by Kevin Fagin, At: SFGate
Tag: JFK ASSASSINATION
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The JFK Assassination: Evidence for a Conspiracy
by Chuck Marler, At: YouTube
The JFK Assassination: Evidence for a ConspiracyChuck Marler -
More on the Congo from Susan Williams
Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II, by Susan Williams
Reviewed by Dan Alcorn, At: AARC
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JFK and the Unforgivable: How the historians’ version of the JFK assassination dishonors the historical record – Addendum
The JFK Assassination According to the History Textbooks
From: Paul Bleau
Sent: Wednesday, August 3, 2016 7:57 PM
To: ltownsend@historians.org
Subject: ComplaintHello,
A few years ago I completed a study on how history books cover the JFK assassination and how the authors justified their writings. Overwhelmingly the authors portray it as a crime committed by a lone nut who was killed 2 days later by another loner. The Warren Commission is the key source (as well as a few authors who back the lone nut scenario). The other subsequent investigations as well as work done by independent researchers who back conspiracy scenarios are not on the radar. The result is that young students who are part of a captive audience are being given an incomplete, biased account of this historical event.
I believe that on this issue, historians are violating their code of conduct by not honoring the historical record. Two articles about this issue are published on the following website: http://www.ctka.net/2016/PaulBleau1.html and http://www.ctka.net/2016/bleau-historians/historians-and-the-jfk-assassination-part-1.html.
Interviews were also given on BlackOp radio: http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2016.html.
I am hoping that the AHA can look into this situation and encourage its members to reconsider how to present this information to students in a more balanced and up to date manner.
Thank you, Paul Bleau College Professor
Return to Part 2
Return to Part 1
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JFK and the Unforgivable: How the historians’ version of the JFK assassination dishonors the historical record – Part 2
United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)
Established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, the HSCA issued its final report in 1979. It found that there was a “probable conspiracy” in the JFK case.
The following is a summary of their findings (source: National Archives):
Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Tex., November 22, 1963:
- Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President John F. Kennedy. The second and third shots he fired struck the President. The third shot he fired killed the President.
- President Kennedy was struck by two rifle shots fired from behind him.
- The shots that struck President Kennedy from behind him were fired from the sixth floor window of the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository building.
- Lee Harvey Oswald owned the rifle that was used to fire the shots from the sixth floor window of the southeast comer of the Texas School Book Depository building.
- Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the assassination, had access to and was present on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
- Lee Harvey Oswald’s other actions tend to support the conclusion that he assassinated President Kennedy.
- Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.
- The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.
- The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
- The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
- The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
- The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
- The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
- Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of their duties. President John F. Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.
- The Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties.
- The Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed, investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the President’s trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President from a sniper.
- The responsibility of the Secret Service to investigate the assassination was terminated when the Federal Bureau of Investigation assumed primary investigative responsibility.
- The Department of Justice failed to exercise initiative in supervising and directing the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the assassination.
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of its duties.
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation adequately investigated Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination and properly evaluated the evidence it possessed to assess his potential to endanger the public safety in a national emergency.
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a thorough and professional investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination.
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation was deficient in its sharing of information with other agencies and departments.
- The Central Intelligence Agency was deficient in its collection and sharing of information both prior to and subsequent to the assassination.
- The Warren Commission performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of its duties.
- The Warren Commission conducted a thorough and professional investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination.
- The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. This deficiency was attributable in part to the failure of the Commission to receive all the relevant information that was in the possession of other agencies and departments of the Government.
- The Warren Commission arrived at its conclusions, based on the evidence available to it, in good faith.
- The Warren Commission presented the conclusions in its report in a fashion that was too definitive.
The committee had other troubling conclusions: Neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor Jack Ruby were the loners depicted by the Warren Commission, and were involved in relationships that could have matured into a conspiracy; Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to David Ferrie and Guy Banister- two conspirators according to Jim Garrison; Jack Ruby was in fact connected to the Mafia (an issue sidestepped by the Warren Commission); Marina Oswald’s incriminating statements against her husband were found to be lacking in credibility; they were inclined to believe Sylvia Odio who asserted that she was visited before the assassination by two Cuban exiles and a Leon Oswald in an attempt to portray Oswald as unbalanced and hostile to JFK. Her testimony was rejected by the Warren Commission even though she had related the event before the assassination; The Lopez Report established that someone was impersonating Oswald seven weeks before the assassination in Mexico City in an attempt to get a visa to travel to Cuba and that the CIA had tampered with the electronic evidence.
While the HSCA asked the Justice Department to re-investigate the case- it chose to only look at the acoustical evidence, which it rejected based on science that itself is also contested.
For those who have used this final point to argue that the Warren Commission got it right and discard all the other incriminating findings- It will prove useful to read what the key members of the Committee had to say:
Gaeton Fonzi – Church and HSCA investigator
Gaeton Fonzi was interviewed a number of times after the investigations. The information he brought forward in his 1993 book, The Last Investigation was considered credible and explosive. Fonzi described an exchange he had with Arlen Specter (the Warren Commission’s principal proponent of the Single Bullet theory) where he described him as being unnerved when discussing the Commission’s evidence. He also revealed how Cuban exile group Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana exposed his CIA handler Maurice Bishop (a cover name for top ranking CIA officer David Atlee Phillips) who he witnessed meeting with Oswald. He discussed how close contacts of CIA officer David Sanchez Morales heard him admit a conspiracy in the assassination. He described how the HSCA was stonewalled by the CIA. He also complained about second Commission head Robert Blakey’s submissive relationship with the CIA.
Gaeton Fonzi(mid-1970s) In a speech in 1998 while receiving the Mary Ferrell JFK Lancer Pioneer Award he had this to say about the Warren Commission: Is there any doubt that the Warren Commission deliberately set out not to tell the American people the truth?
There is a brief glimpse, an illustration of the level at which that deceit was carried out, in an incident that occurred during the Warren Commission’s investigation. Commission chairman Earl Warren himself, with then Representative Gerald Ford at his side, was interviewing a barman, Curtis LaVerne Crafard. Crafard had worked at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. But he was seized by the FBI as he was hightailing it out of town the day after the assassination, having told someone, “They are not going to pin this on me!”
In the interview, Warren asks Crafard what he did before he was a bartender.
“I was a Master sniper in the Marine Corps,” Crafard answered.
The next question that Warren immediately asked was: “What kind of entertainment did they have at the club?”
In a 1999 interview he gave to Michael Corbin, Fonzi contradicted Robert Blakey by stating that the HSCA investigation also lacked thoroughness. He also wonders out loud whether the “…the Government itself or a power elite within the government was a controlling element here”.
He opined that the failed Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis followed by the cessation of secret anti-Castro operations were probably a guiding motivation for operatives linked to the JM Wave CIA station in Miami to remove the President and which end up dovetailing with Oswald’s movements in 1963.
He makes the claim that Oswald was an agent of the intelligence establishment who was coded as a leftist. He was not a lone nut. He believes that he was also a patsy who did not fire a shot and that Dealey Plaza became a shooting gallery on November 22nd 1963.
He describes also how David Phillips was not only seen with Oswald by Antonio Veciana, but how a lot of the cover-up and misinformation campaigns about Oswald were linked to him.
He concludes the interview by stating :“there is no doubt that it was a coup d’état”!
Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez – HSCA “staffers”
(authors of appendix 13 of the HSCA Report, “Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City”, also known as the Lopez Report)
History Matters provides an excellent introduction about this report only released in 1996:
The “thirteenth appendix” to the HSCA Report on the JFK assassination is a staff report entitled “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City.” This report describes what the Committee learned about Lee Oswald’s trip to Mexico City less than two months prior to the assassination. Questions it grapples with include why the CIA was apparently unable to obtain a photo of Oswald from any of its photographic surveillance stations (and instead produced a photo of a “Mystery Man” who was clearly not Oswald), whether Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, and what credibility to attach to any of the indications and allegations of Communist conspiracy emanating from that city.
The so-called “Lopez Report,” written by staffers Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez, was released in its present form in 1996, but remains redacted in several places. It is a good starting place for grappling with some of the many mysteries of the Mexico City affair. Newly released files have provided new information not present in this report. The LBJ taped phone conversations for instance, include startling corroboration for the claim that audio intercepts of an Oswald impersonator were listened to by FBI agents in Dallas while Oswald was in custody. Declassified testimony of David Phillips, the Tarasoff couple who translated the tapes for the CIA, and others illuminate some areas and deepen the mystery in others.
The “Lopez Report” is a good point of departure for a journey into this mysterious affair.
Dan Hardway In 2014, for an ARRC conference, both Hardway and Lopez talked about their experience on the HSCA and the report. A lot of focus was put on how they had been making progress in the HSCA investigation until the CIA placed George Joannides as their resource person in charge of supervising the CIA’s interaction with the HSCA. Despite claims that Joannides was impartial, it was confirmed that he was directly involved with the Cuban exile organization called the DRE in 1963. Oswald had direct interaction with the DRE in events that became very public and were used to paint him as a communist. Hardway concludes his speech with:
“The CIA has something to hide; Joannides knew what they had to hide. The CIA knew he knew and knew we did not know who or what he was hiding; Joannides hid what he had to hide.”
Edwin Lopez Edwin Lopez confirmed the stonewalling and gave examples on how they were being spied on. He referred to the continued holding back of documents as a mess we all needed to work on together.
They also confirmed that they felt that there were either fake phone calls done by an Oswald impostor while he was allegedly in Mexico or at least faked transcripts.
Hardway hypothesizes that because of compartmentalization Phillips and Oswald may have found out on November 22, 1963 that Oswald was a patsy and Phillips received orders to tie the murder to Castro.
In a critique of Phil Shenon’s work written for the AARC in 2015, Dan Hardway expresses the opinion that the CIA is heading to what he calls a limited hang-out by admitting that Oswald may have received guidance from Cuba and that the CIA director at the time, John McCone, was involved in a benign cover-up.
In an interview he gave to Black Op Radio that same year, he recommended The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, a book which exposes incriminating information about Alan Dulles and William Harvey, who can be seen now as persons of high interest in the case.
In 2015, for a civil action where plaintiff Jefferson Morley, was suing the CIA for access to information, Dan Hardway signed a Sworn Deposition that underscores CIA obfuscation techniques as well as some of his findings during the investigation. The following are some of his statements:
Beginning in May of 1978, the CIA assigned George Joannides to handle liaison with Edwin Lopez and me. In the summer of 1978, Mr. Joannides began to change the way file access was handled. We no longer received prompt responses to our requests for files and what we did receive no longer seemed to provide the same complete files that we had been seeing. The obstruction of our efforts by Mr. Joannides escalated over the summer, finally resulting in a refusal to provide unexpurgated access to files in violation of the Memorandum of Understanding previously agreed to by the HSCA and the CIA;
During the course of the spring and summer of 1978 I had been looking into several areas of research which were actively impeded under Mr. Joannides’s direction. These included back channel communications methods used by the CIA’s Mexico City Station, William Harvey’s Office of Security files and his continuing relationship with certain Mafia figures, the use of an impulse camera to photograph the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, missing production from one of the photographic installations that covered the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City as well as the impulse camera at the Cuban Consulate, and David Atlee Phillips’ possible involvement in stories about LHO that appeared after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Before our unexpurgated access was cut off by Joannides, I had been able to document links between David Phillips and most of the sources of the disinformation that came out immediately after the assassination about Oswald and his pro-Castro proclivities. I confronted Phillips with those in an interview at our offices on August 24, 1978. Phillips was extremely agitated by that line of questioning, but was forced to admit that many of the sources were not only former assets that he had managed, in the late 50’s and early 1960’s, but were also assets whom he was personally managing in the fall of 1963. Mr. Phillips was asked, but could not explain, why the information that came from anti-Castro Cuban groups and individuals pointing to Cuban connections, all seemed to come from assets that he handled personally, but acknowledged that that was the case.
We have, since 1978, learned that George Joannides was running the propaganda shop at the CIA’s Miami JMWAVE Station in 1963. It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Joannides could have occupied that position and not have known, and worked with, David Atlee Phillips. In addition, in 1963, we now know, George Joannides was the case officer handling the DRE. In 1977 the CIA specifically denied that DRE had a case officer assigned when asked that question by the HSCA.
Robert Tanenbaum – Chief Counsel HSCA
In a Probe Magazine interview in 1993, Tanenbaum explained why he and Richard Sprague resigned from the Commission:
Q: I interviewed a friend of yours down in New Orleans, L.J. Delsa. He said that he felt that one of the reasons the Congress turned against the Committee was, because of Sprague’s approach. It could have set a precedent in Washington to have really serious investigations instead of fact-finding commissions. Did you get any feeling about that?
A: In my opinion, Congress never wanted to go forward with these investigations at all. That’s just based upon my having spoken with a lot of the membership of the House as I was asked to do by the Committee, in order to get funding. That’s something I never thought would be an issue before I went down there. They sort of politicized into it with some very distinguished members of Congress who were retiring in 1976, requesting that the Kennedy portion be investigated because they had seen Groden’s presentation of the Zapruder film and were very persuaded by it. Then the Black Caucus got involved and said well, investigate the murder of Dr. King. It was an election year and they said, “Ok, why not? We’ll do that.” But there was no commitment to really do it, unfortunately, which regrettably we found out while we were in the midst of investigating the case. They pulled our budget, they pulled our long-distance phone privileges, our franking privileges, we couldn’t even send out mail. And all of this was happening at a time when we were making some significant headway. So, L. J. may be right with respect to his perception, but at the same time I don’t believe they were ever committed to it. Tip O’Neill, who was the Speaker, was never committed to it. Only many, many years later did he realize that he’d made a tragic mistake.
He also reveals troubling information about David Atlee Phillips:
JD: Another thing you’ve discussed and it’s featured in your book, is this incredible movie of the Cuban exile training camp.
BT: To the best of my recollection, we found that movie somewhere in the Georgetown library archives. The movie was shocking to me because it demonstrated the notion that the CIA was training, in America, a separate army. It was shocking to me because I’m a true believer in the system and yet there are notorious characters in the system, who are being funded by the system, who are absolutely un-American. And who knows what they would do, eventually. What if we send people to Washington who they can’t deal with? Out comes their secret army? So, I find that to be as contrary to the constitution as you can get.
JD: Was it really as you described in the book, with all the people in that film? Bishop was in the film?
BT: Oh, yeah. Absolutely! They’re all in the film. They’re all there. But, the fact of the matter is the Committee began to balk at a series of events. The most significant one was when [David Atlee] Phillips came up before the Committee and then had to be recalled because it was clear that he hadn’t told the truth. That had to do with the phony commentary he made about Oswald going to Mexico City on or about October 1st, 1963.
JD: Would you describe that whole sequence, because I feel that is one of the real highlights of your book.
Robert Tanenbaum BT: As I said, I had never followed the sequence of these events and I wasn’t aware of any of this, before I went to Washington. If you had told me all this before I went, I would have said, “This is madness. Talk to me about reality!” So, Phillips was saying that an individual went to Mexico City on or about October 1st and the CIA was claiming this was Lee Harvey Oswald, just as the Warren Commission claimed. However, the following occurred: “Oswald” goes to the Russian Embassy and identifies himself as Lee Henry Oswald. He wants to fake everybody out by changing his middle name. There were tapes of what he said because the CIA was bugging the Embassy the same as they were doing to the U.S. Embassy, according to Phillips. And the CIA was photographing people going in and out of the Embassy, the same as they were doing to the U.S. (We found out, from our own sources that the CIA had a contract employee named Lee Henry Oswald, in their files.) Phillips testimony was that there was no photograph of “Oswald” because the camera equipment had broken down that day and there was no audio tape of “Oswald’s” voice because they recycled their tapes every six or seven days. The problem with his story was, we had obtained a document, it was from the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, it was dated November 23rd, 1963, the very next day after the assassination. This document was a memo to all FBI supervisorial staff stating, in substance, that FBI agents who have questioned Oswald for the past 17 hours approximately, have listened to the tape made on October 1st, by an individual identifying himself as Lee Henry Oswald inside the Russian Embassy, calling on the phone to someone inside the Cuban Embassy and the agents can state unequivocally that the voice on the tape is not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is in custody.
JD: Did you have this document while you were questioning Phillips?
BT: No. It was a whole separate sequence of events that occurred. But, I wanted to get him back before the Committee so we could confront him with this evidence, because we were in a position to demonstrate that that whole aspect of the Warren Report, and what he had testified to, was untrue. And of course, the Committee was not interested in doing that.
Tanenbaum also vindicated Garrison, incriminated Clay Shaw and shared thoughts about leads that were not followed up on:
JD: You’ve said that you’ve actually seen a CIA document that says they were monitoring and harassing Jim Garrison’s witnesses.
BT: Right. We had that information. I was shocked to read that because I remember discounting everything Garrison had said. I had a negative point of view about Garrison based upon all the reportage that had gone on. And then I read all this material that had come out of Helm’s office, that in fact what Garrison had said was true. They were harassing his witnesses, they were intimidating his witnesses. The documents exist. Where they are now, God only knows. It’s a sad commentary on the lack of oversight on the executive intelligence agencies.
JD: I read something about you to the effect that during the brief period you ran the Committee, after Sprague left, one of the areas that really interested you was New Orleans and its connection to JM/Wave and Miami. Also, Delsa told me, as far as he was concerned, that was one of the most productive areas they were working.
BT: That’s correct. The meeting in Clinton and the Clay Shaw connection and the fact that the government was lying about Clay Shaw and the aliases and so on. That the fact that the government and the executive intelligence agencies, not Garrison, were lying about that, was definitely an area to probe to find out what the justification for that was. Why were they involved in all this, if in fact, nothing had occurred? If it was meaningless, why get involved in creating a perjurious situation for a prosecutor in New Orleans? What was he really on to?
JD: What’s interesting about the day that Sprague resigns, is that’s the day De Mohrenschildt is found dead.
BT: Right. The night before the Committee vote, we had sent an investigator to serve him a subpoena. The night of the day he received the subpoena from the Committee is when he was found dead.
JD: I guess the Committee was so crippled at that time that it couldn’t really pursue whatever investigation there may have been into his murder. And he was a key witness, right?
BT: Right. We desperately wanted to find out what happened. He was someone who had not been subpoenaed before, certainly not by the Warren Commission. [CTKA note: he was questioned, but not subpoenaed.] And you’re right, he was a key player.
JD: Another thing you guys were on to that Blakey never seemed to be on to, was the connection between the people in the background of the assassination and the scandal that had just happened in Washington – namely, Watergate.
BT: Right. E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis. Interestingly, some of them had been with Castro in the Sierra Maestra during the revolution and became players after the revolution. And then wound up in the Nixon White House as the “plumbers.”
JD: You’ve stated that the Committee never got any cooperation from the Kennedys.
BT: We called Senator Kennedy 20-30 times. He never responded once to an inquiry. I found that to be astounding, because after all, he is a member of this legislative branch of government. He conducts probes, he engages in fact-finding missions. How could he stonewall from his brethren in the other chamber? He could have just simply acknowledged a phone call. How could he know what information we wanted? The fact of the matter was, as a matter of courtesy, we wanted to let him know we knew he was around and we wanted to discuss with him areas that he felt we should look into and get his opinions. We certainly felt that they would be valid. So, we were very disappointed in that regard. Frank Mankiewicz came by as a representative of the Kennedy family, wanted to see whether or not Sprague and I had two or three heads. He told us, interestingly, Bobby Kennedy couldn’t put a sentence together about the assassination, he couldn’t even think about it, he couldn’t focus on it. Which explains, in large measure why the Kennedy family was willing to accept what the Warren Commission said, without concern. The event was so horrific, in and of itself, they really weren’t concerned with bringing someone to justice other than what the Warren Commission had said. In their minds, from what Mankiewicz said, if it wasn’t Oswald-some nonperson-then it was some other nonperson. What difference would it make?
JD: When the attacks on Sprague began, most notably in the New York Times and a few other newspapers, did you begin to see a parallel between what was happening to Sprague and what had happened to Jim Garrison?
BT: Of course. But, I didn’t pay much attention to it because it didn’t mean anything to me. I’m not moved to any great extent, by what people write in newspapers. They were trying to cause controversy. But, we were on a mission to do a job and nothing some dope in the New York Times or any other newspaper was going to write, that was blatantly untrue, was going to interfere with what we were doing. Whether it was a positive article or a negative article, it didn’t matter.
In 2003, Tanenbaum spoke at the Wecht Conference and what he had to say would certainly give students of American History new insights in the assassination that would not have pleased Earl Warren or Gerald Ford and some of their disciples.
Here are but a few of the points he made:
What I am saying is that from the evidence we produced, there were substantial questions about the assassination …
What I’d like to do very briefly is to explain some of the reasons why, from a prosecutorial point of view, from what our investigation revealed, there was, in my judgment, no case to convict Lee Harvey Oswald of murdering the President …
The assassination was approximately 12:30; at 12:48 a description of a suspect was sent out: “‘white male, approximately thirty, slender build, height five foot ten inches, weight 165 pounds.” Where did that description come from?
And the answer the Warren Commission gives is that this fellow Brennan was… looking up at the Depository window. And he allegedly sees this person – the shooter – Oswald the Warren Commission maintains, and was able to give a description, a miraculous feat … because if he stood up in the window you would only see a partial of his body [his knees] because the first few feet was opaque. [the window was close to the floor]
Whoever the shooter was that was in that window – in that Sniper’s Nest, he was crouched down looking out that window which was raised about 12 inches. At best, if anybody saw anybody in that window, they would have seen a partial of their face, at best.
During a 2015 interview on Len Osanic’s Black Op Radio, he talked about how the Warren Commission did not want look into a conspiracy, including Oswald’s links with intelligence and Ruby’s to the mob and the Dallas Police Department.
Richard Sprague – Chief Counsel
Historians can be illuminated by what this top level insider of impeccable credentials thought about the assassination and the ensuing cover-up from the many interviews he gave.
In the BBC Documentary The Killing of President Kennedy, Sprague related the following about Oswald:
His trip to Russia raised a number of questions that we wanted to get into. For example, when any American went to Russia and renounced his American citizenship and subsequently changed his mind and wanted to come back to this country, upon returning to this country there was a thorough debriefing by the CIA, with one exception as far as we could ascertain- Oswald…
The photographs allegedly of Oswald going into the Cuban embassy as we all know in fact are not photographs of Oswald. Secondly it turns out that those photographs, even if they were of the wrong person, you would expect they would be of a person entering the Cuban embassy but it turns out they are photographs of someone entering the Russian embassy and the question raised how could they so mix up even what building they are talking about. In addition when we inquire where are the photographs you took of the people entering the Cuban embassy the day in question we are told the cameras were not working that day. I want to talk to the camera people I want to find out if that’s true and that’s where we got stopped.
The CIA said they had re-used the tape prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, yet the FBI has a document stating that some of their agents listened to the tape after the assassination of President Kennedy and that the voice on there was not Oswald’s. In addition the CIA presented a transcript of that conversation; we had interviewed the typist who typed it up who said that the transcript presented was not in fact what was typed up by whoever it was who spoke in that conversation. These are areas that I wanted to get into.
From the photographic evidence surrounding the sixth floor window, as well as the grassy knoll, Sprague, Tanenbaum and most of the staff knew Oswald had not fired any shot, they suspected no shots came from the sixth floor “sniper’s nest” window, and knew there had been shots from other points in Dealey Plaza. They knew the single bullet theory was not valid, and strongly suspected there had been a pre-planned crossfire in Dealey Plaza. They were not planning to waste a lot of time reviewing and rehashing the Dealey Plaza evidence, except as it might lead to the real assassins.
They had set up an investigation in Florida and the Keys, of some of the evidence and leads developed in 1967 by Garrison. Gaeton Fonzi was in charge of that part of Sprague’s team. They were going to check out the people in the CIA that had been running and funding the No Name Key group and other anti-Castro groups, e.g., Willaim Seymour, Manuel Garcia Gonzalez, Jerry Patrick Hemming, Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard, and Rolando Masferrer and Carlos Prio Socarras.
This new situation, with Richard Sprague and his team garnering so much knowledge of the CIA’s role in the murder and the cover-up caused the Establishment to face a crisis. They knew they had to do several things to turn the situation around and keep the American public in the dark. Here is what they had to do:
- Get rid of Chief Counsel Richard Sprague.
- Get rid of Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez.
- Get rid of Sprague’s key men and keep them away from more incriminating CIA evidence.
- Install their own chief counsel to control the investigation.
- Nominate a new HSCA chairman who would go along, or who could be fooled.
- Limit Sprague’s investigations of CIA people. Make sure some of the people aren’t found or, if necessary dispose of CIA people who might talk.
- Create a new investigative environment whose purpose would be to confirm all of the findings of the Warren Commission and divert attention away from the who-did-it-and-why approach.
- Control the committee staff in such a way as to keep any of them separate from other teams and silent by signing non-disclosure agreements.
- Control the media by not holding any press conferences.
These things all happened. And they fundamentally altered the temperament and goals of the HSCA. It simply was not the same. As many observers think, this was the last, best chance to solve the JFK case.
How did it happen? According to Gaeton Fonzi in The Last Investigation:
Richard Sprague The key factors that drove Richard Sprague to resign as Chief Counsel of the Assassinations Committee appeared, at the time, to be apparent and on the surface. His proposed use of certain investigative equipment, his demand for an expensive, unrestricted investigation, his refusal to play politics with Chairman Gonzalez – all were apparent grounds for the vociferous criticism which, in the long run, was debilitating to the Committee’s efforts to get on with its job. However, after his resignation and a brief respite from the turmoil of Washington, Sprague was able to view his experience in a broader perspective.” … “If he had it to do over again, he would begin his investigation of the Kennedy assassination by probing “Oswald’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.” Recently, I asked Sprague why he had come to that conclusion. “Well,” he said, “when I first thought about it I decided that the House leadership really hadn’t intended for there to be an investigation. The Committee was set up to appease the Black Caucus in an election year. I still believe that was a factor. But when I looked back at what happened, it suddenly became very clear that the problems began only after I ran up against the CIA. That’s when my troubles really started.
In a 2000 interview for Probe Magazine with John Williams, he described his being fired this way:
SPRAGUE: We were just going to do that type of thorough thing. I demanded the records from the CIA, and now there was an abrupt refusal, and I subpoenaed them. At that point, Gonzales, who was Chairman of the Committee, ordered the CIA, or told the CIA that they need not respond to my subpoena, and fired me, and ordered the U.S. Marshals come in and remove me from my office.
WILLIAMS: Oh, so that firing was directly after you had subpoenaed the records from the Central Intelligence Agency.
SPRAGUE: Right. But there’s more involved in it than the timing …
WILLIAMS: Right.
SPRAGUE: … if you checked the record. That came up after that. He ordered my firing. He ordered marshals to remove me from my office in what I’m sure was the first and only time in the history of the United States Congress. The rest of the Committee, backed me to a man and overrode the Chairman, and ordered that I remain, and the marshals were directed to get off.
Of course, that led to Gonzales taking it up in the House of Representatives, and the House backed the rest of the Committee. And he resigned and Stokes came on. [Louis Stokes was the Representative from Ohio. Eds. Note] I’m sure that’s the only time in the history in the United States Congress that in a fight between the Chairman and the Director, that the Chairman got bounced.
But there’s a terrible price paid for that. Every Congressman dreams of being Chairman of a Committee and being all powerful. It ultimately did not sit well with the Congress that a Chairman got ousted …
Robert Blakey – Chief Counsel and staff director 1977-79
While Sprague’s replacement, Robert Blakey, frustrated some investigators for being too trusting of the CIA, he too did not buy the Warren Commission’s final conclusions.
While at first Blakey felt that the HSCA had investigated the CIA enough to absolve them of any role in the assassination, in 2003 in an addendum to an interview with PBS, his opinion evolved. Because he found out that the CIA misled him and the HSCA by bringing George Joannides out of retirement as the CIA liaison with the Committee and hiding the role he had with an anti-Castro group called the DRE which played an important role by its interaction with Oswald:
I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the Committee. My reasons follow:
The Committee focused, among other things, on (1) Oswald, (2) in New Orleans, (3) in the months before he went to Dallas, and, in particular, (4) his attempt to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil or DRE.
These were crucial issues in the Warren Commission’s investigation; they were crucial issues in the committee’s investigation. The Agency knew it full well in 1964; the Agency knew it full well in 1976-79. Outrageously, the Agency did not tell the Warren Commission or our committee that it had financial and other connections with the DRE, a group that Oswald had direct dealings with!
What contemporaneous reporting is or was in the Agency’s DRE files? We will never know, for the Agency now says that no reporting is in the existing files. Are we to believe that its files were silent in 1964 or during our investigation?
I don’t believe it for a minute. Money was involved; it had to be documented. Period. End of story. The files and the Agency agents connected to the DRE should have been made available to the Commission and the Committee. That the information in the files and the agents who could have supplemented it were not made available to the Commission and the Committee amounts to willful obstruction of justice.
Obviously, too, it did not identify the agent who was its contact with the DRE at the crucial time that Oswald was in contact with it: George Joannides.
During the relevant period, the Committee’s chief contact with the Agency on a day-to-day basis was Scott Breckinridge. (I put aside our point of contact with the office of chief counsel, Lyle Miller) We sent researchers to the Agency to request and read documents. The relationship between our young researchers, law students who came with me from Cornell, was anything but “happy.” Nevertheless, we were getting and reviewing documents. Breckinridge, however, suggested that he create a new point of contact person who might “facilitate” the process of obtaining and reviewing materials. He introduced me to Joannides, who, he said, he had arranged to bring out of retirement to help us. He told me that he had experience in finding documents; he thought he would be of help to us.
I was not told of Joannides’ background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.
That the Agency would put a “material witness” in as a “filter” between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.
The Committee’s researchers immediately complained to me that Joannides was, in fact, not facilitating, but obstructing our obtaining of documents. I contacted Breckinridge and Joannides. Their side of the story wrote off the complaints to the young age and attitude of the people.
They were certainly right about one question: the Committee’s researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency’s integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides.
For these reasons, I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald. Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understates the matter.
What the Agency did not give us, none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on one point, you may reject all of his testimony.
I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the Committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known.
Significantly, the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.
We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.
Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.
I am now in that camp.
Anyone interested in pursuing this story further should consult the reporting by Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post. See, e.g., Jefferson Morley, “Revelation 1963”, Miami New Times (April 2001).
Robert Blakey During his appearance for the AARC Conference in 2014, Blakey’s views seem to have crystallized by stating that at first he felt the CIA had cooperated but that he had come to change his mind. He also explained how he was sold the idea by the CIA of bringing in a facilitator in Joannides to help in the liaison between the CIA and the HSCA, and that that was when things went downhill. He also said that they were refused the DRE file and were told by Joannides that there was no case agent for the DRE, when in fact he was the case agent! It was also discovered subsequent to the HSCA hearings that Joannides was acting as an undercover agent in his dealings with the HSCA. He also said that FBI agent Regis Kennedy described Marcello as a tomato salesman who was not part of the mob.
During this presentation and on a 2015 Black Op Radio program he confirmed his belief in the single bullet theory, but also that a shot came from the grassy knoll due to witness testimony from several people who the Warren Commission made every effort to undermine. This includes Secret Service agents, S. M. Holland, and presidential assistant Dave Powers. He said this caused him to lose confidence in the Warren Commission report. He said that “It’s not an investigation … It’s a justification to assert that Oswald acted alone … They used the testimony of Lenny Patrick – a mob shooter – to exculpate Ruby from mob connections …” He concluded that the committees, including the ARRB, were had.
Comments on the HSCA
A diligent historian who prides himself in honoring the historical record should really take the time to digest the conclusions of the report and the statements of the high level insiders who are in the know… They do not buy the Warren Commission version of the assassination; they do not conclude that Oswald acted alone; they do not find that the murder was adequately investigated!
Liberty Lobby vs. E. Howard Hunt
Contrary to the other investigations which were governmental, this instance was a civil trial which pitted CIA operative and Watergate burglary planner E. Howard Hunt against Mark Lane. Lane came in because Spotlight was a publication which ran a piece in 1985 reporting that the CIA had a memo confirming its intention to out Hunt as having been involved in the JFK assassination, acting as something like a rogue agent. Hunt sued and won for slander but lost on appeal after Liberty Lobby hired Lane to represent them.
Spotlight wrote the following about its victory: “Scattered news reports did mention Hunt had lost a libel case against The SPOTLIGHT. However, no media reported what the jury forewoman had told the press: ‘Mr. Lane was asking us to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence closely, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy.’”
Mark Lane, who passed away in 2016, was among the earliest researchers who detailed problems about the Warren Commission, which he related in the best-seller Rush to Judgement. His books Plausible Denial and the Last Word cover the trial extensively.
Comments about the Liberty Lobby – Hunt trial
While many Warren Commission defenders have tried to discredit Mark Lane through the years, an open-minded historian should consider the jury members who were asked to play an important role in ensuring that justice was served. They took in and evaluated all the evidence. And have added themselves to the already overwhelming number of insiders who do not buy what is written in most history books, i.e., the Warren Commission version of events.
ARRB Assassination Records Review Board
This Board was created in 1994 after the movie JFK put pressure on Congress to pass the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. During a four-year period, it declassified millions of documents. Its mandate was different from the other investigations: The major purpose of the Review Board was to re-examine for release the records that the agencies still regarded as too sensitive to open to the public. In addition, Congress established the Review Board to help restore government credibility. To achieve these lofty goals, Congress designed an entity that was unprecedented.
It was not set up to re-investigate the case, nor to solve what happened on November 22, 1963. It nevertheless provided valuable information to assassination researchers that historians seem oblivious to. It achieved the following:
- Reviewed and voted on over 27,000 previously redacted assassination records.
- Obtained agencies’ consent to release an additional 33,000+ assassination records.
- Ensured that the famous Zapruder Film of the assassination belonged to the American people and arranged for the first known authenticity study of the Zapruder Film.
- Opened previously redacted CIA records from the Directorate of Operations.
- Released 99% of the “Hardway/Lopez Report” documenting the CIA’s records on Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City before the assassination.
- Conducted its own inquiry into the medical record of President Kennedy’s autopsy and his treatment at Parkland Hospital by deposing 10 Bethesda autopsy participants, five Parkland Hospital treating physicians, and conducting numerous unsworn interviews of Parkland and Bethesda personnel.
- Secured records relating to District Attorney Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, including Shaw’s diaries, records from Shaw’s defense attorneys, investigative records from the District Attorney’s office, and grand jury records.
- Made available to the public all FBI and CIA documents from previous official investigations, like the HSCA.
- Sponsored ballistics and forensic testing of Warren Commission Exhibit 567, the bullet “nose fragment” from the front seat of the Presidential limousine (the HSCA Firearms Panel first recommended the testing in 1978, but the testing was not conducted until the Review Board existed).
- Permanently preserved all the extant autopsy photographs of President Kennedy in digitized form, and conducted sophisticated digital enhancement of selected, representative images.
Jeremy Gunn – Executive counsel
On November 10, 2013 he made the following remarks for NPR:
“There were many things that were disturbing.”
J. Thornton Boswell (left)James J. Humes (center) Pierre Finck (right) When Gunn pored over the material, what stuck out most for him was the medical evidence. For instance, what he learned in his 1996 deposition of James Joseph Humes. Humes, who died three years later, was one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Kennedy’s body.
For one thing, Humes told Gunn that the autopsy was not performed strictly by the book; some procedures were left out, such as removing and weighing all the organs. Then, Humes made an eye-opening revelation.
“Dr. Humes admitted that the supposedly original handwritten version of the autopsy that is in the National Archives is in fact not the original version,” Gunn says. He says Humes had never said that publicly before, even to the Warren Commission.
Saundra K. Spencer When Gunn showed Saundra Spencer, the Navy Warrant Officer who processed the autopsy film, the official photos from the National Archives during her deposition in 1997, she said they were not the pictures she remembered processing. What’s more, the official pictures weren’t anything like the ones she remembered. “The prints that we printed did not have the massive head damages that is visible here,” she told Gunn. “… The face, the eyes were closed and the face, the mouth was closed, and it was more of a rest position than these show.”
“[I] can recite a litany of other unresolved questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination — ones the Warren Commission failed to answer. For example, in New Orleans in 1963, Oswald came in contact with the FBI. When he was arrested after a scuffle at a demonstration, he asked to meet with the FBI. Why would Oswald ask to see someone from the FBI?” Gunn asks. “But an FBI agent went and interviewed Oswald, came back and wrote a memo on it, put it in the file.”
Jeremy Gunn “For me, it’s quite simple,” Gunn says. “I don’t know what happened.”
“There is substantial evidence that points toward Oswald and incriminates Oswald,” he says, “and the only person we can name where there is evidence is Oswald. But there’s also rather important exculpatory evidence for Oswald, suggesting he didn’t do it, and that he was framed.”
“So they wanted to write the document in a way that would reassure the American public that it was a single gunman acting alone, somebody who’s a little bit unstable, and that that’s the explanation for what happened. Since the facts aren’t clear, though, that document can look like a whitewash.”
For the Warren Commission, transparency had its own difficulties. “There are serious problems with the forensics evidence, with the ballistics evidence, with the autopsy evidence,” Gunn says. “And, in my opinion, if they had said that openly, it would have not put the issue to rest.”
“If the president had been killed as part of a conspiracy, that needed to be known,” he says.
“The institution that had the opportunity to best get to the bottom of this, as much as it was possible, was the Warren Commission, and they didn’t do it,” he says. “Now it’s too late to do what should have been done originally.”
Doug Horne – Senior analyst
Doug Horne reviewed the military records including the military autopsy for the ARRB. What he found was revealed during interviews as well as the book he wrote, Inside the ARRB, published in 2009. Its contents are fascinating and would surprise students of American history who base their beliefs on many of the history textbooks.
Numerous persons the ARRB deposed or interviewed (FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill, mortician Tom Robinson, and others) have essentially disowned the autopsy photographs showing the back of JFK’s head intact. O’Neill said the photos of the back of the head looked “doctored” (by which he meant that he thought the wound had been repaired – put back together – not that the photo looked altered), and Sibert said the back of the head looked “reconstructed.” Tom Robinson of Gawler’s funeral home said there was a large hole in the back of the head where it looks intact in the photos. Pathologist J. Thornton Boswell said that there was a lot of bone missing in the right rear of the head behind where the scalp looks intact, but did not explain how the scalp could be intact if the bone in the right rear of the skull was missing! (See the ARRB deposition transcripts of Frank O’Neill, James Sibert, and J. Thornton Boswell, as well as the unsworn report of the ARRB interview with Tom Robinson.)
Doug Horne But perhaps Horne’s most stunning conclusion was that the photographs of “the President’s brain” in the autopsy collection are really photographs of someone else’s brain … a major deception in this case. These images, which appear to show damage consistent with a shot from above and behind, were disowned under oath to the ARRB by John Stringer, the photographer who took the official brain photos at JFK’s supplementary autopsy. He disowned the images because of the angles at which they were shot, and because they were taken on the wrong film – film he did not use. (FBI agent O’Neill also disowned the brain photos in the autopsy collection, saying that there was too much tissue present, and that at autopsy over one half of the President’s brain was missing.) These photos have been used for years by supporters of the Warren Commission’s conclusions to support their shooting scenario, and to discount those who claim there were shots from the front or right front.
General conclusions
Most historians who talked about their sources when writing about the JFK assassination were not aware of the ARRB and the wealth of new evidence made available starting a year after Gerald Posner wrote Case Closed. As a matter of fact, not one cited any of the official investigations as a source other than the Warren Commission. Which, of course, is the oldest, most contested, highly rushed, poorly investigated, biased governmental source possible.
That assessment does not come from independent authors who are trying to sell books. It comes from written reports of subsequent investigations and the statements of a very significant cross-section of insiders that participated in the investigations including the Warren Commission: Senators (some Republicans, some Democrats), counsel, staff members, attorneys, researchers, historians, archivists, investigators, FBI, DPD and Louisiana State law enforcement agents. As well as from the highest ranking members of the HSCA and Church committees. As well as an impressive number of dissenting participants of the Warren Commission itself, who have voiced their opinions in reputable magazines, newspapers, documentaries and books, all easily accessible on the web. We are not talking about zany, fringe, book peddling conspiracy theorists here. These are persons that witnessed the autopsy, questioned persons of interest under oath while looking them in the eye, poured over reports and secret documents, worked in teams to analyze the evidence, etc. – people who the U.S. government entrusted to investigate the crime of the century and who curious historians may learn from.
While they may not all know what in fact happened, they all agree on certain key points: The Warren Commission conclusions are not reliable; the investigations into the assassination were deficient (especially the Warren Commission’s); they are far from certain that Oswald and Ruby acted alone. Many of them believe that: government agencies hid the truth; the Single Bullet Theory is a fabrication; that there has been a long-lasting cover-up; that Oswald and Ruby were involved in very suspicious relationships, and the list goes on and on. All diametrically opposed to what historians, for money, are telling adolescents as part of a captive audience! Which is that Oswald did it and the Warren Commission got it right! End of story!
The American Historical Association statement of conduct stipulates that historians are to honor the historical record.. To do so they first need to know what it is! If the next edition of their history books continues to support the cover-up, their behavior should be considered nothing less than unforgivable.
Go to Addendum
Go to Part 1
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JFK and the Unforgivable: How the historians’ version of the JFK assassination dishonors the historical record – Part 1
In April 2016 CTKA published this author’s article[i] that revealed how history books portray the JFK assassination as a crime perpetrated by Oswald alone and how authors’ sources are restricted to the Warren Commission and a few books that mostly support the Lone Nut scenario. Information and conclusions coming from other major investigations and pro-conspiracy authors are almost completely ignored.
The article went on to show how the historians violate their own code of conduct on this issue and looked into possible outside influences that may have affected their work and mindsets. The unfortunate result of the lack of diligence on this issue is that captive audiences of young students have been unfairly exposed to a biased, unsound and incomplete account of the Kennedy assassination in most history textbooks.
Another point that came out was that many historians find that independent researchers that write about possible conspiracies lack credibility. There has been much propaganda to discredit them and their work. They are called zany, dishonest, and greedy and their claims are said to be baseless and off the wall. Furthermore they are accused of undermining their own institutions, government and country. Before a serious historian can zero in on whom the reliable researchers are and focus on the soundness of their arguments, they have to cut through clutter caused by hostile, omnipresent anti-conspiracy messaging as well as the cast of shaky researchers peddling low quality work.
This article focuses on what interested historians can easily learn from the official investigations and the opinions and statements from the actual investigators, lawyers, and staff members who were involved in six investigations that were mostly (all but one) government initiated and managed. The Warren Commission was the first one, the one most historians count on almost entirely for their writings, and as we will see, it is the most obsolete and least reliable.
For an historian who finds research on this issue very daunting, this should serve as a starting point – especially for those who, as they did with the Warren Commission Report, have faith in their government institutions and their representatives. What follows is what can be learned from not only the official investigation reports but from the mouths of those who were direct participants in them … the real insiders: Those who were mandated and given special powers to access witnesses and evidence! It therefore discounts the theories and opinions of independent authors.
It may prove difficult to fluff off these sources as being zany, dishonest and greedy … Doing so would suggest a far-fetched governmental conspiracy to deceive its own people and undermine important American institutions.
It is this author’s opinion that historians are disrespecting the American Historical Association statement of conduct about honoring the historical record when they assert that Oswald alone assassinated the president based on the conclusions of the Warren Commission. If they read this article and continue to do so, their actions cannot be blamed on mere ignorance of the facts, or confusion caused by obfuscators. Thereafter, if the historian does not feel compelled to dig deeper to find out what really happened, then the word unforgivable should be added to the word subservient – at least on this issue – when describing their performance. Especially when one considers the age of the subjects who are victimized in what is supposed to be a learning environment.
If they continue to cite the Warren Commission as their key source, they may want to consider taking up smoking cigarettes; after all some of the first studies about this product concluded that it was good for your health.
The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (aka The Warren Commission)
Established on November 29, 1963, it was set up by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The Commission presented an 888-page report[ii] and twenty-six volumes of evidence on September 24, 1964. Its major conclusions were that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK and that nightclub owner Jack Ruby also acted alone in killing Oswald two days later.
The Commission had “not found evidence” linking either Oswald or Ruby to a conspiracy. (WR, p. 21)
The first hint of dissension among the members of the commission is the following bewildering statement in the report which points to a rift concerning the Single Bullet theory and Connally’s testimony: “Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds. However, Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and the Governor’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.” (WR, Page 19)
What is not being said directly here is that certain members of the Commission, as well as John Connally and his wife, did not believe that a single bullet caused all seven wounds, which is in fact necessary to the essential conclusions. Because if one bullet caused Kennedy’s head wound and another caused bystander James Tague’s injury, then for Oswald to be the lone shooter, he would have had to have caused all remaining seven wounds with his only other shot, because even the Warren Commission acknowledges that Oswald could not have fired more than three shots.
Statements and opinions of Warren Commission members, consultants and investigators
While most historians continue to place their faith in the Warren Commission, it is most noteworthy that an important number of important participants in the investigation had serious doubts about crucial elements in the report.
Roger Craig – Dallas Deputy Sheriff
Roger Craig was very well regarded up until the assassination. He was on duty and in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. In a number of interviews he explains what he witnessed on November 22, 1963: He was in the Book Depository when the alleged murder weapon was found which he confirmed as a Mauser and not the Mannlicher-Carcano that the Warren Commission claimed Oswald owned. (Contrary to what some have written, the brand name Mauser and the calibre are stamped on some editions of the Mauser rifle; see here The Mauser, the Carcano and the Lt. Day Rifle ) Furthermore Craig claimed to have seen Oswald entering a station wagon a few minutes after the assassination, which would contradict the Warren Commission’s chronology of Oswald’s movements and implicated a getaway driver – the following is part of his Warren Commission testimony:
Roger Craig: I drove up to Fritz’ office about, oh, after 5 … about 5:30 or something like that and talked to Captain Fritz and told him what I had saw. And he took me in his office … I believe it was his office … . it was a little office, and had the suspect sitting in a chair behind a desk … beside the desk. And another gentleman, I didn’t know him, he was sitting in another chair to my left as I walked in the office. And Captain Fritz asked me “was this the man I saw” and I said, “Yes,” it was.
David Belin: All right. Will you describe the man you saw in Captain Fritz’ office?
Roger Craig: Oh, he was sitting down but he had the same medium brown hair; it was still … well, it was kinda wild looking; he was slender, and what I could tell of him sitting there, he was … short. By that, I mean not myself, I’m five eleven … he was shorter than I was. And fairly light build.
David Belin: Could you see his trousers?
Roger Craig: No; I couldn’t see his trousers at all.
David Belin: What about his shirt?
Roger Craig: I believe, as close as I can remember, a T-shirt … a white T-shirt.
David Belin: All right. But you didn’t see him in a lineup? You just saw him sitting there?
Roger Craig: No; he was sitting there by himself in a chair … off to one side.
David Belin: All right. Then, what did Captain Fritz say and what did you say and what did the suspect say?
Roger Craig: Captain Fritz then asked … . “What about this station wagon?” And the suspect interrupted him and said, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine” … I believe is what he said. “Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”
In Craig’s 1971 book When They Kill a President, he describes that many in the DPD despised Kennedy, and how the DPD was excluded from security duties the day of the assassination. The following is David Ratcliffe’s summary of the Book:
… He was a member of a group of men from Dallas County Sheriff James Eric “Bill” Decker‘s office that was directed to stand out in front of the Sheriff‘s office on Main Street (at the corner of Houston) and “take no part whatsoever in the security of that motorcade.” Once he heard the first shot, Roger Craig immediately bolted towards Houston Street. His participation in the formative hours of the investigation during the rest of that day and into the evening included observations and experiences that would have singlehandedly destroyed the entire Warren Commission fairy tale before a grand jury or a Congressional investigation.
Roger Craig was named the Dallas Sheriff‘s Department “Officer of the Year” in 1960 by the Dallas Traffic Commission. He received four promotions while he was Deputy Sheriff. Among the most important events he witnessed: At approximately 12:40 p.m., Craig was standing on the south side of Elm Street when he heard a shrill whistle coming from the north side of Elm and turned to see a man—wearing faded blue trousers and a long sleeved work shirt made of some type of grainy material—come running down the grassy knoll from the direction of the TSBD. He saw a light green Rambler station wagon coming slowly west on Elm Street, pull over to the north curb and pick up the man coming down the hill. By this time the traffic was too heavy for him to be able to reach them before the car drove away going west on Elm.
Roger Craig After witnessing the above scene, Deputy Craig ran to the command post at Elm and Houston to report the incident to the authorities. When he got there and asked who was involved in the investigation, a man turned to him and said “I‘m with the Secret Service.” Craig recounted what he had just seen. This “Secret Service” man showed little interest in Craig‘s description of the people leaving, but seemed extremely interested in the description of the Rambler to the degree this was the only part of the recounting that he wrote down. Immediately after this Craig was told by Sheriff Decker to help the police search the TSBD. Deputy Craig was one of the people to find the three rifle cartridges on the floor beneath the window on the southeast corner of the sixth floor. Originally, all three were no more than an inch or two apart. One of the three shells was crimped on the end which would have held the slug. It had not been stepped on but merely crimped over on one small portion of the rim. The rest of that end was perfectly round.
He was among those present after the rifle was found. And, along with Deputy Eugene Boone who had first spotted the weapon, was immediately joined by police Lt. Day, Homicide Capt. Fritz, and deputy constable Seymour Weitzman, an expert on weapons who had been in the sporting goods business for many years and was familiar with all domestic and foreign makes. Lt. Day briefly inspected the rifle and handed it to Capt. Fritz who asked if anyone knew what kind of rifle it was. After a close examination, Weitzman declared it to be a 7.65 German Mauser. Capt. Fritz agreed with him. At the moment when Capt. Fritz concurred with Weitzman‘s identification of the rifle, an unknown Dallas police officer came running up the stairs and advised Capt. Fritz that a Dallas policeman had been shot in the Oak Cliff area. Craig instinctively looked at his watch. The time was 1:06 p.m. (The Warren Commission attempted to move this time back beyond 1:15 to create a plausible claim Oswald had reached the Tippit murder scene in a more humanly possible time-frame than would be the case if Tippit had the encounter with his murderer earlier.)
Later in the afternoon Craig received word of Oswald‘s arrest and that he was suspected of being involved in Kennedy‘s murder. He immediately thought of the man running down the grassy knoll and made a telephone call to Capt. Will Fritz to give him the description of the man he had seen. Fritz said Craig‘s description sounded like the man they had and asked him to come take a look. When he saw Oswald in Fritz‘s personal office Deputy Craig confirmed that this was indeed the man, dressed in the same way, that he had seen running down the knoll and into the Rambler. They went into the office together and Fritz told Oswald, “This man (pointing to me) saw you leave.” At which time the suspect replied, “I told you people I did.” Fritz, apparently trying to console Oswald, said, “Take it easy, son—we‘re just trying to find out what happened.” Fritz then said, “What about the car?” Oswald replied, leaning forward on Fritz‘s desk, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine—don‘t try to drag her into this.” Sitting back in his chair, Oswald said very disgustedly and very low, “Everybody will know who I am now.”
The fact that Fritz said ‘car’ and this elicited Oswald‘s outburst about a station wagon—that no one else had mentioned—confirms the veracity of Roger Craig‘s story.
Junior counsel for the Warren Commission Dave Belin, was the man who interviewed Roger Craig in April of 1964. After being questioned in what Craig recounts as a very manipulative and selective way, Belin asked “Do you want to follow or waive your signature or sign now?” Craig noted, “Since there was nothing but a tape recording and a stenographer‘s note book, there was obviously nothing to sign. All other testimony which I have read (a considerable amount) included an explanation that the person could waive his signature then or his statement would be typed and he would be notified when it was ready for signature. Belin did not say this to me.” After Craig first saw the transcript in January of 1968 he discovered that the testimony he gave had been changed in fourteen different places.
Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig never changed his account of what he witnessed and experienced on Friday, November 22, 1963. The passage where he describes the methodology employed by David Belin in selectively recording his testimony is highly illuminating and provides us with a glimpse of how the Commission interviewed witnesses in a very controlled way. (And is echoed by the experience of Victoria Adams, another key witness, as described in Barry Ernst’s book, The Girl on the Stairs.) Craig remained convinced, for the rest of this life, that the man entering the Rambler station wagon was Lee Harvey Oswald. He was fired from the Sheriff‘s office on July 4, 1967, and from that day forward he never again could find steady work. Multiple attempts were made on his life, his wife finally left him, and in the end, he allegedly shot himself on May 15, 1975.
Jesse Curry (Chief of Dallas Police) Jesse Curry – Dallas Chief of Police
Curry who was in the motorcade just in front of the president and interviewed Oswald after the assassination is on the record for saying: “There is a possibility that one (a shot) came from in front of us … By the direction of the blood and the brains of the president from one of the shots, it just seems it would have to be fired from the front … I can’t say that I could swear that there was one man and one man alone, I think that there is the possibility that there could be another man … “. He also stated they were never able to place Oswald on the sixth floor with the rifle in his hands.
James Sibert and Francis O’Neill – FBI agents
Sibert and O’Neill witnessed the autopsy in Bethesda and wrote a report about it which disproves the Single Bullet theory and explains why junior counsel Arlen Specter, who interviewed them, prevented them from talking to the Warren Commission and also kept their report hidden.
The eventually declassified report, Sibert’s deposition to the ARRB and his interview with William Matson Law for his 2005 book In the Eye of History: Disclosures in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence do not help Specter’s case whatsoever:
James Sibert (FBI) Law: Here’s a piece I don’t know what to think of. He said – Custer again – he’s talking about finding a bullet fragment in the autopsy room. I’ve talked to quite a few people and no one else remembers this: “I called one of the pathologists over and said, ‘Hey, we have a bullet here.’ As soon as they heard that, they came down off the raised platform, they ran over and then picked it up. Then Sibert and O’Neill also came over and said, `Well, we want that.’
Sibert: We never … the only thing we took position of, William, was a little jar with bullet fragments that had been removed from the brain. You know, metal particles?
Law: That’s the only thing I’ve ever had reported to me, and Mr. Custer has since passed away.
Sibert: I don’t remember anything about a bullet – you know they couldn’t find that bullet wound in the back – and they probed that and there was no exit. So, I said, “Well, let me go and call over at the lab, see if there is any kind of an ice bullet that might have fragmentized completely.” That was when I called agent Killion over at the lab, and he said, “Have you learned about the bullet they found under the stretcher over at Parkland?” Now, I came back and reported that to Humes, the chief pathologist, and that’s the only – I never saw that bullet. They were sending that bullet in, but it didn’t come into the autopsy room. I think they flew it into the Washington area, and that went directly to the FBI laboratory, the firearms section.
Law: I’ve talked to Mr. O’Neill quite a bit about this and asked him about his belief in the single-bullet theory, and he said, “Absolutely not, it did not happen!”
Sibert: Well, you can put me in the same category! Have you read Arlen Specter’s latest book, Passion For Truth?”
Law: No, I haven’t. I do not believe in the single-bullet theory from all I’ve read, and how can …
Sibert: I told them before they asked me to come up for the [ARRB] deposition, I said: “Well, before I come up, I want to tell you one thing: I don’t buy the single bullet theory.” And they said, “We don’t expect you to.”
Law: Yes, when I talked to Mr. O’Neill, he was adamant that it did not happen.
Sibert: In the first place, they moved the bullet wound, the one in the back. See, I don’t know if you recall, but over at Parkland, they weren’t even aware of the back wound, because they had a big fight over there as to who had jurisdiction. Texas had a law that any kind of a murder done in Texas, the autopsy had to be performed there. They didn’t know about the back wound. But they get to Bethesda – here’s the pathetic part – they found the wound in the back, of course, they took the wound in the neck as a straight tracheotomy and they didn’t find out that it was a bullet wound until the next morning when they called Parkland.
Law: Do you think it was a straight tracheotomy?
Sibert: Oh! They said over there that the … I forget who the doctor was there but he said he made that tracheotomy right over a bullet wound.
Law: That was Malcolm Perry.
Sibert: Perry, yeah. And you know, a lot of them over there said first that they thought it was an entrance wound. So, you had Parkland not knowing about the back wound, you had Bethesda not knowing about the bullet wound in the neck, taking it as a tracheotomy; which really gets you off on the right foot.
Law: Were you surprised you weren’t called before the Warren Commission?
Sibert: I was at the time, but now I can understand why.
Law: Why do you think you weren’t called?
Sibert: Why? In other words, with that single-bullet theory, if they went in there and asked us to pinpoint where the bullet entered the back and the measurements and all that stuff, how are you going to work it? See, the way they got the single-bullet theory, was by moving that back wound up to the base of the neck.
… Law: I was going to ask you to tell me your thoughts on Mr. Specter and the single-bullet theory.
Sibert: Well I – that single-bullet theory – when they had me come up to the ARRB deposition there at College Park, I said, “Well before I come up there, I want you to know one thing. I’m not an advocate of the single-bullet theory.” I said, “I don’t believe it because I stood there two foot from where that bullet wound was in the back, the one that they eventually moved up to the base of the neck. I was there when Boswell made his face sheet and located that wound exactly as we described it in the FD 302.” And I said, “Furthermore, when they examined the clothing after it got into the Bureau, those bullet holes in the shirt and the coat were down 5 inches there. So there is no way that bullet could have gone that low then rise up and come out the front of the neck, zigzag and hit Connally and then end up pristine on a stretcher over there in Dallas.”
Law: You don’t believe in the single-bullet theory. Period.
Sibert: There is no way I will swallow that. They can’t put enough sugar on it for me to bite it. That bullet was too low in the back.
Law: Where do you remember seeing it, exactly? Your partner, Frank O’Neill, if I remember right, credits you with finding the bullet hole in the back.
Sibert: Well, let me clarify that. When they had the body over at Parkland, they had a shoving match between the fellow who was going to do the autopsy who said that the autopsy had to be done in Texas – and they were going to do it there – and you had Kellerman telling them that he had orders from the Secret Service and also from Bobby Kennedy that it was going to be done in Washington. At Parkland, they never knew there was a bullet wound in the back. That body left there and they did not know about the bullet wound in the back. Then, Bethesda did not know there was a bullet wound where the tracheotomy was made. So that is a pathetic situation. It could have been handled if they had made a phone call. The smart thing to have done – if there hadn’t been such animosity between the partners over there – put one of those Parkland doctors on Air Force One to come right into Bethesda and say, “Here’s what we did.” And the clothing should have come in with the body. But they held the clothing – they didn’t even undo the tie over there at Parkland and there was a nick in the knot – and here you had this entrance or exit wound in the throat where the tracheotomy was.
Law also interviewed O’Neill:
Law: Were you surprised you were not called before the Warren Commission?
O’Neill: Yes. Because we had pertinent information and the information that was given to the Warren Commission as a result of our interview with Mr. Specter was not a hundred percent accurate ….
Law: I have your testimony to the ARRB. They asked you about the bullet wound in the throat and you said, “Well, I question it. I’ll tell you more later.” Why did you question the bullet wound to the throat?
O’Neill: Because there was no such thing as a bullet wound in the throat at that particular time. We only learned about the bullet wound in the throat in particular – well, let me see – we learned about that after the doctors – not “we” – but it was learned by the doctors who performed the autopsy after they had called down to Dallas to speak to the hospital. Ah, I think it was Malcolm Perry?
Law: Malcolm Perry was the attending physician.
O’Neill: That’s the only time that they became aware that there was a bullet wound in the throat.
Law: Do you believe there was a bullet wound in the throat?
O’Neill: I have no idea. It was not a question – I mean it was a question – there was not a question in my mind about a bullet wound in the throat, it just never came up. It was a tracheotomy, period, until we found out that it was performed over the bullet wound – over a wound – because they weren’t sure it was a bullet wound at that time.
As Law concluded, “O’Neill and Sibert are adamant that the single-bullet theory is wrong. ‘That’s Arlen Specter’s theory,’ O’Neill told me. It’s quite evident from my conversations with them that they have no respect for the one-time assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, now Senator from Pennsylvania. When I questioned Jim Sibert about the single-bullet theory and Arlen Specter, he went as far as to say, ‘What a liar. I feel he got his orders from above – how far above I don’t know.’”
The single-bullet theory is key to the “lone-nut” scenario. If, in fact, a bullet did not hit Kennedy in the back, come out his throat, hit Governor Connally in the back, exit his right chest, slam into his right wrist, breaking the bone and cutting the radial nerve, and then pierce his left thigh and fall out in remarkably pristine condition onto a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, then there was more than one assassin and, hence, conspiracy. The single-bullet theory is the linchpin of the government case against Lee Harvey Oswald. If the theory is false, the lone-assassin concept crumbles to dust.
Alex Rosen – Former FBI Assistant Director
Alex Rosen told the Committee (Church Committee testimony) that the FBI was not actively investigating a conspiracy, but was “in the position of standing on the corner with our pockets open, waiting for someone to drop information into it … “ (Source: Mary Ferrell Foundation)
Charles Shaffer – Staff member – Former Justice Department Investigator
In a 2014 Washington Post interview Charles Shaffer admitted that he now thinks that JFK was assassinated as a result of a mob-related conspiracy involving Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. He also claimed that Warren’s biggest blunder was not allowing Ruby to testify in Washington where he may have exposed a conspiracy.
Alfredda Scobey – Staff member – Law assistant to court of appeal State of Georgia
Scobey wrote down notes taking the position of what a defense lawyer for Oswald could have argued with respect to the evidence presented by the Warren Commission. Her observations underscore many problems the prosecution would have faced including: The denial of Oswald’s right to legal counsel; the inadmissibility of his wife’s testimony; the poor quality of Helen Markham as witness to the Tippit assassination; the number of witnesses that refused to identify Oswald as Tippit’s assassin; the lack of pertinence of the Walker incident; the evidence obtained from the Paines’ without a warrant; the chain of possession of the rifle, etc.
Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert – Assistant counsels
Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert were charged with investigating Jack Ruby and while they had not concluded that Ruby was involved in a conspiracy, they were clearly not satisfied with the investigation and information transferred to them by the FBI or CIA. This is made clear by memos written by them and answers Judge Griffin gave in his HSCA testimony.
Lisa Pease, in an August 1995 Probe article, gives a good summary of the memos:
… Assistant counsels to the Warren Commission Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert wrote, in a memo to the Warren Commission members dated March 20, 1964, that “the most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans, and extreme right-wing Americans.” Two months later, Griffin and Hubert wrote another memo to the Commission, significantly titled “Adequacy of the Ruby Investigation” in which they warned, “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales or smuggling.”
Ruby had talked about it himself while in jail, reportedly telling a friend, “They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.” Tales of Ruby running guns to Cuba abounded in the FBI reports taken in the first weeks after the assassination, yet neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee pursued those leads very far. Griffin and Hubert expressed concern over this, saying that “neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored.”
Burt Griffin Hubert and Griffin expressed in their memo of May 14 to Rankin that “we believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area.” They expressed concern that “Ruby had time to engage in substantial activities in addition to the management of his Clubs” and that “Ruby has always been a person who looked for money-making ‘sidelines’.” They even suggested that since the Fort Worth manufacturer of the famous “Twist Board” Ruby was demonstrating the night after the assassination had no known sales, and was manufactured by an oil field equipment company, that “[t]he possibility remains that the ‘twist board’ was a front for some other illegal enterprise.” But what Griffin and Hubert kept coming back to is that there was “much evidence” that Ruby “was interested in Cuban matters”, citing his relationship to Louis McWillie; his attempted sale of jeeps to Castro, his reported attendance of meetings “in connection with the sale of arms to Cubans and the smuggling out of refugees“; and Ruby’s quick correction of Wade’s remark that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee, a group populated with such notables as Clare Booth Luce, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and CIA journalistic asset Hal Hendrix: “Bits of evidence link Ruby to others who may have been interested in Cuban affairs.”
During his HSCA testimony, Griffin made it clear that the requests to investigate Ruby further were not followed up on.
In the documentary The Killing of President Kennedy, Griffin is even blunter: “I feel betrayed … the CIA lied to us …” He goes on to state CIA concealed their efforts to kill Castro and their links with the mafia, which would have been very important for the investigation. Griffin is also on the record as saying: “In any area where Oswald’s relation to the FBI … We could not trust Hoover”. This is important because the Warren Commission had very little investigative resources and relied heavily on the FBI for information gathering.
Senator Richard Russell – Warren Commissioner
Senator Russell in a stunning phone conversation with LBJ on September 18, 1964 voiced his disagreement with the Single Bullet theory very directly:
Sen. Richard Russell “They were trying to prove that the same bullet that hit Kennedy first was the one that hit Connally, went through him and through his hand, his bone, into his leg and everything else. … The commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe it.” … “And so I couldn’t sign it. And I said that Governor Connally testified directly to the contrary, and I’m not going to approve of that. So I finally made them say there was a difference in the commission, in that part of them believed that that wasn’t so. And of course if a fellow was accurate enough to hit Kennedy right in the neck on one shot and knock his head off in the next one … and he’s leaning up against his wife’s head … and not even wound her … why, he didn’t miss completely with that third shot. But according to their theory, he not only missed the whole automobile, but he missed the street! Well, a man that’s a good enough shot to put two bullets right into Kennedy, he didn’t miss that whole automobile.”
Just before his death Russell said publically that he believed that someone else worked with Oswald.
Senator John Cooper – Commissioner
Sen. John Sherman Cooper Senator John Cooper is also on the record for having written about the Single Bullet theory: “it seems to me that Governor Connally’s statement negates such a conclusion.” He later confirmed his stance in an interview for the BBC documentary The Killing of President Kennedy.
Congressman Hale Boggs – Commissioner
Boggs was neither convinced that Oswald was the assassin, nor that Ruby acted alone. According to legal advisor Bernard Fensterwald:
Rep. Hale Boggs “Almost from the beginning, Congressman Boggs had been suspicious over the FBI and CIA’s reluctance to provide hard information when the Commission’s probe turned to certain areas, such as allegations that Oswald may have been an undercover operative of some sort. When the Commission sought to disprove the growing suspicion that Oswald had once worked for the FBI, Boggs was outraged that the only proof of denial that the FBI offered was a brief statement of disclaimer by J. Edgar Hoover. It was Hale Boggs who drew an admission from Allen Dulles that the CIA’s record of employing someone like Oswald might be so heavily coded that the verification of his service would be almost impossible for outside investigators to establish.”
According to one of his friends: “Hale felt very, very torn during his work (on the Commission) … he wished he had never been on it and wished he’d never signed it (the Warren Report).” Another former aide argued that, “Hale always returned to one thing: Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”
Congressman Gerald Ford – Warren Commissioner
Pres. Valéry
Giscard-d’EstaingIn public Gerald Ford was a staunch defender of the Warren Commission’s findings and conclusions, describing the report as a Gibraltar of factual literature. However, in private he seems to have held a very different discourse.
Gerald Ford Valérie Giscard D’Estaing, ex-president of France, claimed the following in an interview he gave to RTL:
Gerald Ford (president of the United States from 1974 to 1977, editor’s note) was a member of the Warren Commission», he resumes. «Once I was making a car trip with him, he was then President as I was myself. I said to him: ‘Let me ask you an indiscreet question: you were on the Warren Commission, what conclusions did you arrive at?’ He told me: ‘It’s not a satisfactory one. We arrived at an initial conclusion: it was not the work of one person, it was something set up. We were sure that it was set up. But we were not able to discover by whom.’»
In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released a document that revealed that Ford had altered the first draft of the Warren Report to read: “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.”
LBJ – President
In a 1969 interview with Walter Cronkite, Lyndon Johnson said that he had not completely discounted the possibility of international connections to the murder.
Comments about the Warren Commission
As we can see, the conclusions of the Warren Commission are far from convincing, for they are belied by many of those who played important and direct roles in the investigation. Far from the Gibraltar that Gerald Ford referred to, it was on weak footing from the outset and things only went downhill from there.
It is clearly unsound for historians to refer to the Warren Commission as their key and only source when describing Ruby and Oswald as lone perpetrators of the crimes related to the November 22, 1963 tragedy. Considering the other government investigations that followed which impeach its modus operandi and many of its conclusions, it is like ignoring a judgement reversal after an appeal and only citing the discredited judgement of the original trial.
The Jim Garrison Investigation
Starting in 1966, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison investigated the assassination. This led to the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, a well-known local businessman, who was accused of being part of a conspiracy. While the jury found Shaw not guilty, according to Mark Lane – who had advised Garrison – most jurors felt there had nevertheless been a conspiracy.
This investigation shed light on many, up to then under-reported, issues. Let us consider some of them:
Pierre Finck - Garrison demonstrated that Oswald, while in New Orleans in the spring and summer of 1963, was seen handing out Fair Play for Cuba flyers. For which he received a lot of negative publicity in conservative New Orleans. However, in what seems to have been a blunder, some of these flyers had the address of 544 Camp Street on them. That faux pas placed his supposed office virtually within Guy Bannister`s detective office, which was, according to Garrison, really a CIA-linked hub for organizing Cuban exile paramilitary operations to overthrow Castro, and also Communist witch-hunts.
- Many witnesses confirmed associations of Oswald with Bannister, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, who Garrison linked with the CIA.
- Garrison argued that Oswald`s learning of the Russian language while a marine, and his journey into the USSR demonstrated his links to intelligence. He also concluded that Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba role was an attempt to sheep-dip him as a pro-Castro villain.
- Garrison was also probably the first person to cast doubt on a strange trip Oswald allegedly made to Mexico in September 1963.
- Pierre Finck, who was part of the Bethesda autopsy team, during his testimony at the Clay Shaw trial demonstrated just how incompetently the autopsy was conducted and how the pathologists were being controlled by high-level military officers.
- During the Shaw trial, for the first time, Garrison showed the jury the Zapruder film, and demonstrated the weaknesses of the lone shooter claim.
Francis Fruge – Garrison case investigator – Louisana State Police Lieutenant
Francis Fuge’s entry into the case actually began a few days before the assassination when he first encountered and questioned Rose Cheramie, a heroin addicted call girl and drug courier, who predicted the assassination, and talked about her links with Jack Ruby while she was hospitalized from November 20-22, 1963. He met her again right after the murder. Fruge later became an important investigator for Jim Garrison. His account of this extremely incriminating story was summarized in a thoroughly documented July 1999 Probe Magazine article:
As Fruge so memorably recalled to Jonathan Blackmer of the HSCA, Cheramie summed up her itinerary in Dallas in the following manner: “She said she was going to, number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby, and to kill Kennedy.” (p. 9 of Fruge’s 4/18/78 deposition)
At the hospital, Cheramie again predicted the assassination. Again, before it happened on November 22nd, to more than one nurse. The nurses, in turn, told others of Cheramie’s prognostication. (Memo of Frank Meloche to Louis Ivon, 5/22/67). Further, according to a psychiatrist there, Dr. Victor Weiss, Rose “…told him that she knew both Ruby and Oswald and had seen them sitting together on occasions at Ruby’s club.” (Ibid., 3/13/67) In fact, Fruge later confirmed the fact that she had worked as a stripper for Ruby. (Louisiana State Police report of 4/4/67.)
Fruge had discounted Cheramie’s earlier comments to him as drug-induced delusions. Or, as he said to Blackmer, “When she came out with the Kennedy business, I just said, wait a minute, wait a minute, something wrong here somewhere.” (Fruge, HSCA deposition, p. 9)
He further described her in this manner:
“Now, bear in mind that she talked: she’d talk for a while, looks like the shots would have effect on her again and she’d go in, you know, she’d just get numb, and after awhile she’d just start talking again.” (Ibid.)
But apparently, at the time of the assassination Cheramie appeared fine. The word spread throughout the hospital that she had predicted Kennedy’s murder in advance. Dr. Wayne Owen, who had been interning from LSU at the time, later told the Madison Capital Times that he and other interns were told of the plot in advance of the assassination. Amazingly, Cheramie even predicted the role of her former boss Jack Ruby because Owen was quoted as saying that one of the interns was told “…that one of the men involved in the plot was a man named Jack Rubinstein.” (2/11/68) Owen said that they shrugged it off at the time. But when they learned that Rubinstein was Ruby they grew quite concerned. “We were all assured that something would be done about it by the FBI or someone. Yet we never heard anything.” (Ibid.) In fact, Cheramie’s association with Ruby was also revealed to Dr. Weiss. For in an interview with him after the assassination, Rose revealed that she had worked as a drug courier for Jack Ruby. (Memo of Frank Meloche to Jim Garrison, 2/23/67) In the same memo, there is further elaboration on this important point:
“I believe she also mentioned that she worked in the night club for Ruby and that she was forced to go to Florida with another man whom she did not name to pick up a shipment of dope to take back to Dallas, that she didn’t want to do this thing but she had a young child and that they would hurt her child if she didn’t.”
Francis Fruge These comments are, of course, very revealing about Ruby’s role in both an intricate drug smuggling scheme and, at the least, his probable acquaintance with men who either had knowledge of, or were actually involved in, the assassination. This is a major point in this story which we will return to later.
Rose Cheramie Although Fruge had discounted the Cheramie story on November 20th, the events of the 22nd made him a believer. Right after JFK’s murder, Fruge “…called that hospital up in Jackson and told them by no way in the world to turn her loose until I could get my hands on her.” (Fruge’s HSCA deposition, p. 12.) So on November 25th, Fruge journeyed up to Jackson State Hospital again to talk to Cheramie. This time he conducted a much more in-depth interview. Fruge found out that Cheramie had been traveling with the two men from Miami. He also found that the men seemed to be a part of the conspiracy rather than to be just aware of it. After the assassination, they were supposed to stop by a home in Dallas to pick up around eight thousand dollars plus Rose’s baby. From there Cheramie was supposed to check into the Rice Hotel in Houston under an assumed name. Houston is in close proximity to Galveston, the town from which the drugs were coming in. From Houston, once the transaction was completed, the trio were headed for Mexico.
How reliable a witness was Cheramie? Extermely. Fruge decided to have the drug deal aspect of her story checked out by the state troopers and U. S. Customs. The officers confirmed the name of the seaman on board the correct ship coming into Galveston. The Customs people checked the Rice Hotel and the reservations had been made for her under an assumed name. The contact who had the money and her baby was checked and his name showed that he was an underworld, suspected narcotics dealer. Fruge checked Cheramie’s baggage and found that one box had baby clothes and shoes inside.
Fruge flew Cheramie from Louisiana to Houston on Tuesday, the 26th. In the back seat of the small Sesna 180, a newspaper was lying between them. One of the headlines read to the effect that “investigators or something had not been able to establish a relationship between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald.” (Fruge’s HSCA deposition p. 19) When Cheramie read this headline, she started to giggle. She then added, “Them two queer sons-of-a-bitches. They’ve been shacking up for years.” (Ibid.) She added that she knew this to be true from her experience of working for Ruby. Fruge then had his superior call up Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police to relay what an important witness Cheramie could be in his investigation. Fruge related what followed afterwards:
Colonel Morgan called Captain Fritz up from Dallas and told him what we had, the information that we had, that we had a person that had given us this information. And of course there again it was an old friend, and there was a little conversation. But anyway, when Colonel Morgan hung up, he turned around and told us they don’t want her. They’re not interested.
Fruge then asked Cheramie if she wished to try telling her tale to the FBI. She declined. She did not wish to involve herself further.
Aftermath of the Garrison case and general comments
Perhaps no other person who believed there was a conspiracy was vilified more than Jim Garrison. He has been called a charlatan, a publicity-seeker and crazy, among other things. With time however, many of his claims have been vindicated. While some described his case as a farce, it is often overlooked that Garrison had presented his evidence beforehand to a three-judge panel who concluded that he was justified to bring it to court, and that the subsequent HSCA investigation concluded that Garrison and his office “had established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald” – a devastating blow to Garrison detractors.
Other information from later investigations reveals that his efforts were sabotaged by adversaries who infiltrated his volunteer team and weakened his efforts; well-orchestrated propaganda attacking both his case and reputation; refusals to his subpoenas for out-of-state witnesses and the harassment, turning and untimely deaths of some of his key witnesses, including the suspicious deaths of star-witness David Ferrie and the murder of Eladio Del Valle. Other evidence that began to emerge showed that Clay Shaw, despite his denials, was in fact a CIA asset and part of a CIA organization of interest called Permindex.
To form their own opinion about Garrison, historians who are not of a pre-judging nature or overly stubborn are advised to read his highly revealing Playboy interview and his book: On the Trail of the Assassins.
The United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (The Rockefeller Commission)
After a 1974 New York Times report on illegal acts committed by the CIA, Gerald Ford set up the Rockefeller Commission headed by his Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller in 1975. It publicized the CIA MK/Ultra mind control experiments and revealed its illegal mail opening and US protester surveillance programs (MH/Chaos). It also held a very narrow investigation into the Kennedy assassination focusing on the Zapruder film, some of the medical evidence and whether Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who had just gained notoriety because of their roles in the Watergate scandal, were involved in the assassination. In a short eighteen-page chapter about the assassination it concluded that the CIA had not been involved and that only three shots were fired from behind the motorcade.
Many distrusted this Commission because of the involvement of key Warren Commission members such as Ford and David Belin. It was largely superseded by the Church and HSCA committees that succeeded it and that were much farther reaching.
It was during this period that, as Daniel Schorr later wrote, Ford let slip the bombshell that the CIA had been involved in assassinations. Which, as we saw previously, he probably learned about on the Warren Commission. But CIA Director Bill Colby then spun this to mean the assassination of foreign leaders.
United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (The Church Committee)
This U.S. Senate Committee was chaired by Senator Frank Church and issued 14 reports in 1975 and 1976 after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and studying thousands of files from the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
It delved into U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders, which were a key component of CIA regime control or change operations. Their targets included Congo’s Lumumba, Castro of Cuba, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. Schneider of Chile, President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Ex CIA leader Allen Dulles’ pact with the mafia to assassinate Castro was also part of their findings. This information, which could have impacted the Warren Commission investigation, was kept secret by Dulles while he was one of its commissioners.
Volume 4 of the report sheds light on HT/LINGUAL, the illegal mail intercept programs involving both the CIA and the FBI.
The Committee also reported on the extent the CIA partnered with media and academia, in an effort to control the media, later called Operation Mockingbird: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”
Lead by Senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker, the Church Committee also conducted a focused investigation (Book 5) of the Kennedy assassination, concentrating on how the FBI and CIA supported the Warren Commission. Its report was very critical of these agencies: ” … developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient.”
If this conclusion does not shake historians blind faith in the Blue Ribbon Warren Commission, perhaps comments from the sub-committee leaders might help create some doubt.
Senator Gary Hart
An interview Hart gave to the Denver Post after his stint on the committee clearly showed that he did not buy the Warren Commission depiction of Oswald, nor did he find that the FBI and the CIA were transparent with what they knew:
“Who Oswald really was – who did he know? What affiliation did he have in the Cuban network? Was his public identification with the left-wing a cover for a connection with the anti-Castro right-wing?”
Hart believed that Oswald was a double agent which was one of the reasons why the FBI and CIA had made “a conscious decision to withhold evidence from the Warren Commission.”
During the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination Hart was interviewed by the Huffington Post and one can only deduce that his views about the inadequacy of the Warren Commission investigation and mainstream media’s efforts into getting to the bottom of things had hardened based on the following statements:
“It’s amazing to me that American journalism never followed up on that story very much, because if you found out who killed those two guys, you might have some really interesting information on your hands.”
“I went down to Miami when [Johnny] Roselli was killed and talked to this Dade County sheriff from the Miami Police Department, and they showed me pictures of him being fished out of the water in the barrel and how he’d been killed — nightmarish stuff. And [Momo Salvatore] Giancana was killed in his own basement with six bullet holes in his throat with a Chicago police car and an FBI car outside his house.”
“I was always amazed in that particular instance of the CIA-Mafia connection and the Cuban connection 12 years — coming up 12 years — after Kennedy was killed that somebody didn’t go after that story … New York Times, Washington Post, anybody. And they didn’t. They reported the deaths and that was it, and the strange quirky coincidence, you know, but nothing more.”
“You don’t have to be a genius to believe that they knew something about the coincidence of events — Cuba, Mafia, CIA and Kennedy — that somebody didn’t want that out in the public 12 years later.”
Sen. Gary Hart The article also underscores the following intriguing insight: According to Hart, the Warren Commission — the presidential commission charged with investigating Kennedy’s assassination that concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone — remained unaware of the connections between Cuba, the CIA, the Mafia and Kennedy. Only then-CIA director Allen Dulles, who was on the commission, knew, according to Hart, but Dulles said nothing to the other members.
During a day-long symposium in May 2015 featuring former Church Committee members and staff, held by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law at the Constance Milstein and Family Global Academic Center of the New York University in Washington, D.C, Hart on a panel with former Church Committee Colleague Senator Mondale, added this powerful affirmation:
” … THE THREE MAFIA FIGURES INVOLVED IN THE CASTRO PLOT WITH THE CIA. WE HEARD FROM ONE OF THEM TWICE. THE 2nd TIME – THE 1st TIME HE CAME AND WENT WITH NO PUBLIC NOTICE AT ALL. HIGHLY SECRET. THE QUESTIONS OBVIOUSLY WERE WHO ORDERED CASTRO KILLED, WHAT ROLE DID YOU PLAY SO FORTH. I FELT AT THE TIME THAT HE WAS GENERALLY FORTHCOMING HE STILL KNEW A LOT HE WASN’T TELLING US. HE WENT HOME TO MIAMI AND DISAPPEARED AND ENDED UP DEAD. HE WAS IN HIS 70s. AND MAFIA TIMES IN THOSE DAYS THAT WAS RETIREMENT. FOR THE REST OF US NOW IT’S MIDDLE-AGED. THE 2nd FIGURE WAS PROBABLY THE TOP MAFIA FIGURE IN AMERICA. PREPARED TO SUBPOENA HIM WITH THE HOUSE COMMITTEE. HE WAS KILLED IN HIS BASEMENT. KILLED IN HIS BASEMENT WITH SIX BULLET HOLES IN HIS THROAT. NEITHER OF THESE CRIMES HAVE BEEN SOLVED. NOW, BY AND LARGE THE MEDIA INCLUDED WITH THESE WERE DISMISSED AS MAFIA STUFF. THERE IS NO DOUBT IN MY MIND THEY WERE KILLED IN CONNECTION WITH OUR COMMITTEE. THE QUESTION IS WHY? WHO DID IT AND WHY? “
Sen. Richard Schweiker
Sen. Richard Schweiker Schweiker’s comments are even more explosive.
In 1975 he made the following statement to the Village Voice: “We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”
In 1976 he told CBS News that the CIA and FBI lied to the Warren Commission and that the case could be solved if they followed hot new leads. He also claimed that the White House was part of the cover up.
In a BBC documentary the Killing of President Kennedy he made the following blistering statement about the Warren Commission investigation:
“The Warren Commission has in fact collapsed like a house of cards and I believe it was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.”…
“The most important thing was that the intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they were really looking for a conspiracy or to find out who killed John Kennedy.”…
“The key is why did they let him (Oswald) bring a Russian-born wife out contrary to present Russian policy, he had to get special dispensation from the highest levels to bring his Russian-born wife out, that in itself says somebody was giving Oswald highest priority either because we had trained and sent him there and they went along and pretended they did not know to fake us out, or they had in fact inculcated him and sent him back and were trying to fake us out, but he had gotten a green light no other American had gotten.”
In the documentary he goes on to say that the highest levels of government were behind him and his committee being mislead, and were continuing the cover-up and also that Oswald was clearly involved with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups, which smacks of an intelligence role as a double agent, and that these relationships were not investigated.
In an interview Bob Tanenbaum (first Deputy Counsel for the HSCA) gave to Probe Magazine, here is how he describes an exchange he had with Schweiker where the senator directly accuses the CIA:
Q: One of the more interesting subjects you’ve mentioned in some of your talks is this meeting you had with Senator Schweiker which, I’m assuming, you give a lot of weight to, because of the evidence and because of who it was coming from.
A: Well, it was shocking! I went up there with Cliff Fenton and Schweiker told me in his opinion the CIA was responsible for the assassination. That’s a heck of a statement to come from a United States Senator and one who had even been Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1976, even though they didn’t make it.
Q: Was it just you in the room when he told you that?
A: Yeah, it was just the two of us. I was stunned! He had asked Cliff to leave and he had his own staff people leave. I had that material he had given us which contained all that information about Veciana and the Alpha 66 group and this Bishop character.
Q: When I interviewed Schweiker, one of the last questions I asked him was if he had been on the oversight committee, for which he had not been nominated, which avenue would he have pursued. And he said, “I would have gone after Maurice Bishop.”
A: Well, as I said, I was stunned. Even after investigating this case, I’m not going to say that the CIA did it. He was saying it definitively. What the evidence suggested when we were in Washington was there were certain rogue elements who were involved with Bishop and others, the “plumber” types in the Nixon White House, who were involved with Oswald, who were substantially involved with anti-Castro Cubans who, the evidence suggests, were involved in the assassination. I keep saying that the evidence suggested it because we weren’t there long enough to make the case. So, there was a short-circuiting that occurred. But, that’s the area we were moving inexorably toward. And then I spoke with Gaeton Fonzi and Gaeton would corroborate this to the extent that he worked with Schweiker, he knew what Schweiker’s feelings were and he knew all about that file on Veciana. And that’s when we asked Gaeton to come on board, because he had worked on the Church senate oversight committee and he had a lot of connections that would be very helpful. And he’s a very honest guy.
Comments about the Church Committee
Any conscientious historian who has reached this point in the article and continues to cite the Warren Commission as the key historical record in their textbooks read by unsuspecting students to conclude that Oswald acted alone, that person deserves the scorn of all who entrust academia to help shape the minds of our youth. The case against the Warren Commission made by Government officials so far is devastating; things are about to get even worse. The HSCA investigation into the assassination will turn Gerald Ford’s Gibraltar into a bowl of Jello.
[i] The JFK Assassination According to the History Textbooks, Part 1, Parts 2 and 3
[ii]http://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/wc/contents_wr.htm
Go to Part 2
Go to Addendum
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NOVA’s Cold Case: JFK – the Junk Science Behind PBS’s Recent Foray into the Crime of the Century
By Gary Aguilar and Cyril Wecht
On August 7, 2013 The Los Angeles Times offered a preview of an upcoming, PBS NOVA program on the Kennedy assassination for which the David Koch Fund for Science provided major financial support.[i][ii] “Sorry, conspiracy theorists, modern forensic science shows that John F. Kennedy was likely killed by ‘one guy with a grudge and a gun,’” it reported, quoting one of the participants, John McAdams, during a panel discussion by those featured in Nova’s “Cold Case: JFK.”[iii] Sure enough, the broadcast offered seemingly impressive scientific support for the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, had done it. NOVA’s ballyhooed evidence came principally from three ballistics experts – the father and son team Messrs. Lucien and Michael Haag, and from Mr. Larry Sturdivan, all longstanding, ardent anti-conspiracists. CBS was so impressed that it featured Lucien and Michael Haag in on-air interviews.[iv] But because it was presented solely in video format (still available on-line[v]) students of the case were hard pressed to assess the quality of the scholarship. Things have changed.
Apparently seeking to disseminate his findings among his professional colleagues (and to take pot shots at a fellow anti-conspiracist, Max Holland[vi]), Luke Haag got his material published in the “peer reviewed” AFTE Journal, the official outlet of The Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners, an organization he was once president of. If Luke Haag had expected his AFTE articles would be a kind of post NOVA victory lap, thanks to the courage and integrity of the journal’s editor, Mr. Cole Goater, his hopes have been rudely dashed.
The editor gamely published two lengthy rebuttals Cyril Wecht, MD, JD and I wrote, 26 pages in all. In their wake, it’s likely Luke Haag rues the day he ever let his junk science see the light of day. For in answer to my request to republish his AFTE material verbatim, he emailed me, “I do not grant permission for you or Cyril Wecht to reproduce or republish any of my articles from the AFTE Journal … .”[vii] Haag clearly grasps he has a lot to hide. (Although he may have succeeded in preventing us from posting his material on-line, readers can access all of them behind a paywall at the AFTE Journal, and can download for free the first one that is as of this writing available on-line.[viii])
We first heard of Haag’s material when a friend sent me (Aguilar) a copy of one of Haag’s articles in early 2015. A longstanding Warren skeptic, I could barely restrain my amusement and glee as I read it. My colleague and coauthor, Cyril Wecht, MD, JD had a similar reaction. The rest of the articles and letters proved to be no less entertaining, not least because most of the claims the Haags and Sturdivan made had long since been widely debunked and discredited. But perhaps what struck us most about this bounty of balderdash is not only how junk science continues to snooker the mainstream media, a phenomenon that’s been oft repeated since the release of the Warren Report,[ix] but also how this cornucopia of codswollop will warm the hearts of both Warren Commission loyalists and skeptics alike.
Encomiums for the articles from the pro-Warren side came quickly. Dale Myers, a Haag fan and an indefatigable defender of the lone gunman scenario, crowed, “The AFTE Journal published … outstanding articles detailing Luke and Michael Haag’s investigation into the forensic aspects of the JFK murder … (that) are sobering, instructive, and a must read for anyone interested in the science behind bullet ballistics and in particular, the JFK case.”[x] (Lucien Haag and Myers are mutual admirers; in his first (of five) articles, Haag touts Myers’ pro-Warren animation work.[xi]) Not only will Warren loyalists appreciate having much of what was shown on TV available in on-line and print format, they’re certain also to welcome some riveting new fairytales that weren’t on TV.
Especially striking among them is the fable that author Wecht, a celebrated forensic pathologist and a perennial Warren skeptic, had actually endorsed the official autopsy report in no less than the “peer-reviewed” Journal of Forensic Sciences. Another is Mr. Haag’s claim that Dr. Wecht had dismissed the Commission’s controversial “Single Bullet Theory” (SBT: the idea that one bullet caused all seven nonfatal wounds in both the President and Governor Connally) because, fabricated Haag, the forensic expert had publicly declared that “one bullet cannot go through two people.” But there’s so much more.
To buck up the controversial SBT, Lucien Haag “proved” that the bullet that struck Governor Connally had passed through JFK first. His evidence? Haag said that the missile didn’t leave a small, puncture-type wound in the Governor’s back, like a typical entrance wound. Instead, it left an oval, 3-cm long, “yawed” entry wound, the full length of Commission Exhibit, #399, the so-called “magic bullet.” The ovality of that back wound was forensic proof, Haag asserted, that the bullet had been destabilized by passing through JFK and was traveling sideways, not point forward, when it hit Connally’s back. As we pointed out, this particular myth has long been debunked.[xii] Connally’s back wound was no more oval than JFK’s skull wound, and no one has ever argued JFK’s fatal missile had been destabilized and was yawing when it took the President’s life.
Further, Mr. Haag and Mr. Sturdivan dredged up Dr. Vincent P. Guinn’s sunken Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) ship, work that was once said to prove that all the recovered bullets and fragments came from Oswald’s rifle.[xiii] To the editor’s great credit, he allowed Dr. Wecht and I to point out in the letters pages the well-known fact that Guinn’s NAA metallurgy work had been repeatedly discredited in the “peer reviewed” scientific literature by authorities vastly better credentialed than those Haag cited. Among others, they include two Berkeley Lawrence Livermore Lab NAA metallurgy experts. In an emotional, splenetic riposte, the uncredentialed Sturdivan dismissed the credentialed scientists as mere “purported metallurgists” not real metallurgists, and that their anti-NAA work was nothing but an attempt “to trash the late Dr. Guinn’s reputation.”[xiv] In our response we pointed out what Sturdivan conveniently omitted: one of the metallurgists who he smeared, Pat Grant, Ph.D, studied under Vincent Guinn and is a credentialed NAA examiner who worked on NAA under Guinn at UC Irvine during graduate school.[xv]
Haag offered additional baloney to buttress the lone gunman scenario, including claims that:
- Duplication experiments in which human skulls were shot from above and behind with Oswald’s ammunition damaged the blasted skulls in a manner very like the damage JFK sustained. As has long been known,[xvi] and as we point out, they did no such thing. If anything, the test skulls prove that JFK was not shot in the manner the Warren Commission had alleged.
- Haag said that JFK’s “back to the left” lunge after being struck in the head from behind had been validated scientifically as due to either, or both, a “jet effect,” as Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez had demonstrated in test firings published in in 1976 in the American Journal of Physics (AJP), or to JFK’s neuromuscular reaction to the head injuries, as explicated by the inexpert and uncredentialed Mr. Larry Sturdivan. Neither explanation holds water.
- Josiah Thompson, Ph.D. recently got the photo file of Alvarez’s shooting tests from a former Berkeley grad student who had participated in the tests, Paul Hoch, Ph.D. When he reviewed the images, Thompson discovered, as we describe, that the Nobel Laureate had misrepresented his own results: virtually all the objects he fired at flew away from the shooter, not toward him, except for the ones he reported in the AJP. Alvarez not only neglected to mention his inconvenient results, in the AJP he clearly implied there were none. (Paul Hoch never told anyone about his former professor’s contradictory results, despite having been asked about the tests for decades.)
- Sturdivan’s claim JFK was rocked backward due to what Sturdivan has variously called a “decerebrate” or a “decorticate” neuromuscular” reaction is nonsense. As we lay out, from our own professional experiences as physicians and as described in the medical literature, JFK’s motions are neither; they’re best explained (as are the skull X-ray findings) as consequence of the impact of a shot from the right front.
This is but a small sampling of the silliness that will send the spirits of both sides of the debate soaring. Neither Dr. Wecht nor I can think of a greater, single repository of nonsense, outright fabrications and junk science than what the Haags and Sturdivan have published in the AFTE journal. And but for the honesty and integrity of the editor, myriad JFK myths and falsehoods would embarrassingly have stood uncontested and uncorrected in the journal. To his everlasting credit, and AFTE’s benefit, Mr. Goater not only published an 8-page riposte Dr. Wecht and I wrote in the Summer 2015 issue in response to Haag’s first three articles, available here on-line, in the Spring 2016 issue he also published our 18-page rejoinder to the fact-challenged, choleric letters Haag and Sturdivan had put in the Journal. Included in our second riposte is the essay, “The Science Behind the Persistence of Skepticism in the Kennedy Case,” supported with over 100 citations to official and professional sources, most available on-line by clicking the provided links.[xvii]
In Haag’s defense, it must be admitted that his forensic-ballistics work was not entirely useless. He demonstrated what had previously been demonstrated and not disputed:[xviii] that one bullet can go through two men and that penetrating bullets can cause heads to explode.[xix] If he had limited his remarks to these obvious, previously established conclusions Warren skeptics and serious students of the murder would have no quarrel. But instead, no doubt through an honest ignorance of the data, and a misguided loyalty to his collaborator, Larry Sturdivan, who’s book he cites, Haag elected to repeat long-debunked, pro-Warren Commission fairy tales. One suspects his work won’t disturb the principals of the David H. Koch Fund for Science, but Haag must hold his fellow AFTE members in low regard to believe he’d get away with publishing such rubbish in their journal.
Haag’s cowardly refusal to permit our republishing his JFK material says it all. It can best be explained by his justified fear that a wider, informed public might see the shoddiness of his research and how poorly he grasps long established, fundamental facts in the Kennedy case. Although he demands his words be kept hidden behind AFTE’s paywall, his confections, falsehoods and severe limitations are clearly visible here on-line, in the two letters Dr. Wecht and I published in the AFTE Journal. For we did what mountebanks most fear: we quoted him accurately and in context.
Aguilar & Wecht — Letter to the Editor: AFTE Volume 47 Number 3 — Summer 2015
(Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)
Aguilar & Wecht — Letter to the Editor: AFTE Volume 48 Number 2 — Spring 2016
(Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)
[i] “Major funding for NOVA is provided by the David H. Koch Fund for Science … .” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/cold-case-jfk.html
[ii] http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/08/27/myths-and-facts-about-the-koch-brothers/200570
[iii] Gelt, Jessica, Television Critics Association Press Tour: PBS’ ‘Cold Case: JFK’ opposes conspiracy theories. Los Angeles Times, August 07, 2013 http://articles.latimes.com/print/2013/aug/07/entertainment/la-et-st-pbs-cold-case-jfk-conspiracy-theorists-20130807
[iv] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jfk-single-bullet-theory-probed-using-latest-forensics-tech/
[v] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzPCca1Deto
[vi] See: Haag, L C. The Missing Bullet in the JFK Assassination. AFTE Journal, vol.47(2), Spring 2015, p. 70-74. See also, Dale Myers, “The Shot that Missed JFK: a New Forensic Study.” http://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-shot-that-missed-jfk-new-forensic.html
[vii] Personal email from Lucien Haag, June 10, 2016.
[viii] N.E.D.I.A.I Journal, Vol.3 of 3, p. 6 ff. http://www.nediai.org/pdf_files/3of3-2014.pdf
See also “Response from Lucien C. Haag. AFTE Journal — Volume 48 Number 2 — Spring 2016, p. 86-91.
[ix] See Robert Hennelly and Jerry Policoff, “JFK: HOW THE MEDIA ASSASSINATED THE REAL STORY,” on-line at: http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/mediaassassination.html
See also Russ Baker, Milicent Cranor, THE MYSTERY OF THE CONSTANT FLOW OF JFK DISINFORMATION, on-line at: http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/11/24/the-mystery-of-the-constant-flow-of-jfk-disinformation/
[x] Dale Myers, “The Shot That Missed JFK: A New Forensic Study.”, 5.5.15, online at:
http://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-shot-that-missed-jfk-new-forensic.html
In 2004 Myers received an Emmy Award[1] from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his computer animated recreation of the Kennedy assassination featured in ABC News’ 40th anniversary television special, Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination — Beyond Conspiracy (2003). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_K._Myers
[xi] Haag, Lucien C., Tracking the ‘Magic’ Bullet in the JFK Assassination. AFTE Journal, Vol. 46(2), Spring 2014, p. 110. Available on-line at: http://www.nediai.org/pdf_files/3of3-2014.pdf (see p. 15)
[xii] See Milicent Cranor, “Trajectory of a Lie,” on-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/BigLieSmallWound/BigLieSmallWound.htm
[xiii] Haag, Lucien C., Tracking the ‘Magic’ Bullet in the JFK Assassination. AFTE Journal, Vol. 46(2), Spring 2014, p. 110. Available on-line at: http://www.nediai.org/pdf_files/3of3-2014.pdf (see p. 8-9)
[xiv] Sturdivan, L. “Response from Larry Sturdivan” AFTE Journal — Volume 47 Number 3 — Summer 2015 143
[xv] See essay by Lawrence Livermore Lab‘s Pat Grant, Ph.D., on-line at http://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Commentary_on_Dr_Ken_Rahns_Work_on_the_JFK_Assassination_Investigation.html
[xvi] See Aguilar G, Cunningham K, HOW FIVE INVESTIGATIONS INTO JFK’S MEDICAL/AUTOPSY EVIDENCE GOT IT WRONG. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_1b.htm
[xvii] Aguilar G, Wecht, CH. AFTE Journal. Volume 48(2) Spring 2016, p. 68-85.
[xviii] See Review of “Cold Case JFK” by David Mantik, MD, Ph.D.: http://www.ctka.net/2013/nova.html
[xix] See testimony of Larry Sturdivan to the HSCA, Vol.1, p. 401-403, on-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol1/pdf/HSCA_Vol1_0908_3_Sturdivan.pdf
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Mark Lane Part III: The Ryder/Russo Graveyard Smear
Dale Myers The Dark Syde did not let Mark Lane’s passing go unnoticed or uncommented upon. At his web site, Dale Myers, also known as Mr. Single Bullet Fact, printed Keith Schneider’s New York Times obituary of May 12. Which, surprisingly, was relatively fair to the deceased. Schneider’s obituary was incomplete about Lane’s rather remarkable life. But when one is trying to do things on a deadline, such things happen. In retrospect, I would say that even my eulogy for Lane was incomplete, mainly because I tried to get it out there fast in anticipation of what I thought would be some rather negative notices. But I have to say, considering who Lane was and what he represented, the MSM really did not treat his passing that badly.
It was the Dark Syde denizens who could not present his death as objectively as Keith Schneider did. Within one day of Myer’s posting Schneider’s obituary, a non-entity named Barry Ryder jumped on the comments thread. To this person’s knowledge, Ryder has no published track record or literary trail in the JFK field. What he does is troll around amazon.com to criticize any book advocating a conspiracy in the JFK field. And he does so with saliva dripping venom and viciousness.
Without dealing with one iota of the totality of Lane’s career—Wounded Knee, the Vietnam War, the Wassaic prison scandal, James Richardson—Ryder started in with the usual Krazy Kid Oswald ranting about Lane. He actually wrote that Lane’s writings on the JFK case “have done irreparable harm to the general understanding of the murder.” In other words, writing and speaking throughout the country in 1964 and telling the public that 1) The official story was dubious; and 2) The real killers may have gotten away with the murder of the president constitutes “irreparable harm” to the public on the JFK case. Talk about Eric Blair aka George Orwell.
Then, channeling David Belin, Ryder now states that Lane made “big money” off the JFK case. As Lane revealed more than once, he made exactly $100 dollars from his original National Guardian essay published in December of 1963. He tried to sell the piece to larger venues but every single outlet turned him down. For the next three years he largely abandoned his promising and growing legal practice to live a hand to mouth existence trying to alert the public, both here and abroad, that there was a distinct probability that Oswald was not guilty. Most of the money he did make was funneled into his Citizens Commission of Inquiry.
I would like to ask a question to Mr. Ryder: Did Arlen Specter ever make that kind of sacrifice for the JFK case? Did David Slawson? Did William Coleman? Did Wesley Liebeler? Not to my knowledge. For that matter, did anyone on the Warren Commission? In comparison, the senior counsel on the Commission only worked part time even though they were being paid. Many of them left by the summer of 1964 when the job was incomplete and they had only been there for about six months. Six months of paid part-time work was too much of a sacrifice for them. After all, it was only the murder of the president. These are the kinds of men that Howard Willens of the Justice Department chose to solve the murder of President Kennedy. And the comment troll Ryder has no problem with that.
Ryder then says that Lane “showboated” before the Warren Commission. Let us be simple: Lane was treated as a hostile witness by the Commission. Anyone who reads the testimony can understand that. As Marcus Raskin wrote in 1967 in the Yale Law Journal, “Reading through the Commission Report and its record gives one the impression that Lane was put on continuous trial.” (see Volume 74, p. 583) And he was, because, as Raskin also disclosed, the FBI reports on Lane were forwarded to the Commission.
How hostile was the Commission towards Lane? Chief Counsel Lee Rankin requested that the local BAR in New York begin deliberations to discipline him. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, p. 155) Lane had to hire an attorney to represent him in the proceedings.
Beyond that, FBI agents followed him around almost everywhere he went. At times, they were waiting for him outside his house. (Mark Lane, A Citizen’s Dissent, p. 21) They talked to radio and TV hosts, attempting to cut Lane off the airwaves. They talked to publishers, trying to prevent anyone in America from publishing his book. It got so bad that Lane had to find a publisher in England. But even then, the CIA sent an agent there to try and sandbag the editing of the manuscript. (Citizen Lane, pgs. 164-165) Then, when the British publisher found an American outlet, the CIA tried to talk Arthur Cohen of Holt, Rinehart and Winston out of signing a contract with Lane. (ibid, p. 357) Does Mr. Ryder think that, say, David Belin had any of these problems publishing his books proselytizing for the Warren Report? No, Belin had help from the New York Times.
But it wasn’t just his profession that was at stake, it was his life. Lane had a number of death threats made against him, especially when he went on tour for his book. In other words, it was not enough for the Power Elite to illegally surveil him, to try and deprive him of his ability to earn a living. Now the man had to undergo the mental duress of death threats, with at least one attempt apparently Agency sanctioned. (ibid, pgs. 168-70)
Of course, much of this could have been prevented if the Commission had simply abided by the request of the murdered defendant’s mother, Marguerite Oswald. She wanted Lane to represent her deceased son’s interests before the Warren Commission. Rankin replied that it would not be appropriate for Lane to see the investigative files of the Commission or participate in the hearings. (CE 2033, p. 445, Vol. 24 of the WC) Then, almost risibly in retrospect, Rankin assured Lane that the Commission would pursue the case concerning Oswald as accurately and fairly as possible. (ibid)
Question for Mr. Ryder: How could that be done if Oswald had no counsel during the proceedings?
But beyond that, as everyone knows today, the Commission, during the entire time it was in session, worked in secret. The only information known about their proceedings was largely that which was leaked to the press by men like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Warren Commissioners Allen Dulles and Gerald Ford. In other words, only that which incriminated Oswald. Further, the only hearings that were open to the public were the two with Lane. And that was because he insisted they be open!
Why? Because if the case against Oswald was really an open and shut one, why not let the public see and hear the proceedings? Why not let members of the press sit in on and even record the hearings? If for no other reason than to preserve them for history. This was a point that Lane vigorously protested: the American people should be allowed to witness the investigation of their murdered president, especially since the alleged assassin had been killed while in the custody of the very police that had arrested him. But further, why was it necessary to lock up so much of the evidence for over 30 years? In fact, it took an act of Congress to declassify some of the Commission records; that act of Congresss became the JFK Act of 1994. Yet, even today, over 50 years later, there is still material being withheld. (See (http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/02/04/breaking-news-list-of-withheld-jfk-assassination-documents/)
Why Mr. Ryder?
The obvious answer to that question is that, contrary to what Ryder wants you to think, the JFK murder was not an open and shut case. Far from it. And, as we know today, the Warren Commission understood that. Commissioners Russell, Cooper, and Boggs did not buy the Magic Bullet fantasy. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 258-60) Later on, Gerald Ford admitted to the French president that the Commission understood there was more to the case than Oswald. (“The Kennedy Assassination: «The dream was assassinated along with the man», Giscard says.”) Junior counsel Wesley Liebeler told Sylvia Odio that the Commission had instructions to bury any leads indicating a conspiracy. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 254) This is obviously a reflection of Warren’s first staff meeting, recorded by Commission counsel Melvin Eisenberg. (ibid, pgs. 253-54) During that initial meeting, Warren alerted the working staff about his meeting with President Johnson in which LBJ intimidated him into taking the leadership job on the Commission. How? By saying that if he did not, a nuclear war would result. In other words, the fix was in and the Commission was not going to let any defense counsel for Oswald reverse that decision. Whether it be Mark Lane or anyone else. Somehow, none of this is worth mentioning for Ryder as well as other lone-nut supporters.
Yet, Ryder does say that Dealey Plaza witness Charles Brehm was misrepresented by Lane in his book. Ryder mentions this and immediately drops it. This issue first surfaced publicly in 1967. In his book, Rush to Judgment, Lane had quoted Brehm as saying that he saw something that appeared to be part of Kennedy’s head go back and to the left as the second bullet struck him. (Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 56) That is as far as he quotes Brehm. In fact, that is the only page of the book on which Brehm’s name appears.
Title card from 1967 CBS Special. Instead of being an honest critique of the Warren Report, the program became a one-sided account that Krazy Kid Oswald did it all by himself. In 1967, CBS was preparing its four-night special in support of the Warren Commission. As the documents attained by former CBS employee Roger Feinman proved, this program began as an honest attempt to question the worth and value of the Warren Report. Through various decisions made by the executives at CBS, especially by president Dick Salant, it turned out to be nothing but a rather sickening four-hour panegyric for the Warren Report. This was due in large part because CBS let former Warren Commissioner John McCloy be one of the clandestine advisors—without telling the public about it. (https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/22/how-cbs-news-aided-the-jfk-cover-up/) Lane was one of the critics that CBS targeted. They brought Brehm on the show to say that he never told Lane the shots came from the right and front of Kennedy, the grassy knoll area.
This is a non-sequitur because Lane never quotes Brehm as saying that in his book. Therefore, Brehm was not misquoted. CBS was desperate for something to throw at Lane. So they created this non-issue. And when Lane asked for time to reply to this smear, CBS declined his request. (Letter from General Counsel Leon Brooks of CBS to Lane of July 6, 1967)
Ryder then says that Lane made up an interview with Mary Woodward. Mary was another Dealey Plaza witness Lane used in his book to indicate the directionality of the shots. Again, Woodward is mentioned on just one page of Lane’s book. There, on page 41, Lane quotes her as saying she thought the shots came from behind her, which would indicate the picket fence. But if one looks at the footnote, one will see that the information does not come from an interview. It comes from a newspaper report of November 23, 1963. One really has to wonder: in his incontinent compulsion to urinate on Lane, did Ryder even read Rush to Judgment before he jumped on the web to trash his memory?
Ryder then brings up the interview Lane did with Helen Markham. Markham was a witness to the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit. The Warren Report famously gave her testimony “probative value.” Yet, as many of the Commission counsel, including Joseph Ball, argued, she was an “utterly unreliable” witness. (Edward Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, p. 142) Ball said that her testimony was “full of mistakes.” She said she leaned into Tippit’s car, yet photos showed the windows to be closed. Markham said she talked to Tippit as he lay bleeding on the street. Yet, the autopsy showed that the policeman died instantly. She said she was the only person on the street, yet there were others on the scene. Ball did not want to use her at all. (ibid, pgs. 142-43) In fact, at a public engagement, he once famously called her an “utter screwball.”
Wesley Liebeler, a colleague of Ball’s, felt the same way and he had also examined Markham. He called her testimony “contradictory” and “worthless.” (ibid, p. 143) In the famous Libeler memorandum, he wrote that using her in the Warren Report would eventually backfire on the Commission, that no matter how the Report tried to hide her, its critics would find her and make hay with her testimony.
Which is what happened. And, as can be seen from the above, the Commission knew this in advance. Liebeler even mentioned Mark Lane as a person who would capitalize on Markham’s liabilities as a witness.
Now, anyone can read Lane’s conversation with Helen Markham. He taped it and then turned it over to the Commission and they printed it in the volumes. (See Volume 20, p. 571 ff) Since the late Vincent Bugliosi’s bloated and empty book on the JFK case was published, it has become standard fare for Commission backers to use this tape to discredit Lane. So Ryder calls this conversation “disgraceful.” Again, one has to wonder, did Ryder read the transcript in the Warren Commission? Or did he just rely on Bugliosi’s boilerplate? For instance, Bugliosi writes that Markham agreed to talk to Lane because he introduced himself as Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police. (Bugliosi, p. 1006) That would be pretty bad. But when one turns to the actual transcript in the Commission volumes, one can see that he introduces himself with this: “My name is Mr. Lane.” (Op cit, p. 572)
Bugliosi then goes on to write that somehow Lane did not want to give up the tape because it showed that he was unduly leading the witness. Anyone can read the transcript. First of all, this was not a legal proceeding. It was simply a private interview for an investigation Lane was doing for Marguerite Oswald. Whenever Lane suggests something to Markham from newspaper interviews she gave, he lets her dispute what the report says. And he does not then discard her revisions. In reading the transcript, one sees that the way he summarized her description of the killer of Tippit does contradict the description of Oswald. Markham said he was short, a bit heavy, and his hair was a bit bushy.
Witness Helen Markham: Perhaps one of the worst witnesses in the JFK case where both Warren Report apologists and conspiracy supporters agree was unreliable at best. Markham went on to say to Lane that no one indicated to her who she should pick out of the police lineup as the suspect she thought had killed Tippit. How can one reply to this without being needlessly cruel? Anyone, except perhaps Ryder, can read the examination by Ball of Markham on this point. Ball asked her if she recognized any of the men in the line up. She replied in the negative. Ball then asked if she recognized anyone’s face. She again replied in the negative. She then said she did not recognize any of these men in the line up. Ball then replied with this leading question: “Was there a number two man in there?” Markham, obviously cued about the number, now replied with “Number two is the one I picked. When I saw this man I wasn’t sure, but I had cold chills just run over me.” (WC Vol. 3, pgs. 310-11)
Bugliosi, somehow, found no fault with Ball’s leading of the witness here. And neither did his acolyte, Ryder. But they both found fault with Lane.
Next up for Ryder is Lane’s treatment of the testimony of Jack Ruby. To be clear, this is another Krazy Kid Oswald shibboleth. Writers like Jean Davison and John McAdams have gone out of their way to criticize Lane’s discussion of Ruby’s testimony in Rush to Judgment. For instance, Davison begins her (atrocious) book, Oswald’s Game, by saying that Lane shortened the context of Ruby’s testimony as to why he wanted to leave Dallas, which Ruby requested to do more than once. Ruby even added that his life was in danger in Dallas. (See WC Vol. 5, p. 196) Which considering the way he died, with CIA MK/Ultra doctor Louis West attending him, may likely have been true. Davison says that the reason Ruby wanted to leave Dallas was not to tell his story further but simply to take a polygraph test, and this was going to show that Ruby was not part of a conspiracy. (Davison, p. 18) Davison never addresses the issue of why a polygraph could not be done in Dallas if that was all Ruby wanted. Then Davison, like Ryder does in other regards, inserts her foot into her mouth. She writes that the test, taken in Dallas, proved he was telling the truth.
Like Ryder, this was how desperate Davison was to nail Mark Lane. Even though she was writing almost five years after the HSCA volumes had been published, she failed to note their report on this polygraph test. Their distinguished panel of experts reversed the Warren Report. They determined that Ruby was not telling the truth. Because the whole test, conducted by the FBI, was a sham. It violated at least ten standard practices in the field, including the fact that the Dallas DA’s office representative was in the room for the test—and he talked to Ruby. But further, the FBI turned down one of the biological indicators for deception on the test; it was called the GSR, Galvanic Skin Response. (For a review of this tawdry episode, which both the Commission and Davison accepted, see DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 244-46. And the reader will see there how Bugliosi covered this up.)
Without the Ryder/Davison censorship of the facts, the questions then become quite interesting. First, why did the FBI rig the test? Did J. Edgar Hoover know that Ruby was going to lie? (I mention Hoover since it is hard to think that the operator would have done this on his own.) Second, if Ruby had gone to Washington, would he have been more truthful once away from his prosecutors? Third, with an honest investigation, which the Warren Commission was not even close to being, could the results of the test have been used to try and break Ruby? After all, as Jim Marrs points out, Ruby later indicated—more than once—that there were higher forces in the country that had placed him in this position. (Marrs, Crossfire, pgs. 430-33. See also Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 472)
The other reason that Commission apologists give to cloud Ruby’s testimony is that he wanted to go to Washington to discuss the issue with President Johnson. John McAdams uses this one. The problem is that Ruby brought up the Washington angle at least four times in his testimony. (See WC Vol. 5, pgs. 190, 195, 196, 210) Only near the end does he bring up Johnson’s name. Since the other requests had been turned down, Ruby may have thought if he dropped the president’s name it may have changed things. It did not.
In other words, Lane quoted Ruby accurately. He did say some provocative things and it turned out that he was lying during his polygraph test. Further, from what we know today, the Warren Commission’s description of Ruby—having no significant ties to organized crime and knowing perhaps fifty Dallas policemen—is a sick joke.
Gus Russo On the Myers blog, Gus Russo later joined Ryder. They both criticized the use of Marita Lorenz by Lane in his libel case against Howard Hunt. Whatever one thinks of Lorenz, it’s pretty obvious that Lane believed her. (See Lane’s Plausible Denial, pgs. 291-303) He also said he later talked to Gerry Hemming who backed up her story about Howard Hunt leading an assassination team to Dallas. Is the story true? Maybe, maybe not. But it was not the heart of his case against Hunt. The heart of his case was 1) There really was a CIA memo written by counter –intelligence chief James Angleton saying that Hunt needed an alibi for 11/22/63 since he was in Dallas that day (ibid, p. 167); and 2) Lane destroyed Hunt’s purported alibi on the stand. (ibid pgs. 272-283) Which leaves most objective observers with the clear implication that Hunt was in Dallas on 11/22/63. If so, why? And one may add, what was David Phillips doing there? Since he himself admitted late in life he was there. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio, p. 364) And, as David Talbot reveals in The Devil’s Chessboard, why was William Harvey there in November? And is it just a coincidence that all three of those men were there along with Allen Dulles? (ibid, pgs. 197-98)
Russo has a simple reason for going after Lane: because Lane, and to a greater extent Oliver Stone, were his entrée into the MSM. As I revealed in an article for Probe magazine,Russo had been ostensibly in the Warren Commission critics’ camp for a while. But right after Stone’s film JFK came out, he began to flip sides. (Who is Gus Russo?) He first began to work with Dan Rather on his 1993 CBS special. For Newsweek, he attacked Lane and his book Plausible Denial, specifically going after Marita Lorenz. From there, it was onward and upward. In addition to Rather, Russo then worked for PBS in 1993, for the late Peter Jennings at ABC in 2003, and Tom Brokaw at NBC in 2013. In those instances, he has been well compensated. In his own words, he was flying around first class, all done in order to revivify the rotten corpse of the Warren Report. One way a media hack’s MSM ticket gets punched on the Kennedy case is by attacking Mark Lane. Russo’s career included, of course, the Dale Myers public atrocity: his computer concoction about the Single Bullet Fact for Jennings. No one who was associated with that blatant and shameless deception should attack someone like Mark Lane regarding his work with Marita Lorenz or anything else. (Click here for a course on Myersvision, as sponsored by Russo: Dale Myers: An Introduction)
Before closing out my comments on this tawdry instance of posthumous character assassination (actually more like urination), I should address one more instance of this Lane posthumous mania. One of the witnesses that Mark Lane interviewed in Dallas was Lee Bowers. Lane had read his Warren Commission testimony. It intrigued him since it looked to him as if Bowers was about to describe something he saw from his vantage point in the railroad yard behind the picket fence, up and above the grassy knoll. The subject was then changed. In his Commission testimony he described three cars coming into the area behind the fence. He then described what he called a “commotion,” one that that he was unable to describe, except that it was out of the ordinary. So much so that it attracted his eye. (WC Vol. 6, p. 288) When Lane interviewed Bowers in 1966, Bowers elaborated on this issue. He said that he saw something like a flash of light, or smoke, “in the immediate area on the embankment.” (Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 32)
As one can see, Mark Lane was such an effective critic of the Warren Report that his ghost is haunted by its shameless defenders even in death.
Decades later, when this interview transcript was given over to a university, it became a bone of contention between the late Gary Mack and Myers because Lane left a bit of ambiguity over exactly where on the embankment Bowers was referring. It became part of a feud concerning Mack’s concept of Badge Man and Myers’ attempt to discredit it. Which side of the fence was Bowers referring to – the inside, toward the railroad yard, or the outside toward the street? Years later, Debra Conway settled the dispute. She interviewed Lee Bowers’ supervisor. He said that not even Lane got the whole story from his employee, because Bowers told him he saw one of the two men throw something metallic to the other and the second man then threw it in the car. This settled the matter, since such a thing could only have happened behind the picket fence. (E-mail communication with Conway, 6/11/16)
As one can see, Mark Lane was such an effective critic of the Warren Report that his ghost is haunted by its shameless defenders even in death. But yet, it is they who are guilty of what they say he was: namely, presenting the facts in a one-sided, polemical way. Russo did what he did because Lane was instrumental in advancing his MSM career. So there was no way he was going to let Lane’s ghost alone. But Barry Ryder is truly a bizarre and offensive piece of work. We should all be on the lookout for this strange personage in the future, a personage who does not even check the database before he unleashes his baseless invective.
Meanwhile, this will close out CTKA’s tribute to a fine lawyer, an admirable advocate for progressive causes, and a man who tried to use his skills and education to correct what was wrong around him. As the old saying goes, nobody’s perfect. But the record of Mark Lane was far above those who opposed him. So much so that he renders the attempts by the likes of Ryder and Russo to belittle him as little more than bitter flapdoodle.
UPDATE: The estimable British Warren Commission critic and CTKA contributor, Martin Hay, lends us some more info on Mr. Ryder. A while back, Ryder was doing his trolling at amazon.uk. This time about Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins. He was posting the usual anti-Garrison sludge. Martin jumped on and began to counter each and every charge–eventually demolishing it all. A couple months later, when Martin checked back, he saw that Ryder had erased both his review and all of the comments by both himself and Martin. This is the kind of man that Mr. Single Bullet Fact aka Dale Myers, and Gus Russo cavort around with.
Unfortunately for Ryder, he will not be able to erase what I wrote here at CTKA.
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Mark Lane, Part II: Citizen Lane
When Mark Lane’s autobiography was published in 2012, I was working on my rewrite of Destiny Betrayed. Right after that, I started in on Reclaiming Parkland. I tried to get someone else to review Citizen Lane, but there were no takers. In retrospect, I am sorry that I could not get anyone interested. And I also understand why no one in the MSM reviewed the book. It is, in quite simple terms, both a marvelous read and an inspiring story.
Too often in the JFK field, we focus solely on the work of the author or essayist on the assassination itself. In my view, this is mistaken. It’s important to me to know who an author is outside of the field. To give one example, Robert Tanenbaum—who wrote the thinly disguised roman a clef about the HSCA, Corruption of Blood—was a graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law. He then became a prosecutor under the legendary New York DA Frank Hogan. He rose to become head of the homicide division. Tanenbaum never lost a felony case in his nearly decade long career in that office. Therefore, he cannot be dismissed as a tin foil capped conspiracy theorist. The late Philip Melanson rose to become the head of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He then built an RFK archives at his university, the best such repository on the east coast. He wrote 12 non-fiction books, including an excellent one on the Secret Service.
In my elegy for the recently deceased Mark Lane, I alluded to some of the things he had accomplished outside the Kennedy assassination field: his work for the alleged killer of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray; his book on the fey, chaotic Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968; and his prime role in freeing an innocent man from death row, James Richardson. Little did I know how much I was still leaving out. I, and many others, clearly shortchanged the career of a truly remarkable attorney.
I have belatedly read Lane’s autobiography, Citizen Lane. Let me say two things at the outset. Everyone should read this book. It is the testament of a man who dedicated his legal career to a lifelong crusade for the causes he believed in. And, as we will see, Lane did this almost right at the beginning of his career. It is clear that no obituary of Lane came close to doing him justice, because there seemed to be a unified MSM boycott about this book. Without reading it, no one can come close to fairly summarizing his career.
Lane was born in New York in 1927, two years before the stock market crash. His father was a CPA, and his mother was a secretary to a theatrical producer. All three of their children went to college and graduated, which is quite an achievement for that time period. Lane’s older brother became a high school mathematics teacher and a leader of the teachers union in New York. His younger sister became a history professor who eventually took over the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Virginia. She built it from virtually nothing to the point where it had fifty majors, and the areas of concentration were expanded. (See here https://news.virginia.edu/content/ann-j-lane-first-director-women-s-studies-uva-has-died)
After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, Mark Lane returned home and decided to become an attorney. He attended Brooklyn School of Law. It was founded in 1901, and is highly rated today by the National Law Journal. That particular publication rates law schools by return on investment. That is: how many of the graduates sign on with the top law firms in the United States. According to that rubric, Lane’s alma mater is in the top 15% of law academies. But Lane did not intend on cashing in on his law degree.
Lane decided that what he wanted to do was to offer legal services to those who did not have access to them but, in fact, really needed them. So he began as a member of the leftist National Lawyers Guild, and working in an office with the later congressional representative Bella Abzug. Lane started out as little more than a researcher and court stand-in for his boss when he was behind schedule. But one day he happened to walk by a court in session while the great Carol Weiss King, founder of the National Lawyers Guild, was defending a client. Lane heard her say, “Just who does this government think it is that it can violate the law with impunity, that it can traduce the rights of ordinary people, that it can tell us that the law doesn’t count because these are extraordinary times? ” (p. 27)
From that propitious moment on Lane decided he was not going to be a gopher for anyone anymore.
II
He now set up an office on the second level of an apartment building in Spanish Harlem. Because few other attorneys were there, people began to come to him with their most dire needs. Prior to Lane’s arrival, when there was a gang shooting, the young Latin accused of the crime almost automatically was executed or got life imprisonment. With Lane there this all changed, even in instances when the victim was white and the assailant was Puerto Rican. Lane was one of the first to assail what was called the Special Jury System. (pgs. 43-44) In New York, under these circumstances, the jury master could choose a jury, instead of having one picked at random. Therefore, the accused was not judged by a jury of his peers. Later, Lane was instrumental in getting this system abolished.
Once he developed a higher profile, Lane would set up legal clinics for the public in high school auditoriums. One of his specialties was advising local renters on how to set up tenant councils and, if necessary, conduct rent strikes. (p. 48) He even arranged to have a legal clinic at the offices of the local Hispanic newspaper. With their help, Lane helped save the concept of rent control in New York City. (p. 49)
Lane was also an active member of the National Lawyers Guild. Like many young lawyers in the late forties and fifties, Lane thought the ABA did not take a strong enough stand against Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee or the demagogue Joe McCarthy. He volunteered to organize a benefit show for the Guild. When the main targeted performer refused to sign on, Lane went to the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger. Seeger invited the jazz artist Sonny Terry. Lane also invited female folk singer Martha Schlamme. Every ticket was sold, with scores of people paying for standing room only. Lane went on to do two more of these shows for Seeger. They went over so well that the young attorney briefly thought of becoming a musical impresario. (p. 36) But, lucky for us, he did not. Lane married the talented and attractive Schlamme, who unfortunately, died of a stroke in 1985.
By this time, the mid fifties, Lane had been in practice for just six years. But yet, his reputation as a champion of lost causes was so prevalent that a young man named Graciliano Acevedo walked into his office one day. He was an escapee from a young adult prison. Except it was not called a prison. It was called Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives. Acevedo began to recite a virtual horror story to the young lawyer. He told him that Wassaic was not really a school. It was a prison camouflaged as a school. Acevedo had been committed there without access to an attorney and not given a hearing or a trial. He did not want to return. He said there was no real schooling going on there, and that the guards were incompetent and sadistic and would beat up some of the prisoners. In fact, one guard actually killed an 18-year-old prisoner. (p. 58)
Lane took Acevedo to a psychiatrist. When his IQ was tested it turned out to be 115. So much for him being a mental defective. Lane decided he was not going to turn him over. He now enlisted two local reporters to his side: Fern Marja and Peter Khiss. Marja ran a three-day series on the abuses of this “school,” which culminated with an editorial plea for it to be cleaned up. Which it was. There was no more solitary confinement, books were now made available, academic tests were now given in Spanish, guards were fired (some were prosecuted), and hundreds of the inmates were released.
It is hard to believe, but at this time, Lane was just 28 years old.
III
Lane was interested in improving the community he worked in, as were some other talented people. So, through his defense of a parishioner, he met with the famous reverend, Eugene St. Clair Callender. After getting the young man off, he and Callender decided to work on creating a drug treatment center at the Mid-Harlem Community Parish. (p. 79) Once the two men got the center up and running, they passed its management on to one of the former patients. That center ended up treating 25,000 patients. After a meeting with baseball star Jackie Robinson, a company he was affiliated with agreed to hire some of the rehabilitated drug addicts. To culminate their success story, Lane and Callender invited a young rising star of the civil rights movement to come north and speak in Harlem. Martin Luther King spoke in front of the Hotel Theresa in 1957. Lane supplied the power for the sound system through a nearby nightclub run by boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. (pgs. 86-87)
From social problems, Lane now turned toward the political field. The young attorney did not think the Democratic Party of New York was representing Spanish Harlem anywhere near as well as it should. So Lane decided to organize his own version of the party. He got the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt in this effort. At the beginning, he said that if he won his race for the state legislature, he would only serve one term. He then wanted to pass the seat on to a local Hispanic. With the help of his sister, brother and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Lane campaign registered over four thousand new voters. At the same time he was running for office, he was managing the local campaign of Senator John Kennedy for president.
On Election Day, his backers patrolled the ballot boxes to make sure no one from outside the district tried to vote. Lane won and celebrations broke out. As promised, after he served one term, he passed the seat on to a local Latino community organizer he knew.
At around this time, the early sixties, the struggle for civil rights was heating up to a fever pitch. The election of John Kennedy and the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General, inspired long delayed public demonstrations to attain equality for black Americans. Callender decided to join in one of these actions, the Freedom Riders movement, by sending Lane and local black activist/lawyer Percy Sutton south to join in them. (p. 138)
In Jackson, Mississippi, before they could even participate in the protest, both men were arrested for sitting next to each other at an airport terminal. The charge was disorderly conduct. They were convicted without trial and sentenced to four months in prison. They were released on bail and promptly interviewed by the New York Times and New York Post. (p. 144) After the bad publicity, the two men returned south to stand trial. Wisely, the prosecutor moved for a directed verdict of not guilty.
IV
We now come to a part of Citizen Lane that most of our readership will be partly familiar with. That is, Lane’s writing of his famous National Guardian essay proclaiming doubt about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of President Kennedy. What inspired Lane to write his essay were the pronouncements of Dallas DA Henry Wade after Oswald had been killed. This was suspicious in itself, since Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on national TV in the basement of City Hall. In spite of that, perhaps because of it, Wade held a press conference and stated that, even though he was dead, and would not have an attorney, or a trial, Oswald was still guilty. (p. 150) Lane studied the charges levied by Wade. He now decided to respond to the DA’s bill of indictment. Although he offered his work to several outlets e.g. The Nation, Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, none of them would publish it. Finally, James Aronson of the left leaning National Guardian called. He had heard of the essay through the publishing grapevine. Lane told him he could have it for now, but not to publish it yet. In the meantime, he went to Jimmy Weschler of the New York Post. The Post had helped him with the Wassaic scandal, and covered his political campaign fairly. Weschler turned it down. After final approval for Aronson, it became a mini-sensation. Aronson had to publish several reprints. Weschler never spoke to Lane again. (p. 152)
This essay was not just hugely popular in America, it also began to circulate through Europe and even Japan. Therefore, with the money Aronson made through the $100 dollar sale of the rights from Lane, he arranged a speaking tour abroad for the author. With Lane’s dissident profile rising, the head of the ABA and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wanted him disciplined because of his defense of Oswald. (p. 155) But Marguerite Oswald had read Lane’s work and wanted him to defend her deceased son, which Lane agreed to do. But the Warren Commission would not tolerate anything like that, by Lane or anyone else. In fact, following through on Powell’s suggestion, Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin filed a complaint with the New York City bar. Lane had to get an attorney to represent him and the complaint was dismissed. (p. 157)
Even though Rankin would not tolerate a formal defense of Oswald before the Warren Commission, Lane now established his Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI) to informally investigate the Kennedy case through a wide network of volunteers. Through his lecture tours he raised enough money to fly to Dallas and talk to witnesses. He also rented a theater in New York and began to appear on college campuses. When he was invited to travel to Europe, the American embassies abroad tracked his appearances and tried to talk his backers out of their sponsorships. At one appearance in Vienna, they planted a translator who deliberately misspoke what he was saying. When the crowd started objecting, an American living there took over the duties. (p. 159)
When Lane returned to the States, he tried to get a book published based upon the Warren Report and the accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. But the FBI visited some of the prospective publishers and talked them out of working with Lane. They also visited local talk radio hosts and tried to discourage them from having him on the air. The Bureau then tapped the phones of the CCI so they would know when and where Lane would be traveling in order to investigate the case. He was also placed on the “lookout list” so that when he arrived back from a foreign speaking tour, the FBI would know he had returned.
Because he was working for nothing but expenses, and he had neglected his private law practice for the Kennedy case, Lane was extremely low on funds at this time. Finally, a British publishing house, the Bodley Head, decided to publish his manuscript called Rush to Judgment. A man named Ben Sonnenberg went to the company and volunteered his services to edit the book. When Lane saw his suggestions, he thought they were weird. It later turned out that Sonnenberg was a CIA agent who was relaying information to the Agency about what was in the book. (p. 165)
The book did well in England and the Bodley Head began to look for an American publisher. They contacted Arthur Cohen of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Cohen was very interested but, probably through Sonnenberg, the CIA found out how explosive the book was. Although it did not implicate them, they tried to talk Cohen out of publishing the book anyway. Cohen told them if they did not leave him alone, he would double the advertising budget. (p. 165) Norman Mailer did a good review of the book in the New York Herald Tribune and the volume became a smashing best seller in America.
Lane began to tour the country from coast to coast as the book caught on like wildfire. In St. Louis, he got a phone caller on a talk show who said he wanted to talk to him offline. He then told him that he needed to talk to him out of the studio. So he directed him to a phone booth nearby. When Lane got there, he now instructed him to go to another phone booth a few miles away. Lane, who had received numerous death threats before was now getting worried. But it turned out that the caller was alerting him to an assassination attempt on his life. He told Lane that this would take place in Chicago, outside of a hotel room he would be staying in and he actually gave him the room number he would be at. He then added that there would be a studio across the street. Lane would cross the street to get there at a precise time, and then there would be an attempt to run him over with a truck. (p. 169) Lane asked him how he knew all of these details. The man said that he had been hired to drive the truck, but he refused to kill an American on American soil. He then added that he would now send a taxi to pick Lane up and return him to his hotel, which he knew the name of. When Lane got to Chicago, all the details the assassin told him were accurate. So he changed his room number, and then arrived at the interview via a circuitous route.
{aridoc engine=”iframe” width=”560″ height=”315″}https://www.youtube.com/embed/3XoAg-FeU9I?rel=0&showinfo=0{/aridoc} Mark Lane appears on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. Although many people had been
skeptical of the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in
the assassination of President Kennedy, Lane’s book Rush to Judgment was the first to
lay out the argument seriously. He defends himself ably in this spirited exchange.
After Rush to Judgment became a national bestseller, documentary film director Emile De Antonio got in contact with him to a do a film based upon the book. So the two traveled to Dallas to interview some witnesses. One of them, Sam Holland, told them that he had been alerted in advance about them coming. And he had also been told by the police not to talk to them. Further, he had been threatened with the loss of his job if he did so. When Lane asked him if those were the circumstances, then why he was talking to him, Holland replied with words that have become hallowed in the annals of JFK assassination literature: “When the time comes that an American sees his president being killed and he can’t tell the truth about it, that’s the time to give the country back to the Indians—if they’ll take it.” As Lane reports, Holland had tears in his eyes as he said this.
I should add one more detail about their work on this film, one that does not come from this book, but from Lane’s 1968 volume A Citizen’s Dissent. While at work on the film, the two struck a deal with CBS to look at their outtakes from their 1964 two-hour special on the Warren Report. The first night they watched five hours of film. They understood it would eventually run to 70 hours—for a two-hour documentary? Lane and De Antonio found something shocking that first night. CBS was, as Lane put it, filming from a script. If any witness diverted from that scenario, the interviewer yelled cut. The witness was then instructed with new information so as to alter their answer for the camera. The witness then gave the revised answer. Only the rehearsed parts were shown to the public. Needless to say, after their first night, CBS called the librarian and said the agreement they had was null and void. (Mark Lane, A Citizen’s Dissent, pgs. 75-79)
V
While on a speaking tour in northern California in 1968, Lane picked up a magazine and read the story of James Joseph Richardson. Richardson was a resident of Arcadia, Florida, who was charged with killing his seven children with poison. (Citizen Lane, p. 187) Lane happened to have another speaking engagement upcoming in Florida. While there, he found that Richardson had been convicted. Lane got in contact with Richardson’s attorney and then with Richardson. After this he and three of his friends and working associates—Carolyn Mugar, Steve Jaffe and Dick Gregory—conducted an eight-month investigation, after which he published a book about the case called, appropriately, Arcadia. This managed to attract some attention to the case and place some pressure on local officials.
The book strongly suggested that Richardson had been framed and that the local police chief and the DA had cooperated in manufacturing evidence. This turned out to be the case. Lane got TV host David Frost interested in the case and he did a jailhouse interview with Richardson. Dick Gregory got a story in Newsweek. Lane called a press conference on the steps of the state capital after he had acquired a copy of the master case file. These documents proved the accusations he had made in his book. The governor now ordered a special hearing into the case and the new facts were now entered into the record. Janet Reno had been assigned the case as a special prosecutor. Lane was allowed to make his case to vacate the previous judgment. Reno made a short presentation which, in essence, agreed with all the facts Lane had presented. She also agreed the verdict should be vacated. The judge agreed also and Richardson was set free. (pgs. 206-07) Lane later called the day Richardson was freed after 21 years of incarceration the greatest day of his professional life.
Mark Lane (left) with Jane Fonda
It would seem almost destined that an attorney like Lane would get involved with the long and arduous attempt to end the Vietnam War. Lane did. With actress Jane Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland, he helped arrange the famous Winter Soldier Investigation. This was a three-day conference in Detroit in 1971. It was designed to publicize the atrocities and crimes that the Pentagon had committed in its futile attempt to defeat the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. A documentary film was made of the event and the transcript was entered into the Congressional Record by Sen. Mark Hatfield.
Both President Richard Nixon and his assistant Charles Colson despised the conference, as did the Pentagon and the FBI. They therefore began counter measures to neutralize its impact. Lane wrote a book about the subject called Conversations with Americans. Consulting with the Pentagon, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan wrote an article saying that since some of Lane’s interviewees were not listed in Pentagon records, then the persons must be ersatz. When Lane tried to call Sheehan and enlighten him on this issue, Sheehan never returned his calls. Lane understood that some of the soldiers would not want their actual names entered into the book for fear of retaliation. Therefore, he had entered the real information about the subjects on a chart and given this information to a former lawyer for the Justice Department. (See pages 219-221) Sheehan apparently never wanted this information. And neither does former professor John McAdams because he still runs a link to Sheehan’s false article to discredit Lane.
Neil Sheehan was a former acolyte of Col. John Paul Vann. Vann had been part of the American advisory group that President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam to assist the ARVN. Vann became convinced the war could not be won unless direct American intervention was applied. In this, he was in agreement with New York Times reporter in Vietnam, David Halberstam. Kennedy disliked them both since he had no intention of inserting American combat troops in Indochina. Somehow, 42 years after the fall of Saigon, McAdams still does not understand what made it such a disaster. It was partly because of writers like Sheehan and military men like Vann.
But that is not all Lane did to try and stop the war. He also read up on the laws concerning conscientious objectors and provided counseling to scores of young men who wanted to use that aspect of the law to either avoid service or leave the service. (p. 236) In addition to that, because Lane had achieved a high profile on the war, one day a Vietnamese pilot training in Texas got in contact with him. He said he did not want to be part of these Vietnamese Air Force missions, since most of them targeted civilians. So he asked Lane if he could be granted political asylum in America so as not to go back and do bombing runs. Lane did some work on the issue. He told him that he did not think he would be successful petitioning for asylum in America, but he thought he could do so in Canada. Therefore, along with his lifelong friend Carolyn Mugar, the two set up a kind of underground railroad into Canada. Carolyn would stop her station wagon before the border checkpoint. Lane and the man he calls Tran (along with two other trainees) jumped out of the car and circled around into a snowy, thin forest. After Carolyn passed the border, she then drove along a narrow road to pick up the pair on the Canadian side. Because of its success, Lane duplicated this along with Mugar several times. He later talked to a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who said that they were on to what he was doing. but they actually were in agreement with him. (p. 283)
VI
One of the most gripping chapters in the book is Lane’s description of his participation in the defense of Russell Means and Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. AIM had organized an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson who they felt was a totally corrupt pawn who was actually abusing the tribe. The area was cordoned off with FBI agents and US Marshals. During the siege, several people were shot and at least one disappeared. After the siege was lifted, Banks and Means went on trial for conspiracy and assault. They were defended respectively by Lane and William Kunstler.
The trial began in January of 1974. Lane motioned for a change of venue to St. Paul, Minnesota, which the court granted. It became very obvious early on that the FBI had illegally wiretapped the phone at the reservation and that they had suborned perjury from their star witness. (p. 267) Although one of the jurors became ill before a final verdict was voted on, the judge accepted an acquittal to one charge and threw out the other because of prosecutorial misconduct. That ruling was accepted on appeal.
Most of us know about Lane’s participation in the Martin Luther King case. He and Dick Gregory wrote a good book about the murder of King. It was originally titled Code Name Zorro and then reissued as Murder In Memphis. In this volume, Lane only discusses his work with Grace Stephens. Stephens was at Bessie’s Boarding House with her common law husband, Charlie Stephens, when King was shot. She saw a man run out of the communal bathroom. Yet, she would not say it was James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, even though she was sober and got a good look at him. Charlie was stone drunk at the time and was not a witness to the man running out. He did not even have his glasses on. (p. 290) But since he would say it was Ray, he was used as a witness to extradite the alleged assassin from England.
When Lane started investigating the case, he asked around for Grace. No one knew where she was or why she was never called as a witness. Finally, Lane got some information that she was squirreled away in a sanitarium. He went there and looked for her. When he found her, he sat down next to her, took out a tape recorder, and asked her about the man she saw. She said she did get a good look at him. And when she was shown pictures of Ray, it was not him. Lane left the place and then played the tape on local Memphis radio. He then got a hearing called in order to free Grace Stephens. (p. 294)
In the fall of 1978, Lane was asked by his friend Donald Freed to go to Jonestown in Guyana. James Jones wanted Freed to lecture there on the King case. Freed figured that since Lane knew much more about it than he did, he would let him do the talking. Lane was well received and he was invited back in November. Before he left, he got a call from a congressional lawyer in Washington. He inquired about how many news media would be there, and if the congressional delegations of Leo Ryan and Ed Derwinski would be small. He was assured that there would be no media and that just one assistant would accompany both congressmen. (p. 305) He had inquired about this because he felt that if everything was kept small scale, he could serve as a mediator if Jones got too paranoid about being investigated. Lane was either misinformed or he was lied to on both points.
Jones did feel threatened by the rather large delegation and Lane could not control things. After watching and intervening in a murder attempt on congressman Ryan, Lane advised the representative from northern California to leave the scene. Jones had seen Ryan bloodied and the newsmen were trying to take photos. (p. 310) Lane convinced Ryan to go. He told him he would interview the people his constituents were inquiring about.
After Ryan left for the airport—where he and others would be killed on the tarmac—Lane and the People’s Temple lawyer Charles Garry were placed in a cell. Lane talked to one of his guards and convinced him that he would be the perfect author to tell the truth about the colony. Miraculously, the two lawyers made it through the jungle to Port Kaituma where they were rescued by the military. They then sought refuge in the American Embassy. Lane concludes this chapter by agreeing with most authors: Jonestown was not a mass suicide. It was at least partly a mass murder. (Please read Jim Hougan’s three-part series on Jones to gain some understanding of what really happened at Jonestown http://jimhougan.com/JimJones.html)
As shown in the video clip above, many people know that Mark Lane opposed William F. Buckley on his show Firing Line about the JFK case. What very few people knew, including me, was that Lane also opposed him in court on four counts of defamation. Buckley had sued Willis Carto for libel because he had called him a neo-fascist and a racist. Carto’s first lawyer took a powder on him and so he turned to Lane in desperation: Buckley was requesting $16 million dollars in damages. Even though the judge was clearly biased towards Buckley, Lane did very well. He simply used words that Buckley had written in his own magazine, National Review to show that Buckley had clearly sided with the forces of segregation in the south way past the time when King and Rosa Parks began their campaign to integrate the area. He also showed that Buckley encouraged the prosecution of African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and that he was also in favor of the poll tax. The $16 million was reduced to $1,001.00. (pgs. 321-28)
It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.
Two other things I did not know about Lane that are in this book. He successfully argued a case before the Supreme Court against Jack Anderson. This again involved a libel case in which Anderson had libeled Carto. The district judge had thrown the case out. Lane argued it should be reinstated. He won the case and Carto settled for a withdrawal of the charges and a token payment to a charitable cause. (p. 336)
Second, Lane had a radio show. He made an appearance on a radio program in New Jersey in 2004 to talk about the JFK case. He did so well that he was invited back. He was then offered a job five days a week, which he declined. But he agreed to do the show once a week with a co–host. The show was called Lane’s Law and I really wish I had known about it since it sounds very funny. Lane had a great time making fun of pompous fools like Sen. Bill Frist. (p. 346)
When Lane’s sister Anne became ill and had to resign her Department Chair at Virginia, Lane moved to Charlottesville to be close to her. She later recovered and moved to New York to attend her children and grandchildren. Mark decided to stay in Virginia. Coincidentally, all three siblings passed away in a period of four years, from 2012-16.
Unlike what Bob Katz once wrote about him, Mark Lane was not an ambulance chaser. In each high profile case he entered, he was requested to do so: from the JFK case to the Buckley case, and all of them in between, including Wounded Knee and the King case. It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.
Mark Lane was such an effective defense lawyer he could have made millions a la Dick DeGuerin defending the likes of Robert Durst. Instead, he decided to be an attorney for the wretched and the damned. A counsel for the downtrodden and the lost. But they happened to be, like Wounded Knee and the JFK case, just causes. And Lane acquitted himself well, considering the forces arrayed against him. I know of very few lawyers who could have written a book like this one. Lane’s life stands out as a man who did what he could to correct the evil and injustice in the world around him, with no target being too small or too large in that regard. This book stands out like a beacon in the night. It shows both what a citizen should be, and what an attorney can be. Buy it today.