing? That’s really pretty easy if the men who were so involved in the assassination felt that it was less dangerous for them to murder Hoover than let Hoover conduct a real investigation of JFK’s murder.

This memo then strongly suggests that George Bush was such a man. It suggests that he was so covered in Kennedy’s blood that murdering Hoover in his own office was an acceptable risk; in any case this memo recalls George Bush’s role as a key player in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy, serving at a high level to protect the misguided anti Castro Cuban president killers from the FBI”

Hate to tell you John, but the memo is not to the Director of the CIA. Its to the Director of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. And I don’t beleive for a second that Bush did what you are suggesting he did, or for the reasons you are describing. In fact, I don’t believe anyone did what you are describing here. Hankey then asks “Are you enjoying this, it’s pretty ugly stuff”. John, I’m not enjoying it at all. But the reason is not what you think it is. What is ugly about this fiasco is the mind of a man who really doesn’t care if he is basing his documentary on fact or fiction. And doesn’t care how outrageous the things he depicts are. Hankey feels he doesn’t need any facts or evidence to a.) Show that Bush was a prime player in the Kennedy murder, or that b.) Bush threatened to kill Hoover unless he wrote the memorandum.

John, please listen to this: You do have to have real evidence before you say wild stuff like that. You really do. If you don’t then its not research. Its a Hollywood screenwriting class in how to compose lurid melodrama. And to somehow make Hoover a cringing victim of someone as low on the pecking order as Bush was at the time, well this shows just how ignorant of the power structure Hankey is. Do I need to add that, at the every end, Hankey tries to insinuate that George Bush Jr. was in on the murder of John Kennedy Jr.? Go ahead, look for yourself. If you dare.

In JFK 2, Hankey makes a rather large song and dance about nefarious notes and memos mentioning George Bush. In fact, he builds a 90 minute pseudo-documentary largely around one FBI memo. Which he then stretches beyond all normal meaning.

Yet, the Assassination Records Review Board declassified 2 million pages of documents after Oliver Stone’s film came out. Of which this film uses none. Why not? Its easy to figure out. Was Bush at Bethesda during Kennedy’s autopsy? Was he in contact with Clay Shaw, or David Ferrie or Guy Banister when Oswald was in New Orleans? Do any cables go to Bush, or have his name on them, before, during and after Oswald’s crucial Mexico City trip? Did Bush have any contact with the Warren Commission during its inquiry into Kennedy’s death? Did Bush have any association with Ruth and Michael Paine in 1963 or 1964? Did Bush have any influence in ratcheting up the Vietnam War in 1964 or 1965? Did Bush influence Johnson to stop Kennedy’s attempt to warm relations with Castro after Kennedy’s assassination? Nope to all these.

In 1963, Bush was a businessman living in Houston, running Zapata Offshore. He was the chairman of the Harris County Republican Organization, supporting Barry Goldwater and preparing for a 1964 run for the Senate against Democrat Ralph Yarborough. The idea that someone like that would be part of a high-level plot to kill President Kennedy, and would threaten to kill Hoover so he would then pen a memo concealing his non-involvement in the assassination, this is all nonsense. And you can dress that concoction up with references to Averell Harriman, you can inflate Bush’s father into the puppetmaster of Allen Dulles, you can falsely declare that Bush pulled Howard Hunt into the White House, or that he got John Connally his job as part of the Kennedy cover up, or that Skull and Bones was really behind it all etc etc etc. As they say a pig is a pig – even if you dress it up with mascara and rouge, and place earrings in the pig’s ears.

What the Hoover memo shows is that Bush was some kind of CIA asset in 1963. And that through his business dealings he was associated with some Cuban exiles. Just as many, many wealthy Repubicans were at that time e.g. Clare Booth Luce (the DRE), William Pawley (Eddie Bayo), and even some wealthy Democrats were, e.g. George Smathers (Eladio del Valle). When Bush said, upon becoming CIA Director for a year, that the had no previous association with the Agency, this was not true. In other words, he lied. Yawn.

This is a shoddy production that cannot stand up to scrutiny and therefore gives the JFK research community a black eye. Pity the country that has to choose between stuff like this and Gary Mack’s Inside the Target Car and The Ruby Connection. Because it is hard to say which is the worst. But besides that, there are three other things that are objectionable about it. First, by impasting George Bush on the JFK case by the same kind of Machiavellian means that Robert Blakey impasted the Mafia, it distorts the actual circumstances of the crime. I mean just think of what Hankey is saying here: George Bush, John Connally, Howard Hunt, Richard Nixon, Averil Harriman, and the Rockefellers, along with Allen Dulles, killed Kenendy. Talk about a diversion away from the facts. Second, this sensationalist approach deflects away from the true crimes committed by George Bush and his sons. Which are both plentiful and horrid. I mean how about stealing the 2000 election from Al Gore? That’s not big enough for Hankey and Russ Baker? Third, and this is something Hankey has tried to do, it somehow implies that the same people behind the JFK murder, were behind the 9/11 attacks. If you think I’m kidding, read this. Which is, again, preposterous.

But I will admit one thing. It is a lot more sexy, timely and high profile to follow Howard Hunt from Nixon to Bush than it is to follow him from Phillips to Helms. So if you are Alex Jones, making big bucks selling books and videos, then Hankey and others who have sprung up in the wake of 9/11 are more in tune with your marketing angle than say John Newman, Gaeton Fonzi, Lisa Pease and Jim Di Eugenio are.

There is nothing wrong with writing revisionist history. But if you choose to do so, you must be held to high standards of scholarship. Because if you are not, the tendency is to fall into an abyss of baseless thrill-seeking. Which is what happened here. And as long as the likes of John Hankey are floating around-and with demagogues like Alex Jones to market him to an unsuspecting public – legitimate concerns about legitimate conspiracies, like the Kennedy assassination and others, can be swept under the carpet and marginalized by enemies of the truth.

Knowingly or not, this is the function that John Hankey serves.

Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

“Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 1

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 2

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 3

Master Class with John Hankey, Part 4