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Tag: MEDIA

  • Oswald’s Ghost

    It is difficult to understand why Robert Stone made his new documentary on the JFK case, Oswald’s Ghost, which is airing on PBS stations nationwide on January 14, 2008.

    There is good reason to approach this film with great skepticism. For one thing, it contains no new information. The Assassination Records Review Board has been closed down now for several years. There has been abundant time to go through the millions of new pages that have finally been declassified. Yet Stone chose not to do this. Which, of course, seems rather odd. What is even more odd is that although the film mentions Oliver Stone and his film JFK, the ARRB is never even mentioned in the picture. In other words, the body that literally almost doubled the amount of documentation available on the JFK case goes unnoticed in a film on that very case.

    That tells you something about the film. So does Robert Stone’s choice of interview subjects. There are eleven main talking heads in the film. Four of them deal with the historical, political, and sociological backdrop of the era: Tom Hayden, Robert Dallek, Todd Gitlin, and Gary Hart. Seven of them deal with the assassination itself. Two are from the conspiracy camp: Mark Lane and Josiah Thompson. Five of them are Warren Commission advocates: Dan Rather, Priscilla Johnson, Edward Epstein, Hugh Aynesworth, and the late Norman Mailer. And this quintet has a lot more screen time than Lane and Thompson.

    So clearly, with this talking head line-up, Stone basically announces that he has no interest in divulging any new information or exploring any outstanding mysteries of this case. In fact, the very first shot in the film tells us where he is headed. It is of the so-called sniper’s nest window, which the Warren Commission alleged that Lee Harvey Oswald fired from. The end features Mailer’s bloviating voice-over about Oswald’s ghost not being able to talk as we see first the accused assassin’s gravestone and then a photo of a young Lee. So far from being any kind of free form, or even handed piece of investigatory journalism, the film stacks the deck and tries to lead the viewer to a preordained conclusion.

    And if one knows little or nothing about the JFK case, that conclusion may be convincing not just because of the imbalance of the witnesses, but also because of the cinematic skill of the director. Few American documentaries I have seen have been done with the technical brio and facility of this one. In sound, pacing, montage, and use of photographic devices, the film is extraordinarily well executed. And the intermixing of audiotapes, narrative voice-over, archival footage, present day film, and witness interviews is effective at giving the film a well-knitted surface that implies texture and depth to the uninitiated.

    But for someone who is not a novice, the film and its conclusion summon up the famous Chesterton comment. The first time G. K. Chesterton strolled down 42nd Street in Manhattan, he said, “What a wonderful experience this must be for someone who can’t read.” Because as with the first and last shots, the film is a transparent set-up. There is very little discussion of the evidence. The single bullet theory is barely mentioned and is not illustrated. The magic bullet, CE 399, goes unnoticed. The Zapruder film is used, but only in a very limited way. The only time the head snap at frame Z 313 is shown it is not with the Robert Groden, rotoscoped version i.e. enlarged, slowed down, and stabilized. So therefore it does not have its usual visual impact. When Stone does show that version of the film, he cuts right before frame 313, the head snap, to a shot of Oswald walking in the opposite way. To me, this was a clear subliminal message betraying both the director’s sophistication and his bias.

    The structure of the film is essentially chronological. It begins with the events of November 22nd in Dallas. As recited by Aynesworth, Stone depicts the assassination, the shooting of J. D. Tippit, and Oswald’s apprehension and incarceration. We then watch the shooting of Oswald by Ruby and how this then provoked President Johnson into creating the Warren Commission. There is very little discussion of how the Warren Commission worked or how they arrived at their conclusions. The third movement of the film tells us about the wave of books and articles that were published in the wake of the Commission’s findings. But again, there is very little, if any, enumeration of what was in any of these books. For example, Stone creates a scene in which we look down at a kind of black pit. He then drops several of these books from above the camera and we watch them disappear into this bottomless hole. It’s quite an achievement to drop a monograph as well done as Ray Marcus’ The Bastard Bullet and try and tell the audience by visual metaphor that it means nothing.

    The film then goes to a fourth section, which is on the investigation by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. If there were any doubts about the director having an agenda, they are quickly dispelled here. The two leading witnesses on the Garrison inquiry are Aynesworth and Epstein. This would be like doing a special on Bill and Hillary Clinton and having as your two chief talking heads Ann Coulter and Christopher Ruddy. But director Stone has no qualms about letting these two men expound at length on the DA, with rather predictable results. Aynesworth brings up the Sodium Pentothal (truth serum) session conducted at Mercy Hospital by Dr. Esmond Fatter with Perry Russo. And he dusts off the old chestnut that was used by his friend James Phelan: by rearranging the sessions in time sequence, he makes it appear that Fatter was leading, even implanting, information in Russo’s mind. The film then heightens this impression by using overexposed photography as a background. Lisa Pease previously exposed this distorting technique at length as used by Phelan. (See Probe Vol. 6 No. 5 p. 26). It was also used by Shaw’s defense team, of which Aynesworth was a full-fledged member, an important fact that the film keeps from the viewer.

    The next swipe the film takes at Garrison is his use of a questionable codebreaking device in one of Shaw’s address books to adduce Jack Ruby’s unlisted phone number. The film milks this for all it is worth — which is not very much — as we see both Epstein and Aynesworth talk about it, along with Lane. What the film leaves out, of course, is that when one is dealing with a complex, labyrinthine crime that has been well-disguised, then blind alleys and faulty hypotheses will naturally be encountered. And eventually discarded, as this eventually was. This particular attack on Garrison highlights the imbalance of the piece. For if one is going to skewer the DA about a faulty theory he eventually abandoned, then why not blister the Warren Commission about several of its dubious findings which it never abandoned? To use just one example: the condition of the magic bullet, CE 399. Why didn’t Stone show the comparison photographs of test bullets in the experiments Dr. Joseph Dolce did and then have him testify that it was impossible to get such a pristine result by shooting the bullet into flesh and bone? Dolce was a true authority in the field with no bias involved. Something that cannot be said about Aynesworth and Epstein.

    I was really saddened to see Stone allow Epstein to characterize the discovery of Clay Shaw through Russo’s characterization of Clem Bertrand as a homosexual. This is just wrong of course, as Garrison first got interested in Shaw through Dean Andrews’ testimony in the Warren Commission. (And Andrews’ testimony interested others such as Lane and Sylvia Meagher.) From this faulty assumption, Stone then goes into a segment that actually tries to characterize the Garrison inquiry as some kind of excuse for homosexual persecution. This is so irresponsible as to border on the malicious. Culminating this reckless and wild sequence, Stone allows Clay Shaw to tell us that Garrison is a character out of Machiavelli: he will utilize any kind of means to achieve his end. The message being that Machiavelli/Garrison would even falsely accuse an unfortunate closet homosexual of being a conspirator.

    And this is where I thought the film really started to break down and dissolve into a slick propaganda piece. For to discuss the Garrison inquiry and leave out what is probably his greatest discovery is ridiculous. I am referring to the address on Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba flyer: 544 Camp Street. Which of course was the location of rabid right winger Guy Banister’s office. But if you watch the film you eventually understand why the director has to leave this crucial piece of information out. It relates to the ludicrously outdated and one-sided portrait of Oswald. Which is lifted right out of the Warren Report, only slightly moderated by Johnson and Mailer. In this film Oswald is the malcontent Marxist loner who wanted to be a Big Man in History, and strike a blow for the cause. But if Stone would have gone into the whole 544 Camp Street mystery and how it leads Oswald to people like Banister, Kerry Thornley, the Cuban exiles, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and then later to the Clinton-Jackson incident, then the viewer will have something called cognitive dissonance. In other words, he will have to ask himself: What the heck is a Communist doing with all these nutty CIA guys who want to overthrow Castro? And the viewer might then notice another lacunae in the film: If Oswald was a communist, why has the film not produced any communist comrades who were in a cell with him? Maybe because there weren’t any? Perhaps because Oswald wasn’t a communist at all? Which is precisely what Garrison said in his famous Playboy interview.

    Relating to this last point, there is another interesting methodogical paradox with which Stone closes the section on Garrison. He has Epstein say that the DA ended up not just attacking those who defended the Warren Commission, but he then accused his critics in the press of being involved in a coordinated attack on him. At this point, an honest investigator would have asked Epstein the following questions: 1) Did the CIA distribute any of your articles on Garrison? 2) Did you forward any of your research materials to Clay Shaw’s defense team?, and 3) Were you in contact with any of the other lawyers who were defending witnesses or other suspects in the Garrison inquiry? And if Epstein denied any of this, I could have furnished Stone with documents on camera to contravene the denial. It would have been interesting to listen to Epstein’s response. But of course, with the releases of the ARRB, the very same thing could have been done with Aynseworth and Johnson. Which is probably why Stone ignored those releases. And if you do not tell your audience this about the loyalties of your “authorities” what does this then say about your honesty toward them and your own bona fides in making the film?

    After the hatchet job on Garrison, Stone moves onto Gary Hart and the Church Committee investigation. Hart mentions the CIA coup attempts, the assassination plots against foreign leaders, and the plots to kill Castro. But even here, Stone curtails his portrait of the Church Committee by concentrating on serial liar Judith Exner. And I should also note that this is essentially where the story rather arbitrarily stops. I say arbitrarily because the natural progression — both historically and by cause and effect — should have been from the Church Committee to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The film never even mentions the HSCA. With Stone’s record, one has to postulate that one reason could have been because that body came to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy in the JFK case.

    The last part of the film essentially does two things: it pontificates about there being no real evidence produced for a cohesive and convincing conspiracy scenario, and it then hammers home the misfit portrayal of the accused assassin Oswald. Epstein does most of the former and, of course, if one ignores all the new evidence, one can get away with such a sleight of hand. But before Epstein made this pronouncement, I would have asked Mr. Stone if he ever read any of the new ARRB releases. If he said no, then I would suggest a new documentary to him based on just four areas of evidence. In order: the Clinton-Jackson incident, Oswald in Mexico City, the ballistics, and the autopsy. With just fifteen minutes on each, one could convincingly show that a) Oswald was being manipulated and impersonated in advance of the assassination b) That the “magic bullet” was never identified by the witnesses who discovered it c) That the bullet-lead evidence used to connect Oswald to the crime is phony, and d) That the Bethesda autopsy hid evidence of a blown out back of the head and multiple shooters.

    I think that would contravene Epstein rather nicely.

    The very end of the film intercuts the Mailer/Johnson triteness about Oswald –actually accusing him of shooting at Edwin Walker and killing Tippit — with people visiting Dealey Plaza and buying pamphlets on the case. The film shows us close-ups of money being exchanged in these transactions. So Stone’s parting shot is that while certain gifted writers (he actually labels Priscilla Johnson an historian) know the truth, there are those who still try and confuse the public about the facts of this case. And since the public does not want to believe a loser like Oswald killed a great hero like Kennedy, the business still goes on. You can only do this of course, if you ignore the evidence. And, as I mentioned above, that is the worst part of this whole enterprise. Oswald’s Ghost wants to take us back to 1970. It is as if the HSCA, JFK, and the ARRB never existed. Which makes me wonder about the people at PBS, which helped make this film for the series The American Experience. In 1993 they gave us the outrageously one sided Frontline special on Oswald, and now this: two Warren Commission carbon copies in 14 years.Yet this is not what PBS is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about alternatives to network offerings. How can you have a special on the Kennedy case which features Dan Rather and call it an alternative to what the networks are offering? It is not any such thing. It is more of the same under a different, slicker disguise. But that does not make the underlying result any less cheap in its approach or worthless in its value.

  • Time Magazine on the JFK Conspiracy and Presidency

    David Talbot’s book Brothers is clearly the inspiration for the July 2, 2007 issue of Time featuring President Kennedy on the cover. In a long center section from pages 44-67, the magazine features seven essays on Kennedy, including one by Caroline Kennedy. The first one is by Talbot and is a general overview of Kennedy’s foreign policy. This is a kind of magazine type summary of his book, which treats Kennedy fairly, judiciously, and insightfully. The last essay is a point/counterpoint conspiracy/no conspiracy argument on the assassination itself between Talbot and Vincent Bugliosi. In between there are essays on Kennedy’s civil rights policies (by Robert Dallek), how he confronted the Roman Catholic faith issue in the 1960 election, and two essays on Kennedy’s style as president.

    This issue is remarkable for two reasons. First, as Talbot notes in his book, the Luce press (i.e. Time and Life) were strong critics of Kennedy while in office. They then did much to cover up the true facts of his death after the assassination. In fact, the last cover Time devoted to Kennedy was when Seymour Hersh published his absolutely horrendous hatchet job of a book on him, The Dark Side of Camelot back in 1997. This, of course was in keeping with the magazine’s tradition. So this issue offers a clean break with that tradition. Second, Talbot’s book, and his essay in the magazine focus on Robert Kennedy as the first to suspect a conspiracy in the JFK case. For instance, Talbot writes in Time: “…Bobby immediately suspected the CIA’s secret war on Fidel Castro as the source of the plot.” (p. 66) He then traces RFK ‘s secret search for the truth about his brother’s death through to 1968. He concludes with, “Kennedy told confidants that he himself would reopen the investigation into the assassination if he won the presidency, believing it would take the full powers of the office to do so … Bobby never got a chance to prove his case.” (ibid)

    This is extraordinary. I can’t recall a previous time when Time actually printed a genuine pro-conspiracy essay on the Kennedy case in its pages. Let alone describing Robert Kennedy as a conspiracy investigator who was going to “Let the Heavens Fall” when he became president. The even more remarkable thing about this is that if the reader was unawares of RFK’s inquiry before, he could come to the subliminal conclusion that, “Hey, RFK was killed before he got to so this. Maybe that was the reason.” In other words, Time may have opened the door for some on the RFK case also.

    David Talbot’s book, which rose as high as number thirteen on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, is having a salutary effect.

  • BBC RFK Update

    June 2007

    In David Talbot’s new book Brothers he reveals that both he and Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post Online did a follow up inquiry on the Shane O’Sullivan report with the BBC. The investigation was commissioned by The New Yorker. According to Talbot’s book, the pair traveled widely, “interviewing dozens of relatives, friends and former colleagues” of their principal subjects (p. 397). They discovered that Gordon Campbell “died in 1962, making it impossible for him to have been filmed in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel” (Ibid). In an interview with Rex Bradford Talbot revealed that they had also attained good photos of both Morales and Joannides taken around the 1968 time period. When they were compared to the BBC Ambassador Hotel footage, it was evident that they did not match. Or as Talbot told Bradford, “…it’s simply not the man caught on camera at the Ambassador.”

    Interestingly, the New Yorker decided against publishing an article based on this work. Talbot, as of yet, has not revealed the reasons behind this curious decision.

    The BBC RFK Report

    February 2007

    On November 20, 2006, the British Broadcasting Corporation showed a 15-minute report about the Robert Kennedy assassination. Put together by Shane O’Sullivan, it is supposed to be part of a longer documentary work-in-progress.

    The BBC report began with the late Larry Teeter, former attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, going over the autopsy evidence in the Robert Kennedy case. As most people know, this evidence strongly indicates a conspiracy. The report then used some photographs and films to present the case that there were three CIA officers at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was killed. They were identified as David Morales, Gordon Campbell, and George Joannides. All three men are known to have worked out of the infamous Miami CIA station codenamed JM/WAVE in the sixties.

    The basis for the photo identifications were four men who had interacted with the trio in the sixties and seventies. Wayne Smith, a former State Department employee, worked with Morales when Smith was stationed in Cuba in the late fifties and sixties. Ed Lopez, a former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, interacted with Joannides in the seventies when the latter was the CIA liaison to the Committee. Brad Ayers, who worked out of JM/WAVE in the early sixites, identified Campbell and Morales. And another CIA operative, David Rabern, also identified Morales since he knew him at that same time. Rabern says he was actually at the Ambassador that night and added that he recalled Morales talking to Campbell, even though he did not know who Campbell was at the time.

    The BBC special is designed to give the impression that O’Sullivan discovered these photos and put together this evidence. But if you take a look at the entry for Brad Ayers on the JFK Research Forum on the Spartacus school.net site, you will learn that Ayers told Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board back in 1995 that he had a “credible witness who can put David Morales inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of June 5, 1968.” It seems that Ayers is clearly referring to Rabern here. O’Sullivan does not make it clear that he knew this in advance. He seems to indicate that Ayers led him to Rabern. But if that is the case then Ayers already knew that Rabern would make the ID. Further, Ayers was predisposed to making the Morales ID himself since he found Rabern credible at the much earlier date. The Campbell identification is totally reliant on Ayers, since Rabern did not seem to know who he was in 1968.

    The BBC report also included a short interview with Robert Walton. Walton first appeared in Gaeton Fonzi’s memoir about his HSCA experience entitled The Last Investigation. And for all intents and purposes that book, published in 1993, is where Morales first figured in any significant way in the JFK case. Fonzi mentions Ayers there and talks about some investigatory work Ayers did on his former colleague Morales. Fonzi concluded his section on Morales by introducing Walton. Walton, who did some legal work for Morales, related a story in which he was drinking with Morales one night. President Kennedy’s name came up and Morales exploded in anger at what Kennedy had done to the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The tirade concluded with the following line: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” (Fonzi, p. 390)

    The source given by Fonzi for this quote is Walton. But in the BBC special this quote is now expanded in both length and reference points. Walton now states that Morales said he was in Dallas when “we got that mother fucker and in LA when we got that little fucker.” This is a serious revision of the original comment since it now means that Morales was actually on the scene in not just one place for one assassination but in both. It is hard to believe that Fonzi would not have recorded and printed the much more specific quote back in 1993. But the altered quote does jibe with what the BBC report is now saying.

    Ever since Fonzi’s book came out, the Morales angle has had a strong influence on the literature. For example, Noel Twyman in Bloody Treason spent a lot of time examining what Morales did with the CIA. And Morales is also mentioned a lot in that bloated piece of pap, Ultimate Sacrifice. But this is the first time in a printed or broadcast report that a named witness connected him to the RFK case.

    Ayers has been obsessed with Morales for a long time. As Lisa Pease notes on her Real History blog, he once tried to convince her and myself that Morales was involved in the MLK case. But he did not tell us at the time about Morales and the RFK case and he never mentioned David Rabern. If one believes Ayers, then Morales was somehow involved with the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK. He told us that he thought Morales actually ran the street operation in Dealey Plaza. But, strangely, it was not for the CIA. Back then he thought it was for Barry Goldwater and he linked this to the notorious 1976 murder of Arizona reporter Don Bolles. It was somehow a way for Goldwater to get elected in 1964.

    An interesting question is why was Rabern at the Ambassador that night? If he was a covert operator, was he from the liberal wing of the CIA who supported RFK? And how does he remember Campbell so clearly talking to Morales if he did not know who Campbell was back in 1968? If one takes this report at face value, there were four CIA operatives at the Ambassador that night. All out in the open in the midst of cameras, film equipment, and tape recorders. And if Rabern recognized Morales, didn’t Morales recognize Rabern? If so, what did he say to him?

    Now, the BBC report has stirred at least two reactions. Mel Ayton, a British anti-conspiracy author, wrote up a reply about a week later, and updated it a week after that. The first part of his response is worthless since it uses the shameful work of Dan Moldea to respond to the points made by Teeter. But he does bring up some notable disagreement with the photo identifications. For instance, Dan Hardway who worked with Lopez at the HSCA did not identify Joannides in the pictures. He said his encounter with him was too long ago for him to venture an opinion on the matter. Ayton says he talked to Grayston Lynch, who also worked out of JM/WAVE and knew Campbell. Ayton writes, “According to Lynch the man in the LAPD film footage is not Campbell.” Ayton also quotes a man named Col. Manuel Chavez who worked with Morales for a period of time in 1964. Chavez says the man depicted in the special “does not look like Dave Morales.”

    Now the above does not mean that the BBC special is wrong, but it does point up the problems with using photo identification as a tool to solve a crime. Tony Summers chimed in on this point by saying, “Photographs and photographic recognition are infamously unreliable, especially coming from witnesses so long after an event.” I should point out that in the JFK case, the photo identifications of the three tramps in Dealey Plaza have been a continual source of error and embarrassment. As has the alleged identification of Joseph Milteer along the motorcade route.

    In speaking with author David Talbot, he and Jefferson Morley were commissioned by The New Yorker to do a follow up story on the BBC report. Talbot has been working for years on a book about Robert Kennedy. The New Yorker got hold of a galley proof of his long-awaited book and they were impressed. They are going to excerpt the book and also do a supplementary report on this alleged identification. This report is scheduled to run in May. Hopefully Morley and Talbot will be able to do more ground work on the matter. Like, for example, finding the three CIA officers next of kin and asking if they were with them on that rather memorable night.

  • Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination

    On June 6, 2007 the Discovery Times Channel broadcast a one-hour special on the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968. It was divided into several quick and sketchy sections which tried to set the background, fill in the circumstances of the shooting, examine some of the eyewitness testimony to the crime, discuss the autopsy of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, and the investigation by the LAPD (which was aided to a small extent by the FBI and Secret Service.)

    There were some new interviews done for the special. Some of the witnesses at the scene were Paul Schrade, one of the shooting victims, Roosevelt Grier, a Kennedy bodyguard, Roger Katz, a bystander, and LAPD officer Arthur Placencia, who brought alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan to the police station. In addition to the above, several critical commentators were also interviewed. These included those both supporting and attacking the official story. In the first camp were British anti-conspiracy author Mel Ayton and former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates. In the second were former FBI agent and author Bill Turner, author and investigator Ted Charach, and former president of the American Academy of Forensic Science, Dr. Robert Joling.

    The first part of the show gave a decent summary of the facts of the case until 1969. It went over the official circumstances of the shooting, the apprehension of Sirhan, and the actual death of Kennedy on June 6th at Good Samaritan Hospital. It then mentioned the eight-month investigation by the LAPD, which culminated in the February-April 1969 murder trial of Sirhan. The trial ended with Sirhan’s conviction and the application of the death penalty. Sirhan escaped capital punishment when the state changed its law on this issue, and he has been in prison ever since.

    At this point in the show, doubts about the verdict began to be aired. Katz mentioned that the shots seemed to be too rapid for one man to be firing. Joling said that if four shots hit RFK, and five bystanders were also hit, then this is one too many shots for Sirhan’s alleged eight shot revolver. From here the focus shifted to Noguchi’s autopsy. The doctor said that all the shots which hit Kennedy (one went through his jacket) came from behind. In a taped interview, the man who was escorting Kennedy through the pantry, Karl Uecker, said that this was impossible: Sirhan was always in front of him and he was always between the two. Another important point dealt with was the distance issue. Schrade said that the witnesses that LAPD thought were most credible all said the gun was between 1.5 to 3 feet away from Kennedy. Yet, Noguchi’s careful experiments determined that the amount of gunpowder in Kennedy’s scalp necessitated a much closer range, from 1-3 inches. No one put Sirhan that close, which would be a point blank shot. And the gun would literally have had to be at his head since the fatal shot came from behind his right ear. No one recalled seeing that rather unforgettable sight.

    A previously taped interview followed as the show tried to focus on a chief suspect in the killing, Thane Eugene Cesar. Don Shulman, a runner for a press organization, said that he saw the security guard behind Kennedy pull his gun and fire three shots during the fusillade. In an interview done for the show, Charach said that Cesar changed his story on this point, but he has him admitting to pulling his gun on tape. Joling chimed in here by saying that no other gun was tested by the LAPD and that Cesar was allowed to leave the pantry for ten minutes before returning to collect his tie, which had fallen on the floor. The implicit point here being that although Cesar says he was carrying a .38 that night, he also owned a .22, an issue which he also lied about. And it is this smaller caliber weapon which LAPD says was used in the crime.

    From here, the show began to criticize the LAPD investigation even more strongly. The role of firearms expert DeWayne Wolfer was mentioned and how it appears that the revolver he used to match the victim bullets to the weapon was not actually Sirhan’s, but a testing weapon. The documentary showed, with close-up shots, that the serial number on Wolfer’s evidence envelope did not match up with the serial number on Sirhan’s alleged revolver. The special also showed evidence of extra shots in the walls, swinging door divider, and ceiling tiles. This included photos of Noguchi pointing at circles, which were supposed to represent bullet holes. But of course, if these were actual shots, the sum would number too many for an eight shot revolver. Even more suspiciously, the divider and tiles were later destroyed even though Sirhan’s case had not exhausted its appeals process. Gates replied to this point with, “The guy was convicted. You can’t keep junk around forever. It takes up a lot of room.”

    The above set up the departure point for the documentary’s longest and concluding section. In fact, its actual reason for being. In 1968, a young reporter of Polish descent named Stanislav Pruszynski had taken a leave of absence from his job on a Canadian newspaper. He wanted to cover the American presidential race in order to write a book about the contemporary political scene in the USA. Therefore he found himself at the Ambassador that night covering Kennedy’s California primary victory. In fact he was near RFK when the senator left the ballroom podium to begin his fateful walk down the corridor and through the swinging doors of the pantry. The young man had in his hands a new invention: an audiocassette recorder, and he was recording as he followed RFK. One of the highlights of this show is that Pruszynski is still alive and the producers show him film of himself and he certifies his placement as RFK begins to leave the podium. The LAPD did not ask him for his tape that night. But in 1969, the Canadian authorities did at the request of the FBI. The FBI tested the tape and decided there was nothing of crucial evidentiary value on it. So the test cassette was sent to the California Archives in Sacramento.

    This is how matters stayed until about three years ago. At that time, an employee working for one of the cable news networks stumbled upon Pruszynksi and his tape. He took the tape to an audio technician named Phil Van Praag. Van Praag had worked in the field for 35 years and had accumulated state of the art sound testing devices along with the latest computer programming in the field. Much better than what the FBI had in 1969. He made both digital and analog copies of the tape and then tested them for sounds of a gun firing. He came to the conclusion that 13 shots were on the tape. Further, he located a couple of instances in which the shots were spaced too closely for one person to be firing them.

    The filmmakers decided to take the tape to a second authority. This was a Pasadena company called Audio Engineering Associates, headed by a man named Wes Dooley. He came to a similar conclusion: there were too many shots on the tape for just Sirhan as the assailant. And the spacing sounded too close for one man to be firing. (Although his number was smaller: he located ten shots.) A firearms expert named Phil Spongenberger then tested the alleged weapon, an Iver Johnson Cadet and determined that the technicians were correct. The gun cannot be fired as quickly as the spacing indicated on the tape. This forensic discovery echoes the earlier testing done by Dr. Michael Hecker of Stanford in 1982. By analyzing other tapes, he was sure there were at lest ten shots fired that night and probably more. But he was certain of ten. Now we have the same verdict but with a different tape, and more modern analysis.

    I should add a sad postscript here. Many are familiar with the famous acoustical testing done by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which caused them to reverse the Warren Commission and change the official verdict on the JFK case to a conspiracy. With the film and tape of Pruszynski available, plus the fact that he is still alive, just about everything was in place here to do the same acoustical testing for the RFK case that was done for the JFK case. Why go the extra yard? Because in addition to the number of shots, and the spacing of shots, this last test would have revealed the directionality of the shots. That is, where they came from. But because of what the Los Angeles School District did with the site of the Ambassador Hotel, which they today own, this test could not be done even under the best circumstances. Only one person can be happy about that. Namely Thane Eugene Cesar who, as the show states, is happy to maintain his innocence from the distant location of the Philippines.

  • HBO, Playtone plan JFK miniseries: Hanks, Paxton set to produce “History”

    HBO, Playtone plan JFK miniseries: Hanks, Paxton set to produce “History”

    By Michael Fleming, Variety Magazine

    HBO is near a deal with Playtone that will turn Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,632-page book “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy” into a miniseries.

    Ten-parter will debunk long-held conspiracy theories and establish that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    HBO is wrapping up a deal to finance and air the mini, which will depict Oswald’s journey to becoming an assassin and his subsequent murder on live TV by Jack Ruby.

    the guys
    L-R: Hanks, Paxton and Goetzman

    Playtone’s Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman will exec produce along with their “Big Love” star Bill Paxton.

    The network will make a companion documentary special, with Bugliosi addressing myriad conspiracy theories, including those involving the Mafia, the KGB or Fidel Castro in JFK’s assassination.

    Project was hatched after Hanks, Paxton and Goetzman had a conversation about the shooting. They decided to look at Bugliosi’s book, published last month by W.W. Norton, as the basis for a possible project.

    “I totally believed there was a conspiracy, but after you read the book, you are almost embarrassed that you ever believed it,” Goetzman said. “To think that guys who grew up in the ’60s would make a miniseries supporting the idea that Oswald acted alone is something I certainly wouldn’t have predicted. But time and evidence can change the way we view things.”

    Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and wrote the book “Helter Skelter,” was moved to write “Reclaiming History” after prosecuting a mock trial of Oswald for a British TV special. He walked away feeling the Warren Commission got it right and then spent the next two decades gathering evidence to prove it.

    “Many more people will see the miniseries than will read the book,” Bugliosi told Daily Variety. “With the integrity that Tom, Gary and Bill bring, I think that we will finally be able to make a substantial dent in the 75% of people in this country who still believe the conspiracy theorists.”

    Project comes along as Playtone nears a wrap on the seven-part HBO miniseries “John Adams” and preps for an Aug. 27 production start in Melbourne on “The Pacific,” the 10-part WWII mini for HBO that Hanks and Goetzman are exec producing with Steven Spielberg. The Playtone-produced series “Big Love” begins its second season on HBO this Monday.

    Playtone is in the early stages of developing as a series the Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” the novel about a 41-year-old hermaphrodite that just became the latest choice of the Oprah Book Club.

    Bugliosi’s deal was made by PMA Literary’s Peter Miller.

    See the original article here.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The BBC RFK Report

    On November 20th of last year the British Broadcasting Corporation showed a 15-minute report about the Robert Kennedy assassination. Put together by Shane O’Sullivan, it is supposed to be part of a longer documentary work-in-progress.

    The BBC report began with the late Larry Teeter, former attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, going over the autopsy evidence in the Robert Kennedy case. As most people know, this evidence strongly indicates a conspiracy. The report then used some photographs and films to present the case that there were three CIA officers at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was killed. They were identified as David Morales, Gordon Campbell, and George Joannides. All three men are known to have worked out of the infamous Miami CIA station codenamed JM/WAVE in the sixties.

    The basis for the photo identifications were four men who had interacted with the trio in the sixties and seventies. Wayne Smith, a former State Department employee, worked with Morales when Smith was stationed in Cuba in the late fifties and sixties. Ed Lopez, a former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, interacted with Joannides in the seventies when the latter was the CIA liaison to the Committee. Brad Ayers, who worked out of JM/WAVE in the early sixites, identified Campbell and Morales. And another CIA operative, David Rabern, also identified Morales since he knew him at that same time. Rabern says he was actually at the Ambassador that night and added that he recalled Morales talking to Campbell, even though he did not know who Campbell was at the time.

    The BBC special is designed to give the impression that O’Sullivan discovered these photos and put together this evidence. But if you take a look at the entry for Brad Ayers on the JFK Research Forum on the Spartacus school.net site, you will learn that Ayers told Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board back in 1995 that he had a “credible witness who can put David Morales inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of June 5, 1968.” It seems that Ayers is clearly referring to Rabern here. O’Sullivan does not make it clear that he knew this in advance. He seems to indicate that Ayers led him to Rabern. But if that is the case then Ayers already knew that Rabern would make the ID. Further, Ayers was predisposed to making the Morales ID himself since he found Rabern credible at the much earlier date. The Campbell identification is totally reliant on Ayers, since Rabern did not seem to know who he was in 1968.

    The BBC report also included a short interview with Robert Walton. Walton first appeared in Gaeton Fonzi’s memoir about his HSCA experience entitled The Last Investigation. And for all intents and purposes that book, published in 1993, is where Morales first figured in any significant way in the JFK case. Fonzi mentions Ayers there and talks about some investigatory work Ayers did on his former colleague Morales. Fonzi concluded his section on Morales by introducing Walton. Walton, who did some legal work for Morales, related a story in which he was drinking with Morales one night. President Kennedy’s name came up and Morales exploded in anger at what Kennedy had done to the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The tirade concluded with the following line: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” (Fonzi, p. 390)

    The source given by Fonzi for this quote is Walton. But in the BBC special this quote is now expanded in both length and reference points. Walton now states that Morales said he was in Dallas when “we got that mother fucker and in LA when we got that little fucker.” This is a serious revision of the original comment since it now means that Morales was actually on the scene in not just one place for one assassination but in both. It is hard to believe that Fonzi would not have recorded and printed the much more specific quote back in 1993. But the altered quote does jibe with what the BBC report is now saying.

    Ever since Fonzi’s book came out, the Morales angle has had a strong influence on the literature. For example, Noel Twyman in Bloody Treason spent a lot of time examining what Morales did with the CIA. And Morales is also mentioned a lot in that bloated piece of pap, Ultimate Sacrifice. But this is the first time in a printed or broadcast report that a named witness connected him to the RFK case.

    Ayers has been obsessed with Morales for a long time. As Lisa Pease notes on her Real History blog, he once tried to convince her and myself that Morales was involved in the MLK case. But he did not tell us at the time about Morales and the RFK case and he never mentioned David Rabern. If one believes Ayers, then Morales was somehow involved with the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK. He told us that he thought Morales actually ran the street operation in Dealey Plaza. But, strangely, it was not for the CIA. Back then he thought it was for Barry Goldwater and he linked this to the notorious 1976 murder of Arizona reporter Don Bolles. It was somehow a way for Goldwater to get elected in 1964.

    An interesting question is why was Rabern at the Ambassador that night? If he was a covert operator, was he from the liberal wing of the CIA who supported RFK? And how does he remember Campbell so clearly talking to Morales if he did not know who Campbell was back in 1968? If one takes this report at face value, there were four CIA operatives at the Ambassador that night. All out in the open in the midst of cameras, film equipment, and tape recorders. And if Rabern recognized Morales, didn’t Morales recognize Rabern? If so, what did he say to him?

    Now, the BBC report has stirred at least two reactions. Mel Ayton, a British anti-conspiracy author, wrote up a reply about a week later, and updated it a week after that. The first part of his response is worthless since it uses the shameful work of Dan Moldea to respond to the points made by Teeter. But he does bring up some notable disagreement with the photo identifications. For instance, Dan Hardway who worked with Lopez at the HSCA did not identify Joannides in the pictures. He said his encounter with him was too long ago for him to venture an opinion on the matter. Ayton says he talked to Grayston Lynch, who also worked out of JM/WAVE and knew Campbell. Ayton writes, “According to Lynch the man in the LAPD film footage is not Campbell.” Ayton also quotes a man named Col. Manuel Chavez who worked with Morales for a period of time in 1964. Chavez says the man depicted in the special “does not look like Dave Morales.”

    Now the above does not mean that the BBC special is wrong, but it does point up the problems with using photo identification as a tool to solve a crime. Tony Summers chimed in on this point by saying, “Photographs and photographic recognition are infamously unreliable, especially coming from witnesses so long after an event.” I should point out that in the JFK case, the photo identifications of the three tramps in Dealey Plaza have been a continual source of error and embarrassment. As has the alleged identification of Joseph Milteer along the motorcade route.

    In speaking with author David Talbot, he and Jefferson Morley were commissioned by The New Yorker to do a follow up story on the BBC report. Talbot has been working for years on a book about Robert Kennedy. The New Yorker got hold of a galley proof of his long-awaited book and they were impressed. They are going to excerpt the book and also do a supplementary report on this alleged identification. This report is scheduled to run in May. Hopefully Morley and Talbot will be able to do more ground work on the matter. Like, for example, finding the three CIA officers next of kin and asking if they were with them on that rather memorable night.

  • Hugh Aynesworth Never Quits

    If you do a search of this web site on the name “Hugh Aynesworth,” you will come up with several matches. None of them are complimentary. Probe magazine did a lot of work on Mr. Aynesworth. We discovered that in regards to the JFK case, to call him a “journalist” was, to be kind, rather stretching the term. As Bill Davy notes in his book Let Justice be Done, even journalists in New Orleans covering the Jim Garrison inquiry questioned his practices (and also those of his friend and partner, the late James Phelan).

    Well, it appears that Hugh Aynesworth is still carrying a torch for Clay Shaw. At a time of life when he could be enjoying retirement, the 75-year-old Aynesworth is believed to be the principal source for a screenplay centering on Jim Garrison’s investigation. The screenplay is now being shopped around Hollywood. But unlike Oliver Stone’s 1991 blockbuster JFK, this version of events portrays Clay Shaw in a favorable light.

    The screenplay was written by one Jim Piddock, a writer and actor who is apparently a babe in the woods on the JFK case. He actually takes Aynesworth seriously. Well, worse than seriously. He trots out this golden oldie: that Aynesworth and a few other intrepid reporters protected the world from the deluded Garrison and helped save the saintly Clay Shaw. (Yawn.)

    Just how under the spell of Aynesworth is Jim Piddock? Piddock calls Oliver Stone’s film “entirely fictional” and a piece of “nonsense.” He actually quotes Aynesworth as saying: “Well, at least Stone got two things right about Kennedy’s death: the time and the date.” There’s an objective source.

    Piddock states that the Garrison case against Shaw has parallels with today. These parallels are “in terms of the abuse of power after a national tragedy and the manipulation of the public by powerful but unscrupulous and corrupt men…” Yeah Jim, just look at the guy you’re talking to.

    When Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, Aynesworth went on one of his patented mini-rampages. He was on one of the news networks claiming that he saw Garrison bribing someone. (The reporter didn’t bother to ask: Who was it and for what purpose?) And he wrote a series of articles that appeared in some Texas newspapers basically recycling a lot of the anti-Garrison propaganda that he had originated years before. Clearly, the Stone film disturbed him since Garrison was allowed to make a lot of his case to the public directly, without Aynesworth and Phelan et al biting him in the back.

    None of Aynesworth’s antics in the early 1990s were much different from his assassination work in the 1960s. In 1964 he wrote a hatchet job review of Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?, one of the very first books on the Kennedy assassination. “If you would listen to [Joesten],” Aynesworth sneered, “he would have you thinking that Lee Harvey Oswald was a polite little misunderstood youth who just got mixed up in the wrong company … It’s the same old tripe with some new flavoring.” And in a notorious May 1967 Newsweek article, Aynesworth called Jim Garrison’s investigation “a plot of Garrison’s own making.” He alleged the New Orleans DA offered a witness $3,000 “if only he would ‘fill in the facts’ of the alleged meeting to plot the death of the President.”

    Jim Garrison himself said Aynesworth “seemed a gentle and fair enough man” when Aynesworth interviewed him. But the DA found out different. “As for the $3,000 bribe, by the time I came across Aynesworth’s revelation, the witness our office had supposedly offered it to, Alvin Beaubeouff, had admitted to us it never happened.” If the Newsweek article was typical of Aynesworth’s work, Garrison observed, then it was hard to undertand how he kept getting his stuff published.

    With the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, many more pages of documents have been released showing how tightly bound Aynesworth was with the intelligence community. It has been demonstrated that Aynesworth was — at the minimum — working with the Dallas Police, Shaw’s defense team, and the FBI. He was also an informant to the White House, and had once applied for work with the CIA. As I have noted elsewhere, in the annals of this case, I can think of no “reporter” who had such extensive contacts with those trying to cover up the facts in the JFK case. And only two come close: Edward Epstein and Gerald Posner.

    Whatever Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Piddock might say, it is important to remember the simple fact that Clay Shaw committed perjury. He lied to his own defense counsel in open court about his supposed non-relationship to the CIA. And he lied twice in a 1967 interview with the CBC’s Gordon Donaldson. Donaldson asked Shaw if he ever worked for the CIA and whether he had an affiliation with that agency. To the first question Shaw answered: “No.” To the second question Shaw replied: “None whatsoever.” We know better today.

    Jim Piddock has been involved in some of the worst movies put out by Hollywood of late — which is saying a lot. But take a look, if you can, at things like The Man and An Alan Smithee Film. Piddock says that he knows that films like his Garrison/Shaw opus are not easy to get made. Let’s hope that with his track record — and his sources — it doesn’t. What the world needs now is anything but more Hugh Ayesworth.

    Read some more about Piddock’s project.

    Read some more about Hugh Aynesworth.

  • Hugh Aynesworth: Refusing a Conspiracy is his Life’s Work

    Hugh Aynesworth: Refusing a Conspiracy is his Life’s Work

    hugh
    Hugh Aynesworth

    At the time of the assassination, Hugh Aynesworth was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He has maintained that on November 22, 1963 he was in Dealey Plaza and a witness to the assassination — although there is no photograph that reveals such. At times, he has also maintained he was at the scene where Tippit was shot — although it is difficult to locate a time for his being there. He has also stated that he was at the Texas Theater where Oswald was arrested — although, again, no film or photo attests to this. Further, he has written that he was in the basement of the Dallas Police Department when Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. Like Priscilla Johnson, Aynesworth soon decided to make his career out of this event. As we shall see, it is quite clear that he made up his mind immediately about Oswald’s guilt. Long before the Warren Report was issued. In fact, he tried to influence their verdict.

    On July 21, 1964 Aynesworth’s name surfaced in the newspapers in Dallas in a column by his friend Holmes Alexander. Alexander implied that Aynesworth did not trust Earl Warren and therefore was conducting his own investigation of the Kennedy murder. He was ready to reveal that the FBI knew Oswald was a potential assassin and blew their assignment. He also had talked to Marina Oswald and she had told him that Oswald had also threatened to kill Richard Nixon. Alexander goes on to say that these kinds of incidents show the mind of a killer at work. That “of a hard-driven, politically radical Leftist which is emerging from the small amount of news put out by the Warren Commission. If the full report follows the expected line, Oswald will be shown as a homicidal maniac.” Holmes concludes his piece with a warning: If the Commission’s verdict “jibes with that of Aynesworth’s independent research, credibility will be added to its findings. If [it] does not there will be some explaining to do.” Clearly, Aynesworth contributed mightily to the article, had decided Oswald had done it even before the Commission had revealed its evidence, and was bent on destroying its credibility if it differed from his opinion.

    The story about Marina and Nixon was so farfetched that not even the Warren Commission bought into it (Warren Report pp. 187-188). It has been demolished by many authors; most notably Peter Scott who notes that to believe it, Marina had to have locked Oswald in the bathroom to keep him from committing this murderous act; yet the bathroom locked from the inside. Also, as the Commission noted in the pages above, Nixon was not in Dallas until several months after the alleged incident. Further, there was no announcement in any local newspaper that Nixon was going to be in Dallas at this time period — April of 1963. Since Aynesworth was quite close to Marina at this time (he actually bragged to some friends that he was sleeping with her) it may be that he foisted the quite incredible story on her in his attempt to portray Oswald as the Leftist, homicidal maniac he related to Holmes Alexander.

    Aynesworth was also out to profit personally from the tragedy. In late June of 1964, Oswald’s alleged diary from his Russian days appeared in Aynesworth’s newspaper with a commentary by the reporter. Two weeks later it also appeared in U. S. News and World Report. An FBI investigation followed to see how this material leaked into the press. In declassified documents, it appears that the diary was pilfered from the Dallas Police archives by the notorious assistant DA Bill Alexander and then given to his friend Aynesworth. Aynesworth then put it on the market to other magazines including Newsweek. It eventually ended up in Life magazine also. Alexander, Aynesworth and the reporter’s wife Paula split thousands of dollars. Oswald’s widow was paid later by Life since, originally, Aynesworth had illegally cut her out of the deal. In another FBI report of July 7th, it also appears that Aynesworth was using the so-called diary for career advancement purposes. A source told the Bureau that part of the deal with Newsweek was that Aynesworth was to become their Dallas correspondent. As the Bureau noted, Aynesworth did become their Dallas stringer afterward. (It is interesting to note here that the “diary” has been shown to have been not a real diary at all. That is, it was not recorded on a daily basis but rather in two or three sittings.)

    Right after this, in August of 1964, another trademark of Aynseworth’s Kennedy career appeared: his penchant to attack and ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. Aynesworth published a review of Joachim Joesten’s early book on the case entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy. The review is not really a review at all, it is just a string of invective directed at the author for believing such silly notions that Oswald could have been innocent and that he could have been an agent of the FBI and/or CIA. When rumors circulated that Oswald had been an FBI informant, which he apparently was, Aynesworth went to work discrediting them saying that it was all a joke he had made up — even though he was not the source of the quite specific information.

    In December of 1966, Aynesworth surfaced again on the Kennedy case. At this time Life was doing its ill-fated reinvestigation of the murder led by Holland McCombs and Richard Billings. Somehow, probably through McCombs who was a good friend of Clay Shaw, Aynesworth was a part of this investigation. Aynesworth began informing on the intricacies of the probe to the FBI. For instance on December 12th, Aynesworth informed the Bureau that they had discovered a man who connected Oswald with Ruby. Aynesworth turned over a copy of this report to the FBI. He also then told the Bureau that Mark Lane was a homosexual and had to drop his political career because of these allegations. At the end of the interview Aynesworth “specifically requested” his identity and his sources not be disclosed outside the Bureau.

    Billings’ investigation eventually and perhaps inevitably ran into the initial stages of the secret probe being conducted by District Attorney Jim Garrison. And because a mutual acquaintance of Billings and Garrison, David Chandler, was involved, Aynesworth was one of the first people to discover what Garrison was doing. The unsuspecting Garrison actually granted the duplicitous reporter an interview in his home. After the interview, Aynesworth wrote a note to McCombs that they should not let the DA know they were playing “both sides.” Recall, this was the first time they had met face to face! So much for a modicum of objectivity.

    Almost immediately Aynesworth set out to smear Garrison in the national press, to obstruct him by cooperating with law enforcement agencies who were opposed to the DA, and to defeat him in court by extending his services to Shaw’s lawyers. All of the above is readily provable today as it had not been before the releases of the ARRB. It would not be hyperbole to write that no other reporter in recorded history had as much to do in opposing a DA both covertly and overtly as Aynesworth did in New Orleans from 1967-71. Especially when one extends Aynesworth’s actions to connect with his two allies in this effort, namely James Phelan and the late Walter Sheridan. (Significantly, when the ARRB requested the files of Sheridan on the 1967 NBC special he produced, Sheridan’s family sent them to NBC. And the network refused to turn them over.) Aynesworth’s actions are too lengthy to be discussed here but they are recorded in detail in Probe Magazine (Vol. 4 No. 4) and also in the book The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (pp. 24-29). Aynesworth published an attack on Garrison in Newsweek on May 15, 1967 (about a week after Phelan’s broadside had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.) The “report” was clearly a venomous hatchet job that had one aim: to stigmatize Garrison and, by doing that, to neutralize his investigation by turning the public’s attention away from his discoveries and toward the controversy being manufactured by Aynesworth, Phelan, and NBC’s special which was to follow the next month. The article depicted Garrison as a modern day Robespierre whose investigation had bribed witnesses into making false claims, whose staff had threatened to murder a witness, and finally that Garrison was so possessed he held the entire city in thrall by terrorist tactics.

    We have seen how Aynesworth informed on the Billings investigation with the FBI. On the Garrison case, he extended his reach. Before his article was printed, he forwarded a copy to George Christian who was press secretary for the White House. But not before he had called him and discussed his inflammatory and deceitful article. The actual telegram he sent is interesting in revealing his psychology. He tells Christian that he is informing because he is aware of what Garrison is up to. What, in Aynesworth’s view, is he up to? He is trying “to make it seem that the FBI and CIA are involved in the JFK plot.” But further, “he can —and probably will — do untold damage to this nation’s image throughout the world.” Finally, he tells Christian that although Garrison wants the government to defy him or to pressure a halt to his probe, that is not what they should do, “for that is exactly what Garrison wants.” Of course, he again asked that his role be kept a secret. These last two assertions imply that Aynesworth would serve as the intermediary to obstruct Garrison clandestinely while claiming to be a reporter so that the government could keep its hands clean as he did their dirty work for them.

    Further insight into Aynesworth’s peculiar psychology came in an interview in 1979 on KERA, the Dallas PBS affiliate. He said there, “I’m not saying there wasn’t a conspiracy. I know most people in this country believe there was a conspiracy. I just refuse to accept it and that’s my life’s work.” In other words, what the facts are do not really matter to him. It’s keeping the lid on a conspiracy to commit homicide that matters. (Wouldn’t it have been interesting if Jennings would have confronted Aynesworth with that statement and asked him to explain his view of journalism in light of it?)

    By the 1990’s Aynesworth’s role had been so exposed to those in the know that he couldn’t appear at research conferences. So he did not show up at them himself — as he may have, for surveillance purposes, earlier. Instead he arranged other conferences to eclipse them, as he did in 1993 for the 30th anniversary of the assassination. At this one in Dallas, someone asked him this: Had he ever cooperated with the government on a story prior to its publication? He denied it of course. Then the questioner read him the Christian memo quoted above.

    Why couldn’t Jennings do the same?

  • Why ABC?

    The Seizing of the American Broadcasting Company ABC is offering a new pro-Warren Commission television documentary — the latest in a long line of support for the party line. But who watches the watchdogs? This article probes the background of the purchase of ABC by Capital Cities Communications in 1985. This Introduction sets the story up with a 2003 perspective.

    Capital Cities Before it Bought ABC How Cap Cities developed into the powerhouse it is today.

    David Westin The President of ABC News.

    John Stossel ABC’s “Consumer advocate” more closely resembles a corporate advocate. Whose side is he on?

    ABC and the Rise of Rush Limbaugh How CC/ABC launched Rush Limbaugh and ushered in a new era in radio.

  • Script of “CBS News, ABC News, and the Lone Assassin Theory”

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)