JFK Conference: Rex Bradford detailed the historic importance of the Church Committee

[Octafish]

As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend "Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" at Duquesne University.

One of the important speakers there I was privileged to meet and hear, Mr. Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, discussed “Political Assassinations Revealed: The Church Committee.” In addition to documenting numerable illegal and unconstitutional actions by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and others in the secret government, are more than willing to lie about it to Under Oath to Congress, meaning there is no accountability for extralegal action, including political assassination and mass murder, to We the People.



Mr. Bradford focused on the Church Committee and its investigations in 1975, the year after Richard Milhous Nixon resigned.

“I think what they did was very valuable work, doing the detailed documentation of the plots to kill Castro and others. Because, I have no doubt, if not for what the Church Committee did, the whole idea that the CIA plotted against these people would be one of these conspiracy theories you hear about with pros and cons, and, reminiscent of some of the other matter that’s before us this week. It’s also striking how much, I think, things have changed in America since 1975. Nowadays, the U.S. openly conducts drone strikes against foreign adversaries, whose senior officials we call, quote, bad guys; and along with collateral damage of family members, the associates who may or may not themselves be bad guys, and the occasional wedding party. In 1975, by contrast, it was a national scandal, the very idea that the executive branch of the U.S. government would contemplate targeted killings abroad.”

-- Rex Bradford, Oct. 18, 2013

Nixon, few remember, had been the victim of a Pentagon spy ring, the Moorer-Radford Affair, in 1971. The elections following Watergate, the resignation and revelations of the Church Committee brought us some important Liberal voices to Washington, including Henry Waxman and Patrick Leahy and other anti-war Democratic leaders. Their work included new laws for open government and sunshine statutes making public many records of import to democracy.

Gerald Ford, the first un-elected president and once a member of the Warren Commission, succeeded Nixon. With Ford, Donald Rumsfeld returned to the White House, accompanied by young Dick Cheney. Then, one day during an off-the-record luncheon for journalistic bigwigs, Ford accidentally revealed the CIA assassination program. One of the journalists present later related what happened to Daniel Schorr, who took the story worldwide via CBS News. The spaghetti hit the fan later on, during the congressional investigations, including the Pike Committee in the House.

“I can only imagine what Dick Cheney thought as New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug took on the National Security Agency,” Bradford said.

Bradford added that the Church Committee succeeded in opening up for full view the nefarious activities of U.S. intelligence agenencies: History. Rationales. Abuses. 14 Volumes of reports from a one-and-a-half-year investigation. The volumes' bland titles don't don’t cover the range of topics discussed within, from the FBI COINTELPRO operations for domestic disruption; to the harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; to the Joint FBI-CIA mail opening operation; to warrantless electronic surveillance and black bag jobs by FBI and CIA; illegal CIA domestic spying programs and operations, including CHAOS; covert operations and coup plotting against Chile and other nations; and other important topics. Bradford specifically mentioned:

The Church Committee revealed two important areas:

1.) Foreign assassination plotting by the CIA, and

2.) Limited review they conducted of some aspects of the (John F.) Kennedy assassination.

The Chuch Committee made public the secret history of the CIA Executive Action assassination program. It examined the CIA's efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and Rene Schneider of Chile. The committee also received info, but didn’t examine the cases of Achmed Sukarno in Indonesia and Papa Doc Duvallier in Haiti.

It's interesting to remember that the press revealed some spectacular information about the CIA program, including exploding sea shells, chemical to make Castro's beard fall off. The reality that is not mentioned is the operations were not Keystone Kops: They were deadly serious. Most of the CIA plots involved machine guns, rifles, pistols, explosives, poisons. And four of the five on the list are dead. Only Castro survived.

In 1967, President Johnson ordered a CIA Inspector General to investigate and report on the Castro plots. The resulting record, Bradford reported, is incomplete, especially missing reports of any interviews with John and Robert Kennedy and CIA's Desmond Fitzgerald and Allen Dulles. Later on, when the Church Committee investigated, other important witnesses had passed, including Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli -- the former found shot five times in the mouth while in federal protective custody and the latter found cut in pieces inside a 55 gallon oil drum floating off the coast of Florida.

Of course, "Plausible Denial" ended many an investigation. What's telling are the phony "201 Files" and other forged, faked, and back-dated documents that were part of the plans of operations from their inception, making it difficult to investigate the connections between participants and events. The record extant, however, is sufficient for people to make clear connections between players and events. This all from Mr. Bradford also brought to my mind we don’t get this in the nation's news media.

Thankfully, while omitted from Corporate McPravda, we have talked about them on DU: Some of the players in ZR Rifle and Operation 40 rose to prominence, including Porter Goss and Friend of Poppy Bush Felix Rodriguez.

Sen. Frank Church led an investigation into the NSA. The NSA launched a secret investigation into Sen. Frank Church. Guess which one was in the public interest? Church lost re-election in the "Reagan Landslide" of 1980. One more thing to remember: The Church Committee was the last time Congress investigated and held to task the intelligence community and the national security establishment, the secret government, that drives the policy of wars for profit and to make the rich get richer.

[Mika]

1. I just posted this in a Venezuela thread

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

[Octafish]

3. Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer

More on the big shots at Corporate McPravda:

Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer

by Daniel Brandt
From NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997

EXCERPT...

OSS veteran Frank Wisner ran most of the early peacetime covert operations as head of the Office of Policy Coordination. Although funded by the CIA, OPC wasn't integrated into the CIA's Directorate of Plans until 1952, under OSS veteran Allen Dulles. Both Wisner and Dulles were enthusiastic about covert operations. By mid-1953 the department was operating with 7,200 personnel and 74 percent of the CIA's total budget.

Wisner created the first "information superhighway." But this was the age of vacuum tubes, not computers, so he called it his "Mighty Wurlitzer." The CIA's global network funded the Italian elections in 1948, sent paramilitary teams into Albania, trained Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, and pumped money into the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the National Student Association, and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Key leaders and labor unions in western Europe received subsidies, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were launched. The Wurlitzer, an organ designed for film productions, could imitate sounds such as rain, thunder, or an auto horn. Wisner and Dulles were at the keyboard, directing history.

The ethos of the fight against fascism carried over into the fight against godless communism; for these warriors, the Cold War was still a war. OSS highbrows had already embraced psychological warfare as a new social science: propaganda, for example, was divided into "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source), "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such).[1]

After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in U.S. psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using U.S. public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3]

The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of "democracy" obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis -- the capacity to see and understand the world around them -- entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.namebase.org/news17.html

Cover-ups bother me, too, Mika. "Top Secret" doesn't trump Democracy, and it certainly doesn't trump the Constitution.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. As always... THANK YOU Octafish!!!

[Octafish]

6. You are most welcome, Cooley Hurd!

Rex Bradford is a national treasure.

The Fourteen Minute Gap.



There's more ahead. And DU's got the negatives.

[Rex]

4. Smart man that Rex fella.

nt.

[Octafish]

8. ‘Phoney 201 (file)….all documents therein forged and backdated’

ZR/RIFLE got started in December 1960 by William K. Harvey, a kind of twilight zone of who salutes whom and reports to nobody, a world where top secret government agents are in bed with the mafia.

“Should have phoney 201 in RI to backstop this, all documents therein forged & backdated. Should look like a CE file…….Cover: planning should include provision for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow.”

— Excerpt from “Project ZRRIFLE” notes, created in December 1960, by William K. Harvey, the CIA officer in charge of this assassinations project.

And then, they lie to investigators after Dallas.

The only good thing about this, Rex: Rex has the documents.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Back then, there was lots of tv coverage of the Committee findings.

Our preferred station was CBS tv. for news.
Lots of screen time for Committee members remarks.
Lots of newspaper coverage too.
I remember there was a feeling of pride about Church, we kinda claimed him as "ours" in Washington state, tho he was Idaho Sen.
So soon after Watergate, we had confidence the process was working, there was oversight, wrongs would be righted.

Damn..I was so blissfully naive.

[Octafish]

14. And then, it was gone...

Thanks to Poppy's Crew.

CIA Censors Books

Bush Perfects the Cover-up

excerpted from the book

Secrets

The CIA's War at Home

by Angus Mackenzie

University of California Press, 1997, paper

EXCERPT...

Bush Perfects the Cover-up

Amid the numerous scandals of the Nixon administration and under particular pressure from partisans of Ralph Nader, Congress was moving toward a new openness. Amendments to strengthen the I966 Freedom of Information Act were drafted. The FOIA had been reduced to near uselessness by bureaucratic intransigence and judicial refusals to restrain executive secrecy. The U.S. Supreme Court, in deciding the I973 FOIA case Environmental Protection Agency v Mink, had said the courts should not be allowed to inspect classified national security records unless Congress directed otherwise. By rejecting judicial review, the Supreme Court had in the Mink case adopted basically the same line of reasoning as had Chief Judge Haynsworth in the Marchetti case.

In the fall of I974, however, Congress amended the FOIA to reverse the Mink decision. The main proponents of the amendment were Edward Kennedy in the Senate and John E. Moss in the House. The amendment explicitly authorized federal judges to inspect classified records in chambers in order to determine whether the government was warranted in withholding them from public release. In addition, Congress added teeth to the FOIA in several other ways. In the future, the government would have to prove why secrecy was necessary for each specific case. Government agencies would have to publish indexes identifying information that had been made public, as a means of assisting citizens in locating government documents. And the fees charged to citizens for copies of government records, which sometimes were prohibitively high, could be waived under a new range of circumstances, thus ensuring that fees could not be used as barriers to disclosures. Bureaucratic delays in the release of data also were sharply curtailed. A new deadline of ten working days was imposed on the government for all FOIA requests. In a case in which the government denied a request, a twenty-day appeal period was established, after which the case could be taken to court.

The CIA would spend the next two decades fighting the release of documents to citizens who requested them under the FOIA. For CIA officials, whose lives were dedicated to secrecy, the logic behind the checks and balances of the three-branch system of government may have been incomprehensible. The idea that federal judges not trained in espionage could inspect CIA files and even order their release was enough to curdle the blood of secret operatives like Richard Ober. CIA officers felt that neither Congress nor the courts could comprehend the perils that faced secret agents. Their instinctive reaction, therefore, was to find any avenue by which they could avoid judicial or journalistic scrutiny.

A month after Congress enacted the new FOIA amendments, someone at the CIA leaked the news of MHCHAOS to Seymour Hersh at the New York Times. Hersh's article appeared on the front page of the December 22, I974, issue under the headline "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years." Although sparse in detail, the article revealed that the CIA had spied on U.S. citizens in a massive domestic operation, keeping 10,000 dossiers on individuals and groups and violating the I947 National Security Act. Hersh reported that intelligence officials were claiming the domestic operations began as legitimate spying to investigate overseas connections to dissenters.

Gerald Ford, who only four and a half months earlier had assumed the presidency in the wake of Nixon's resignation, took the public position that the CIA would be ordered to cease and desist. William Colby, who had replaced James Schlesinger as CIA director, was told to issue a report on MHCHAOS to Henry Kissinger. Apparently Ford was not informed that Kissinger was well aware of the operation. A few days later, after Helms categorically denied that the CIA had conducted "illegal" spying, Ford named Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head a commission that would be charged with making a more comprehensive report. Ford's choice of Rockefeller to head the probe was most fortunate for Ober. Rockefeller was closely allied with Kissinger, who had been a central figure in the former New York governor's I968 presidential primary campaign. Although Rockefeller was well regarded in media and political circles for his streak of independence, it was all but certain from the beginning that his report would amount to a cover-up.

p64
A continuing series of scandals had eroded the CIA's public credibility. In November I975, Frank Church's Senate committee reported that the CIA had tried to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and had engineered the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the new Republic of the Congo. The Church Committee also contradicted the sworn testimony of Richard Helms by revealing that the CIA had helped engineer the I973 coup in Chile. Moreover, several former CIA operatives-Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Stanley Sheinbaum-had joined the CounterSpy advisory board to help consolidate the outside pressure against the CIA.'

The CIA was not without resources, of course. In I975, former CIA officers, including David Atlee Phillips, organized the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers to undertake a public relations campaign to enhance the Agency's image. Phillips also operated behind the scenes. He told Marchetti, whose name was on the CounterSpy masthead, "Get your name off. We're going to land on them." Marchetti respected the CIA's power and took the warning to heart. He withdrew from the magazine and talked others into leaving with him.

Just before Christmas I975, a tragedy had provided an opportunity to shift the scrutiny away from the CIA scandals. In Athens, Greece, the CIA chief of station Richard Skeffington Welch was assassinated on December 23, gunned down as he returned to his house from a party at the U.S. ambassador's residence. His death focused attention on the danger inherent in publishing the names of CIA agents. Welch had been identified as a CIA officer in a letter to the editor published by the Athens News a month earlier on November 25. The letter, signed by the "Committee of Greeks and Greek Americans to Prevent Their Country, Their Fatherland, from Being Perverted to the Uses of the CIA," denounced the CIA for its role in the installation of a reactionary Greek government. While Welch's assassins most likely learned about his CIA affiliation from this letter (or from his decision to live in an Athens house well known as a CIA residence), most of the blame for his death was aimed at CounterSpy, which also had printed Welch's name.

In the midst of the Senate vote to confirm George Bush in January I976, intelligence officials were making no secret of their outrage over Welch's death and their fury at CounterSpy. A well-known reporter told editor Tim Butz that his own life had been threatened by angry former intelligence officers, and Butz began to carry a gun. Members of the New York intelligentsia, who had been drawn to CounterSpy by Norman Mailer, began to keep their distance. It was unseemly to be contributing money to a magazine accused of having blood on its hands.

Even though CIA critics were put on the defensive by the Welch assassination, it did not take Bush long to appreciate that he had his work cut out for him when it came to casting the Agency in a positive light. Less than a month after taking over, he had to answer questions about a report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Although the House had voted to suppress the report at President Ford's request, someone leaked it. The whole report, known as the Pike Report after U.S. Representative Otis Pike, Democrat of New York, was reprinted in the Village Voice issues of February I6 and z3, I976.

The Pike Report was shocking because it provided the first official overview of CIA excesses: the Agency ran large propaganda operations, bankrolled armies of its own, and incurred billions in unsupervised expenses. The report revealed that top CIA officials had tolerated cost overruns nearly 400 percent beyond the Agency budget for foreign operations and 500 percent beyond the budget for domestic operations, for years concealing their profligacy from Congress. The CIA also was said to have secretly built up a military capacity larger than most foreign armies; the CIA and FBI between them had spent $I0 billion with little independent supervision. Further, the CIA's single biggest category of overseas covert projects involved the news media: it supported friendly news publications, planted articles in newspapers, and distributed ClA-sponsored books and leaflets. The phony CIA dispatches had often found their way into domestic news stories, thus polluting with inaccuracies the news received by Americans.

SOURCE:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CensorsBooks_SecretsCIA.html

That above, we learned thanks to the Church Committee. We need a party full of Frank Churchs.

[dixiegrrrrl]

16. "We Americans are the ultimate innocents......

"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

Sydney Schanberg

[leftstreet]

7. Fascinating reminder re: Congressional investigations

It's hard to imagine a Congressional investigation nowadays

DURec

[Octafish]

15. Church Committee was last time INTEL Services held to public scrutiny

Some of what they found: FBI DESTROYED OSWALD EVIDENCE.

Destruction of the Oswald Note

In 1975, the allegation surfaced that the FBI had destroyed a note delivered to it by Lee Harvey Oswald, just one or two weeks prior to the assassination of President Kennedy. An internal FBI investigation failed to find any records relating to this, but interviews of Dallas Field Office personnel established that an Oswald visit and note dropoff had occurred.

The House Judiciary Committee heard testimony from several relevant witnesses, as did the contemporaneous Church Committee. The results of this were:

• Oswald definitely did visit the Dallas Field Office a week to two weeks prior to the assassination, looking for Agent (James) Hosty, who had recently visited his wife Marina.

• When told that Hosty was not in, Oswald left a note in an envelope which was unsealed.

• The note contained some sort of threat, but accounts varied widely as to whether Oswald threatened to "blow up the FBI" or merely "report this to higher authorities."

• Within hours after Oswald's murder on 24 Nov 1963, Hosty destroyed the note and a memorandum which Special-Agent-in-Charge Gordon Shanklin had ordered written on November 22.

Hosty maintained that Shanklin, head of the Dallas Field Office, had ordered him to destroy the note. Shanklin denied ever having heard of the note until 1975, though Assistant Director William Sullivan did recall the incident. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reviewed the incident and did not find Shanklin's denial credible.

CONTINUED...

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Destruction_of_the_Oswald_Note

The Nation can use some more Church Committees nowadays.

[Bolo Boffin]

17. Very odd behavior for someone who's been hired by the CIA to kill Kennedy.

Or hired by anti-Castro exiles or the MIC, what have you. Showing up and getting irate at an FBI office two weeks before such a huge hit? Not very professional of Oswald.

[IDemo]

9. Hard to conceive, but Idaho was a Democratic state back then

We had the great Frank Church and the greatest governor ever of the state - Cecil Andrus. The doofus who beat Frank Church seemed to kick off a steady stream here of RW embarrassments of the Michele Bachmann mold and it's been downhill ever since.

[Octafish]

24. Frank Church warned us about the Secret Government and then got the Treatment

Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.

The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.

Newly minted CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush would help shut down the investigation by making a case that former agents leaked the CIA station chief in Greece's name. Of course, no one brought up the point that the man's name was well known before any leaks, as detailed in Reply 14 above.

And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:

In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.

SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1

Sorry this is so late in reply. Just want to say thank you for grokking, IDemo!

[sabrina 1]

30. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people "

Only a fool would disagree with him on that. Especially after the recent revelations of the NSA. And to think we have people still defending what they are doing??

Are they naive or just willfully blind? Either way they are aiding and abetting the death of democracy whether they know it or not.

Thank you Octafish, once again for all you do to keep the people informed.

[Octafish]

34. Bush represents the Dulles Brothers in the present Age.

Since the assassination of President Kennedy 50 years ago, money has trumped peace. Its agent is secret, unaccountable government, which has worked to create the richest and most powerful class in history.


The people who tried to overthrow FDR in 1933 had kids.

ETA: You are most welcome, sabrina1! With Truth, We the People can do anything.

[RobertEarl]

10. One good thing

They aren't smart enough to figure out how to game the vote counting computers.

'Cuz if they did, we'd be in a world full of republicans and Dinos. hmmmm

[Octafish]

25. They don't like to take chances. Funny, that 80 Year Line of Dots...

...goes straight back through Wall Street to Smedley Butler, who the Big Money Warmongers approached to lead the Coup against FDR, who won an election to bring change -- including the New Deal and Keynesian Economics.

[Mnemosyne]

11. Thank you much, Octafish. Once again giving me so much material to read, my brain starts to reel!

Glad you enjoyed your conference!

[Octafish]

22. Rex Bradford addressed LBJ-Hoover phone call about Mexico City...

One thing more: Rex Bradford addressed LBJ-Hoover phone call about Mexico City...

... Mr. Bradford explained the LBJ Library contains tapes with the conversations that took place on Nov. 23, 1963. Only the one between President Lyndon B. Johnson and FBI director J Edgar Hoover is missing.

"No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason—we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there." -- FBI director J Edgar Hoover to President Lyndon B. Johnson

SOURCE: http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_Mexico_City_Tapes

Which means that someone impersonated Oswald; certain CIA officers made the imposter out to be Oswald; other CIA and FBI people said, "No, that's not Oswald." And other individuals hoped would be covered-up by stating the matter was a case of "National Security."

Thank you for the kind words, Mnemosyne! Wish I was a better communicator to get all of what was said at Duquesne onto DU, the information is that important. The above is from Mr. Bradford's "History Matters" web site. The page goes to links with details -- important information that every DUer and anyone else who cares about democracy and the Nation should know.

[sabrina 1]

31. I just saw that, re Oswald in Mexico, for the first time this week.

They've explained it be claiming their cameras weren't working right, or something.

Focusing on whether or not Oswald was the shooter is distracting from the real question. Was he just a puppet for someone else?

[Octafish]

32. Absolute Distraction.

Same with all the controversy generated about Oswald in Mexico City, the ambush in Dealey Plaza, magic bullets, photos, films, Dictabelts, etc, etc, etc.

The facts show conspiracy that goes straight to the offices of unaccountable secret government -- the issue that must be uncovered, examined and prosecuted.

[sabrina 1]

33. I agree. I can accept that Oswald was the shooter, but not that he acted alone. So I don't generally

bother arguing over the forensic evidence. He certainly seems to have been someone who could easily be used to do something like this. They certainly aren't going to do it themselves are they?

[Wilms]

12. ^

[johnnyreb]

13. Sunday kick.

And rec.

[robertpaulsen]

18. Monday kick

I'm enjoying immensely this entire series of OPs. Thanks for attending and reporting!

[MinM]

19. Sen Richard Schweiker chaired a subcommittee under the "Church Committee"

"The Warren Commission has collapsed like a House of Cards" -- Senator Schweiker

"The Warren Commission was set up at the time to feed pablum to the American people for reasons not yet known .. One of the Biggest Cover-ups in the history of this Country occurred at that time." -- Sen. Richard Schweiker (6:30 into the 1978 documentary above)

From 1975 to '76, Schweiker chaired a subcommittee under the "Church Committee" that looked into to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In an interview on Face the Nation, he claimed the original investigation "was snuffed out before it even began" and that "the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was to not use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up." ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Schweiker

A couple of side notes...

1) It's very powerful watching Senator Schweiker's smackdown of the Warren Commission.

2) You will never see a Republican like Richard Schweiker again. The Koch Bros & Co. would never allow it.

[Octafish]

20. 'The Warren Commission has collapsed like a House of Cards' -- Sen. Richard Schweiker

"Pabulum." Thank you for the heads-up, MinM.

[font color="blue"]"I think the (Warren) report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards.....the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up." -- Sen. Richard Schweiker on Face the Nation[/font color]

So. I wonder why Face the Nation failed to follow up on what Sen. Schweiker said?

Could it be the same reason all of Corporate McPravda failed to follow up on what Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's kids said?

A boss I once knew was friends with a guy who knew Schweiker well and said the same as you, MinM, about Sen. Richard S. Schweiker, (R-PA): Said the same thing, "A Man of Integrity."

[JackRiddler]

29. Unbelievable!

[bobthedrummer]

21. Thanks again Octafish. K&R + a couple of links relevant to this thread.

The House also looked into many aspects of the "intelligence community", law enforcement, the military, etc after Watergate.
Here's an old thread I started March 11, 2008 about the House investigations (some 404's due to the time factor-but the context is correct)

The Pike Committee
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2990965

The National Security Archive recently posted another National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book about the Diem assassination. One thing stood out, for me "...President Kennedy acted primarily as a moderator, eliciting the views of his advisors by posing questions and listening to the ensuing discussion. ..."

The Diem Coup After 50 Years
John F. Kennedy And South Vietnam, 1963
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 444 ( posted 11-1-13 edited by John Prados)
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB444

[Mc Mike]

23. Recced. Thanks Octa. Nt.

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

26. Great post.

Thanks!

[Octafish]

28. You are welcome, JimboBillyBubbaBob! Rex Bradford is a great guy!

His websites are Centers of Truth in a sea of disinformation, distraction and disturbed minds:

The Mary Ferrell Foundation: http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

History Matters: http://www.history-matters.com/

He also is kind to the "regular people" who happen by.

[CanSocDem]

27. Kick for the masses. (eom)