Michael Parenti - The JFK assassination, strange accounts

[Coyotl]

The JFK assassination, strange accounts

E-mail from Michael Parenti
Today at 9:43 PM

A number of people have asked me if I was going to write anything about the JFK assassination, or had I done so in the past .
Yes, 17 years ago I wrote two longish articles about the JFK killing. (They appeared in DIRTY TRUTHS, a book of my essays dealing with a wide variety of subjects.)
Here is a substantial excerpt from one of those essays, with minor edits, attached and printed just below. Please feel free to post and circulate.

--excerpt from an article entitled "The JFK Assassination: Defending the Gangster State"

by Michael Parenti
(originally published, 1996, in Parenti's book, Dirty Truths, lightly edited 2013)

Today in the much vaunted western democracies there exists a great deal of unaccountable state power whose primary function is to maintain the existing politico-economic structure, using surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, judicial harassment, disinformation, trumped-up charges and false arrests, tax harassment, blackmail, and even violence and assassination to make the world safe for those who own it.


"Buffs" and Cover-Ups

There exists a state within the state, known as the national security state, a component of misgovernment centering around top officers in the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, the Pentagon, and policymakers in the Executive Office of the White House. These elements have proven themselves capable of perpetrating terrible crimes against dissidents at home and abroad. National security state agencies like the CIA, in the service of dominant economic interests, have enlisted the efforts of mobsters, drug traffickers, assassins, and torturers, systematically targeting peasant leaders, intellectuals, journalists, student leaders, clergy, labor union leaders, workers, and community activists in numerous countries. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered to prevent social change, to destroy any government or social movement that manifests an unwillingness to reduce its people to economic fodder for the giant corporations that rule the world's economy.[1]

Occasionally an incident occurs that reveals in an unusually vivid manner the gangster nature of the state. The assassination of President John Kennedy in November 1963 is such an occasion. The dirty truth is that Kennedy was heartily hated by right-wing forces in this country, including many powerful people in the intelligence organizations. He had betrayed the national interest as they defined it, by refusing to go all out against Cuba, making overtures of rapprochement with Castro, and refusing to escalate the ground war in Vietnam. They also saw him as an anti-business liberal who was taking the country down the wrong path. Whether Kennedy really was all that liberal is another matter. I don't believe he was. But what the national security rightists saw him to be was what counted.

To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for [fifty] years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers, Philip Melanson, Jim Garrison, Cyril Wecht, Jim Marrs, Gaeton Fonzi, James DiEugenio, Peter Dale Scott, Sylvia Meagher, Michael Canfield, Gary Aguilar, and still many others more recently.

These investigators have been described as "assassination buffs." The term "buff" is a diminishing characterization, describing someone who pursues odd hobbies. For the same reason that we would not refer to "Holocaust buffs," so should we not refer to these serious investigators as "assassination buffs." Their efforts reveal a conspiracy to assassinate the president and an even more extensive conspiracy to hide the crime.

Sociologist David Simone compiled a study of the books published on the Kennedy assassination, some 600 titles, and found that 20 percent of them blamed either a lone assassin or the mafia or the Cubans or Russians. The other 80 percent ascribed the assassination to a conspiracy linked to U.S. intelligence agencies, some of these also saying that mobsters were involved at the operational level. Ignoring this 80 percent of the literature, publications like the New York Times and Washington Post have listed the various theories about the JFK assassination as follows: (a) lone assassin, (b) mafia, (c) Cubans/Soviets, and (d) the "Oliver Stone movie theory." In other words, they ignore the existence of a vast literature from which the [Oliver Stone movie, JFK] is derived and ascribe the critical theme presented within the film solely to the imagination of a film maker. The mainstream press would have us believe that the notion of a state-sponsored assassination conspiracy and cover-up came out of a movie--when actually the movie was based on a rich and revealing investigative literature.

Like the Warren Commission itself, the press assumed a priori that Oswald was the killer. The only question it asked was: Did Oswald act alone? The answer was a loudly orchestrated YES. Meanwhile, almost every in-depth investigator had a different conclusion: Oswald did not act at all. He was not one of the people who shot Kennedy, although he was involved in another way, as a fall guy, in his own words "just a patsy."

The U.S. mainstream media have been tireless in their efforts to suppress the truth about the gangster state. In 1978, when a House Select Committee concluded that there was more than one assassin involved in the Kennedy shooting, the Washington Post (1/6/79) editorialized:

Could it have been some other malcontent who Mr. Oswald met casually? Could not as much as three or four societal outcasts with no ties to any one organization have developed in some spontaneous way a common determination to express their alienation in the killing of President Kennedy? It is possible that two persons acting independently attempted to shoot the President at the very same time.

It is "possible," but also most unlikely and barely imaginable. Instead of a conspiracy theory the Post creates a one-in-a-billion "coincidence theory" that is the most fanciful of all explanations.



Ignored Evidence, Unanswered Questions

David Garrow, author of a biography of Martin Luther King, condescendingly says: "A large majority of the American people do believe in assassination conspiracies. That allows events to have large mysterious causes instead of small idiosyncratic ones." Contrary to Garrow, the question of whether a conspiracy exists in any particular situation has to be decided by an investigation of evidence, not by patronizing presumptions about the public mind. Investigators who concluded there were conspiracies in the Kennedy and King murders did not fashion "large mysterious causes" but came to their conclusions through painstaking probes of troubling discrepancies, obvious lies, and blatant cover-ups. They have been impelled not by the need to fashion elaborate theories but by the search for particular explanations about some simple and compelling truths.

Many people talk about finding the "smoking gun" behind this or that mystery, the one evidentiary item that dramatically resolves the case and puts to rest all further questions. Unlike fictional mysteries, in real life there usually is no smoking gun. Historians work by a process of accretion, putting piece by piece together until a picture emerges. In the Kennedy murder the pieces make an imposing picture indeed, leaving one with the feeling that while there may not be a smoking gun there is a whole fusillade of impossibilities regarding the flight of bullets, the nature of the wounds, the ignored testimony of eye witnesses, the sudden and mysterious deaths of witnesses, the disappearance and deliberate destruction of evidence, and the repeated acts of official cover-up that continue to this day regarding the release of documents.

Let us focus on just a small part of the immense brief that has been assembled by investigators. Consider the background of Lee Harvey Oswald. Over the decades to this very day, mainstream commentators have been telling us that Oswald was an incompetent "loner" and not very bright. Gerald Posner, transforming himself into an instant psychiatric expert, announced that Oswald "had a very disturbed childhood, and he was a passive-aggressive." A passive-aggressive assassin? He was also repeatedly labeled a "loner" and a "leftist." The truth is something else.

Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lone drifter but directly linked to the U.S. intelligence community. All of his IQ tests show that he was above average in intelligence and a quick learner. At the age of eighteen in the U.S. Marines he had secret security clearance and was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, a top secret location from which the CIA launched U2 flights and performed other kinds of covert operations in China. The next year he was assigned to El Toro Air Station in California with security clearance to work radar.

Strange things began to happen. While at El Toro, Oswald emerged as a babbling Russophile and a "communist." He started playing Russian language records at blast level in his barracks and addressing his fellow Marines in Russian, calling them "comrade." He read Russian books and hailed Soviet Communism as "the best system in the world." If Oswald was a Soviet or a Cuban spy, as some people now claim, he certainly had a novel way of building a cover.

Philip Melanson, author of Spy Saga, a book about Oswald's links to intelligence, reminds us that the U.S. Marine Corps in 1958 was not exactly a bastion of liberal tolerance and freethinking. But in this instance, for some strange reason, Oswald's Marine commanders did not seem to mind having a ranting commie sympathizer in their midst. In fact, he kept his security clearance and retained access to a wealth of sensitive radar information and classified data from secret facilities!

Other odd things happened. In February 1959, Oswald failed the Marine Corps proficiency test in Russian. Six months later he had developed some fluency in that language. In 1974, a document classified by the Warren Commission--and dislodged mostly by Harold Weisberg's legal efforts--revealed that Oswald had attended the U.S. Army's School of Languages at Monterey. Monterey is not open to anyone who just happens to have a language hobby. One is sent by the government, for training in a specific language pertaining to a specific assignment. Oswald learned Russian at Monterey.

Another curious thing: Oswald applied for an early dependency discharge from the Marines because his mother had injured her foot--the accident had occurred a year earlier. He was released one week after putting in his request, a decision so swift as to astonish his fellow Marines.



Luxury Defection

Oswald then "defected" to the USSR, but how? Melanson notes that such a trip would have cost at least $1,500 in those days, but Oswald's bank account showed a balance of $203. And how did he get from London to Helsinki on October 11, 1959, when no available commercial flight could have made it in one day? He must have had some kind of private transportation to Helsinki.

Once in Russia, he went to the U.S. embassy and openly renounced his U.S. citizenship, declaring that he was going to give military secrets to the Soviets. Embassy officials made no effort to detain him. As the KGB files opened in 1991 show, the Soviets kept him under constant surveillance. KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who had been responsible for investigating every contact Oswald made in the USSR, reported that the young American had never been associated with Soviet intelligence and that the KGB suspected he was connected with U.S. intelligence.

While in Russia Oswald belonged to a gun club at the factory in which he worked, though he showed no interest in guns. He reportedly used to join in rabbit shoots but could never score a hit. Someone would have to stand behind him and shoot the rabbit while he was firing. His performance became something of a joke among his co-workers. His marksmanship in the U.S. Marines had been no better.

U.S. intelligence mysteriously departed from normal procedure and made no damage assessment of Oswald's "defection," or so they claimed. Another odd thing: after two-and-a-half years, Oswald's sudden request to return to the United States was immediately granted by U.S. officials--all this after he had threatened to give away state secrets to the Soviets. Instead of being arrested for treason, Oswald was accepted with open arms by U.S. authorities.

The CIA claimed it had no record of debriefing him and was never near him. Their explanation before the Warren Commission was that there were so many tourists coming in and out and there was nothing particularly unusual about Oswald that would have caught their attention. One might wonder what was needed to catch the CIA's attention.

Yet, CIA officials claimed they had suspected all along that he was a Soviet spy--which makes it even more curious that they did not debrief him. In fact, they did debrief him in Holland. But being so eager to cover up any association with Oswald, they could not recognize how in this instance the truth would have been a less suspicious cover than the improbable lie they told about never noticing his return.

State Department officials also behaved strangely. They paid all travel and moving expenses back to the United States for Oswald and his wife. Without a moment's delay they gave him back his passport with full rights to travel anywhere in the world. Another curious thing: his wife was exempted from the usual immigration quotas and granted immediate entry. Years before she had belonged to the Soviet Komsomol, the Communist youth organization, which automatically would have barred her from the United States. Yet in violation of U.S. immigration laws, she was allowed into the country with Oswald.



The FBI/CIA "Leftist"

In Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald settled under the wing of White Russian emigre' and former cavalry officer George de Mohrenschildt, an aristocratic reactionary and an associate of oil millionaires H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchinson and other Dallas economic elites. In de Mohrenschildt's telephone book was found the name of George "Pappy" Bush. A correspondence existed between Bush Sr. and de Mohrenschildt indicating that they were personal acquaintances.

De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne were identified by the Warren Commission as the people closest to Oswald just before the assassination. An investigator for the House Select Committee, Gaeton Fonzi, noted, "Given his background, it seemed strange that de Mohrenschildt would have spontaneously befriended someone with the look of a working-class drifter like Lee Harvey Oswald." That was not the only strange thing about de Mohrenschildt. He also was part of a network of ex-Nazis contracted by the CIA.

A CIA memorandum written not long after Oswald returned from Russia advised de Mohrenschildt on how to handle the young "defector." De Mohrenschildt also had a close friendship with J. Walter Moore, who was an agent of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division. As de Mohrenschildt told one investigator just before his sudden death, it was Moore who encouraged him to see Oswald. Investigator Jim Marrs observes in his book Crossfire: "The CIA memos, Moore's closeness, and de Mohrenschildt's own testimony all confirm that a certain relationship existed between the CIA and the man closest to Oswald in early 1963. While this does not necessarily involve the Agency in a plot to kill Kennedy, it raises questions about what Agency officials might have known regarding such a plot."

Oswald embarked on a series of short-lived public forays as a "leftist." He started a one-person Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans, without ever bothering to recruit another member. He never met with a single member of the Communist Party or any other left organization, although he wrote friendly letters to the Communist Party and to the Socialist Workers Party (two groups that were not even talking to each other) supposedly asking for instructions. Again, all this was a puzzling way for a Soviet agent and would-be assassin to act.

He blazed a highly visible trail as a "leftist" agitator: managing to get exposure on local T.V. in New Orleans after getting involved in some fistfights while leafleting. One of the leaflets he distributed showed that his organization was on Camp Street in the very same building that a former FBI bureau chief, Guy Banister, had his office. Banister retained close working relations with émigré' Cuban right-wing groups and with Lee Harvey Oswald.

When he wasn't playing the communist agitator, Oswald spent most of his time with rabid anti-communists, including émigré Cubans and CIA operatives. Besides Banister and de Mohrenschildt, there was David Ferrie. (In his book First Hand Knowledge, Robert Morrow, a conservative businessman and CIA operative, tells how he served as a pilot on CIA missions with Ferrie.) Oswald also knew businessman Clay Shaw who was CIA, as later confirmed by the agency's director Richard Helms. These were hardly the sort of friends we would expect for a loudmouthed "Marxist revolutionary" just returned from giving away classified secrets in the USSR.

The attorney general of Texas, Waggoner Carr, told the Warren Commission that Oswald was an FBI informant or contract agent, with assigned number S-172 or S-179. For his services, Oswald was paid two hundred dollars a month by the FBI.[2] Orest Pena, a Cuban émigré and FBI informant, told Mark Lane that Oswald worked for the FBI and met with FBI personnel from time to time.

If not paid by security agencies, how did Oswald support himself during his forays into New Orleans and Dallas? He was employed for a brief time in 1962 by a printing company in Dallas that specialized in highly classified government work, including the making of secret maps of the Soviet Union for U.S. Army Intelligence--again hardly the sort of job to assign an openly pro-Soviet communist agitator. Oswald's overall employment record and income sources remain something of a mystery. To this day, the U.S. government refuses to release his tax returns, with no explanation as to what issue of national security is at stake.



The Impossible "Assassin"

We are asked to believe that Oswald just happened to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository five weeks before the assassination, when it had not yet been publicized that Kennedy's limousine was going to pass in front of that building. In fact, George de Morenschildt got him the job.

We are asked to believe that Oswald, who could not hit the side of a barn, chose a Mannlicher-Carcano to kill the president, a cheap, poor performance Italian rifle that the Italians jokingly said never killed anyone on purpose and caused them to lose World War II.

We are asked to believe that Oswald would forgo shooting President Kennedy when he had a perfect target of him as he rode right down Houston Street directly toward the Texas School Book Depository. Instead he supposedly waited until the car had turned down Elm Street and was a half-block away. With the President's head and shoulders barely visible through a tree, Oswald supposedly fired rapidly, getting off three shots in record time, one missing the limousine by twenty-five feet and the other two hitting their target with devastating accuracy and record rapid succession, a feat the best marksmen in the country found impossible to emulate even after much practice and after the sights on the Mannlicher-Carcano were properly reset in a laboratory.[3]

We are asked to believe that Oswald then left his rifle at the window, complete with a perfect palm print and, they now say, his fingerprints (but no fingerprints on the clip or handloaded cartridges), along with three spent shells placed on the floor neatly in a row, in a manner no spent shells would fall.

We are asked to believe that a bullet would go through John Kennedy, pause in mid-air, change direction, and wound Governor Connally in several places--something Connally never believed--and reappear perfectly intact wedged into the flap of a stretcher in Parkland Hospital, supposedly having fallen out of Connally's body but obviously pushed into the flap by hand. (It became known as the "magic bullet" among skeptics.)

We are asked to believe that only three shots were fired when in fact six bullets were noted: one that entered the president's throat and remained in his body; the second extracted from Governor Connally's thigh; a third discovered on the stretcher; a fourth found in fragments in the limousine; a fifth that missed the president's car by a wide margin, hitting the curb according to several witnesses, and wounding onlooker James Thomas Tague on his face; a sixth found in the grass by Dallas police directly across from where the president's vehicle had passed.

The Secret Service took possession of the presidential limousine, ignored reports in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (12/1/63) that there was a bullet hole in the windshield, and rejected all requests to inspect the vehicle. The inside of the limousine, a trove of physical evidence, was then quickly torn out and rebuilt, supposedly with no thought of covering up anything.

We are asked to believe that Kennedy's autopsy was innocently botched and his brain just accidentally disappeared. The X-ray purporting to be Kennedy's head now shows a rear entry wound, different from the rear exit wound all the pathologists saw. Someone cropped the jaw out of the picture, so there is no opportunity to determine by dental identification if the X-ray really is the president's.

We are asked by people like Max Holland, writing in the Nation, to believe that the "infamous picture of Oswald posing with rifle in hand" is not a forgery. Actually there are two pictures, both proven composites, with bodies of different sizes but with the identical head that matches neither body, and with shadows going in incongruous directions. Who fabricated these well publicized photos?



Rubbing Out the Witnesses

The supposedly "lone leftist assassin," Lee Harvey Oswald, was a friend of Jack Ruby, a gangster with links to Cuban exiles and the FBI. Ruby once worked for Congressman Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee in Chicago when his name was still Jack Rubenstein. He also worked for the FBI in Dallas during the years before the JFK assassination. Ruby claimed he was just an ordinary private citizen, moved to kill Oswald in order to avenge the suffering Oswald had inflicted upon the Kennedy family.[4]

While in prison Ruby pleaded with the Warren Commission to be taken to Washington where he could tell the whole story. He feared for his life and claimed "they are killing me here." Indeed, he died in jail, supposedly of natural causes.

We are asked to believe that when twenty-four persons who had information related to the case met violent deaths, this was a colossal coincidence.[5] In 1978, after the House Select Committee investigation got underway, Anthony Summers records that another sixteen connected to the case died violently. This too supposedly was just a coincidence. This latter group included George de Mohrenschildt, killed by a gun blast to the head three hours after a House Assassinations Committee Investigator had tried to contact him. De Mohrenschildt had been worried that he would be murdered. His daughter Kressy Keardon believes it "impossible" that he shot himself. The sheriff's office in Palm County, Florida, found the shooting "very strange." But it was ruled a suicide. Generally, people who voice fears that they might be killed do not then kill themselves.

William Sullivan, number three man in the FBI, was secretly on the CIA payroll, according to CIA operative Robert Morrow. He was scheduled to appear before the House Select Committee but before he could do so, he was shot outside his home by a man who claimed to have mistaken him for a deer. The killer was charged with a misdemeanor and released in custody of his father, a state policeman. While under government protection, mobster Sam Giancana was shot dead a day before he was to testify before the House Select Committee about mob and CIA connections. One of the things that emerges from this whole story is the widespread linkages between the CIA and organized crime, between the gangsters and the gangster state.

When the House committee was putting its staff together, it was heavily pressured to employ only persons acceptable to the CIA, the very agency it was supposed to investigate. In his book Plausible Denial, Mark Lane reports that when Bernard Fensterwald, an independent minded Washington lawyer, was offered the job of general counsel, a CIA representative called on him and said that the Agency would hand him "his head on a platter" if he took the assignment. Fensterwald turned it down.

Is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy just a lot of hoopla kicked up by "conspiracy buffs"? Most of the independent investigators I have met seem to be serious politically literate people. Their struggle to arrive at the truth is not impelled by a love of conspiracies but by a concern for the political and historic importance of the case. They seek the truth no matter how dirty it might be. That process of confronting the machinations of the national security state is not a conspiracy hobby. It is an essential part of the struggle for democracy.

Let me end with a summary quotation by John Judge, which he was kind enough to send me by Gmail:



85% of the American public reject the findings of the Warren Commission report, as did the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, finding instead a "probable conspiracy" in the murders of President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. No federal investigation or action followed. We are the mainstream, not the dissent. Oswald's role as a patsy, not a shooter, is supported by all the best evidence that has been released. The real evidence clearly points to a crime and a cover-up that reaches to the highest levels of the U.S. government and military.





1 Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a military intelligence chief closely connected with the CIA, tells of his visit to "a special 'village' in the Mediterranean where a highly select group of stateless 'mechanics' in the CIA are hit-men, assassins, and other related specialists. They are absolutely anonymous"; see his introduction to Mark Lane's Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). For a further discussion on U.S. repression abroad, see "Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy," p. ; also my two books Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995); and The Sword and the Dollar (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).



2 The Warren Commission reacted with extreme alarm toward Carr's testimony. Its general counsel, J. Lee Rankin said that evidence linking Oswald to the FBI "is very damaging to the agencies that are involved in it, and it must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this commission." The "wipe out" consisted of a statement from Hoover reassuring the commission that Oswald never worked for the FBI. In the New York Times edition of the Warren Commission report, Waggoner Carr's testimony is nowhere to be found.



3 In his political memoirs, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil writes that Kenneth O'Donnell, a top JFK aide, said he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to." O'Neil reports that another top Kennedy aide, Dave Powers, who was present when O'Donnell made this statement, said he had the same recollection of the shots.



4 At a Washington, D.C. conference in October 1995, assassination investigator John M. Williams reported on an interview he had with Robert Morrow, March 10, 1994. Morrow said that on the day after JFK's assassination, Marshall Diggs, the man who recruited Morrow as a CIA operative, confided to him a warning of Oswald's impending assassination: "He won't be around to testify for his trial."



5 See Penn Jones, Jr., Pardon My Grief vols. 1 and 2 for details about the death of these twenty-four.

[OnyxCollie]

1. K&R for Michael Parenti. nt

[MindMover]

2. And the Dr. who witnessed Kennedy's lifeless body ...

http://www.myplainview.com/canyon/news/article_f6555d0a-48c4-11e3-bbd1-001a4bcf887a.html

[Ghost Dog]

6. “the posterior part of his head was blown out.”

.

[newfie11]

8. I talked to one of the X-ray techs that x-rayed Kennedy

He was working at parkland back then and when I talked to him he had returned home to SD.
He was adamant the back of Kennedy's head was blown off.
I asked about lateral skull views and of course they took them but who knows what happened to them. That would tell the story.

[Ghost Dog]

11. .

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. These 18 witnesses point to the exit wound

Doctors, nurses and witnesses at the shooting.

[newfie11]

14. And yet the same old story is told over and over

Thanks for posting this. I had never seen it.

[Ichingcarpenter]

15. death of witnesses

Dr. Jerry Kroth, Ph.D did a statistical comparison of the cause of death of witnesses connected with the JFK murder and the general population of the U.S.

What he found was stunning.
The cause of death by percentage of 78 people who were connected with the JFK assassination was as follows:


Murder- 37%
Accidental Death- 23%
Suicide- 17%
Natural Causes-22%


The cause of death of the general population in the 1970′s was as follows:

Murder-less than 1%
Accidental Death-9%
Suicide-1%
Natural Causes-89%


The measure by which differences are calculated from what is expected is called Chi Square. The Chi Square statistic reveals that the JFK sample is tremendously at odds with national norms.


The probability that this variation could simply be the result of coincidence, chance or random occurrence is less than one in 10,000.


The cause of death of individuals who had a direct or indirect linkage to the JFK murder sketches a pattern that is so atypical, so statistically significant, that it suggests a conspiracy.


Article goes on to each witness, cause of death and relationship to the story......

http://themanfrom2063.com/strange-deaths-witnesses-individuals-connected-jfk-assassination/

Here is a sample of one death.

Lt. Commander William Pitzer USN-October 29, 1966
Pitzer filmed and photographed JFK’s autopsy. He later told friends and family that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy. He was debriefed by CIA people who warned him to be quiet about what he had seen. Cause of death: Suicide by gunshot. A .45 caliber pistol was found in his right hand but he was left handed.

[newfie11]

16. Unfreaking believable

Now with the mic, oligarchs, crooked politicians and the msm feeding lies I don't hold much hope for the future of this country.
The very scary thing is all the nukes in this country and our war mongering.

[truth2power]

22. And don't forget Dorothy Kilgallen, who, if memory serves

interviewed Jack Ruby in his jail cell, and allegedly remarked that she was going to blow the case wide-open.

Shortly thereafter she was found dead, from an overdose of drugs, so we're told. Amazing coinky-dink!!


Oh, and thanks for the reference to Chi Square. Going to look it up.

I'm not a statistician. I once took a statistics course under duress, though.

[avaistheone1]

3. K&R

[burrowowl]

4. K&R

[dchill]

5. K & R.

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. Incoherent nonsense.

I just love the way that believers in conspiracy say "the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded there was a probable conspiracy"...without bothering to mention that the HSCA also confirmed the major findings of the Warren Commission: that all the shots that struck Kennedy and Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Their only evidence for conspiracy? An audio recording thought to've been from a police motorcycle in the motorcade, thought to reveal "impulses" that indicated a fourth shot. Further analysis of that recording shows that the motorcycle wasn't in the motorcade and that the "impulses" come too late to be shots (because there's crosstalk from another channel of the Dallas chief of police saying "hold everything secure", which happened after the fatal shots were fired). So one of the major points that this whole thing rests on? It isn't even true.

Neither is the assertion that George de Mohrehschildt got Oswald his job at the TSBD; de Mohrenschildt left Dallas in June, and went to Haiti. He had no further contact with Oswald after this date. Oswald got the job at the TSBD in October. This is a matter of record. There are pay slips and other documents. De Mohrenschildt may have helped Oswald get an earlier job with Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall...in October of 1962; Oswald was fired from that job in April of 1963 (again this is all a matter of record, there are documents).

There are so many flat-out untruths and falsehoods here that it's not worth bothering to list them all.

[newfie11]

9. K&R!!!

[reddread]

10. Oswald was not a lone nut leftist, he was tied in with spooks and anti-communists

the corroborating information and confirmed suspicions of famous, infamous and mysterious characters
like E Howard Hunt, George Bush of the CIA, and particularly, the interesting stories of Claude Barnes Capehart,
put the kabosh on the simple minded official adherence to the Warren Commission's fact changing, testimony ignoring
cover up treachery.
That "people" are following the "suggestions" of propaganda memorandums in pushing the fairytales regarding
one of the most damaging coup de tats of the 20th century is almost as disturbing as the renewed adoption of
assassination as policy by Democratic presidents and some number of equally blood stained voters and writers.

There is much more information out there, and more surely to come.
They want us all dead before it becomes any clearer to us.
Dont waste too much psychic energy tussling with deceivers.
You need that energy to fight for the truth instead, so keep that in mind.
They are playing a game, and its called
WASTING YOUR TIME.

[truth2power]

21. Thank you for your comments, reddred...

You are so correct. It's a game, an attempt to deceive, and it's a waste of everyone's time.

The players are ubiquitous, here. And they tag-team.

[Octafish]

12. Parenti archive...

http://www.tucradio.org/parenti.html

Scroll about for "JFK and the Gangster Nature of the State" and more information and analysis from a remarkable scholar.

[reddread]

17. a crucial recording

a brilliant speaker and thinker

[DanTex]

18. Actually, in this case there is a "smoking gun".

It takes the form of an actual gun, which belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald, and was matched to the bullets that hit JFK and Connelly.

[Dawson Leery]

19. k/r

[Doctor_J]

20. everyone here should read dirty truths

How do I get on parentis mailing list?

[Multimir]

23. Only imoprtant is the cause of JFK death

I do not understand why to speckculate on details of assasination act, when obvious main cause is so simple. JFK stepped on the viper
tail by public speech placed below. See what is printed bold.


http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/American-Newspaper-Publishers-Association_19610427.aspx

President John F. Kennedy
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City
April 27, 1961

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.

You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.

You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.

We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."

But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.

If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.

I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight "The President and the Press." Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded "The President Versus the Press." But those are not my sentiments tonight.

It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.

Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.

Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.

If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.

On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses that they once did.

It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one's golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man.

My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future--for reducing this threat or living with it--there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security--a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President--two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

I

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country's peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of "clear and present danger," the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public's need for national security.

Today no war has been declared--and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions--by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security--and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.

For the facts of the matter are that this nation's foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage; that details of this nation's covert preparations to counter the enemy's covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least in one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby satellites were followed required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.

The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.

The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to the nation, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration.

On many earlier occasions, I have said--and your newspapers have constantly said--that these are times that appeal to every citizen's sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.

I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.

Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: "Is it news?" All I suggest is that you add the question: "Is it in the interest of the national security?" And I hope that every group in America--unions and businessmen and public officials at every level-- will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests.

And should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations.

Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war. In times of peace, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of peace and peril which knows no precedent in history.

II

It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation--an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people--to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well--the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.

No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers--I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: "An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed--and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news--for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security--and we intend to do it.

III

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world's efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.

And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news--that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

[gopiscrap]

24. welcome to DU

[Coyotl]

25. Thanks.