Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Writing before development of thermonuclear bombs, J.D. Stranathan gives this account of the discovery of deuterium :
G.H. Aston in 1927 obtained a value 1.00778 +- 0.00015 for the atomic weight of hydrogen, which differed from the accepted chemical value of 1.00777 +- 0.00002. The figures were so close that no isotope seemed necessary.
But, the discovery of the two heavier isotopes of oxygen forced a reconsideration because their existence meant that the physically derived and chemically derived scales of atomic weight were slightly, but importantly, different. This meant that Aston's value, when converted to the chemical scale, was 1.00750, and this was appreciably smaller than the chemically determined atomic weight. The alleged close agreement was adjudged to be false.
That discrepancy spurred Harold C. Urey, Ferdinand G. Brickwedde and George M. Murphy to hunt for deuterium, which they found and which became a key component in the development of the atomic bomb.
But, this discrepancy turned out to have been the result of a small experimental error. It was shown that the 1927 mass spectrograph value was slightly low, in spite of having been carefully confirmed by Kenneth T. Bainbridge. When the new spectrograph value of 1.0081 was converted to the chemical scale, there was no longer a substantive disagreement. Hence, there was no implication of the existence of deuterium.
Though the chemical and physical scales were revealed to have been slightly different, that revelation, without the 1927 error, would have yielded no reason to expend a great deal of effort searching for heavy hydrogen.
Had heavy water been unknown, would allied scientists have been fearful of German development of atomic fission weapons (British commandos wrecked Germany's heavy water production in occupied Norway) and have spurred the British and American governments into action?
Even had the Manhattan Project been inevitable, it is conceivable that, at the outset of World War II, the existence of heavy water would have remained unknown and might have remained unknown for years to come, thus obviating postwar fulfillment of Edward Teller's dream of a fusion bomb. By the time of deuterium's inevitable (?) discovery, the pressure for development of thermonuclear weapons might well have subsided.
That is, looking back, the alleged probability of the discovery of heavy water was miniscule, and one is tempted to wonder about some peculiar spiritual influence that fated humanity with this almost apocalyptic power.
At the least, we have the butterfly effect on steroids.
Friday, December 13, 2013
CIA connections abound
in assassination of JFK
By Roger Conant
One of the most dubious aspects of the John F. Kennedy murder case is the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle supposedly found at the sixth-floor sniper's nest in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas.
All experts agree that the Italian rifle is almost worthless as to reliability and accuracy. In tests in which shooters have tried to duplicate Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged feat, the conditions the testers have used have always been less rigorous than the reality.
One of the first cops upstairs, Seymour Weitzman, said he found a Mauser. He should have known; he once sold sporting guns.
A photo of a policeman outside the depository shows him with a long object, presumably a rifle, covered with a sack. "They didn't want you to see it, did they?" comments retired Texas newsman Penn Jones. "I'd like to know where they got that (unusual) sack so fast."
- During the other presidential stops in Texas, the limousine seating arrangement was the two politicians JFK and Texas Gov. John B. Connally side by side, with their wives side by side. At Love Field on Nov. 22, 1963, the seating arrangement was switched, probably by the Secret Service, so that Connally sat behind JFK. "They didn't want to shoot a woman," suggests Jones. .
- About noon, a battalion of combat-ready troops returning from Europe on a training mission was reportedly airborne over the central United States. Jones said he spoke to one of the soldiers who landed at Austin, Texas, later in the day. Also in the same time period, it has been reported, telephone service and power were interrupted in Washington, D.C.
- Army Capt. Richard C. Cloy said Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, a Rockefeller protege, had ordered a unit of troops to rehearse for a state funeral before the assassination. The Warren Commission brushed off the claim, but McNamara said at one point that the death of a high military official. who was ailing, appeared imminent.
- Writer Lincoln Lawrence claims there was an enormous flurry of short-selling on Wall Street in the hours preceding the murder.
- A planeload of top Kennedy administration officials was out over the Pacific heading for a conference at the moment of the slaying.
Writer David S. Lifton, who spent 15 years studying the assassination, believes the President's brain was removed and the incriminating bullets extracted as soon as the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The Warren Commission never examined the autopsy X-rays or photos. The commission was told that no testable bullet fragments could he found in the body.
Lifton noted that two FBI agents assumed there had already been surgery on JFK's head before the "official" autopsy began and he said Commander James Humes's autopsy report described in highly technical language a wound caused by someone slicing into the head. The House panel came up with experts who essentially supported the original conclusions. Lifton points out a number of discrepancies, including apparently missing autopsy photos.
Other vital evidence, the President's brain, vanished within a few years after the murder.
Lifton cites a number of retired servicemen who indicate that some funny business was going on in Bethesda. For example, Naval X-ray technician Jerrol F. Custer related that he was hustled past Jacqueline Kennedy in Bethesda's lobby while he was carrying the second or third batch of autopsy X-rays upstairs for processing.
This is strange. Jackie passed through the lobby while JFK's casket was still in an ambulance out front. This means, Lifton reasons, that the casket driven from the plane was empty and that JFK's body was flown by helicopter to Bethesda after being whisked out a door out of view of TV cameras. TV footage indicates a helicopter revving in the background when the official casket was publicly removed, Lifton said.
Witnesses in the morgue have said the room was filled with civilians and military brass, including JFK's physician, Admiral George Burkley; Admiral Edward Kenney, Navy surgeon general; Admiral Calvin Galloway, commander of the Bethesda base; [and] Capt. John Stover, hospital commander. The body was at all times in the care of the Secret Service, headed by James Rowley.
Another name that lurks in the background because of his association with various persons who were in Dallas or who have been accused of complicity in JFK's death is ex-CIA mastermind Richard H. Bissell. Bissell ran with an iron fist the U2 program (Oswald served at a U2 base), was instrumental in arranging the overthrow of Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz -- a move which benefited the Rockefeller empire's United Fruit -- and plotted the Bay of Pigs invasion. As boss of clandestine services, he orchestrated an extraordinarily complex exile war against Cuba. One of his chief Latin America and U.S. operatives was E. Howard Hunt, like Bissell a scion of a well-to-do family, who helped him in the Guatemala and Cuba plots. Hunt was reputedly CIA station chief in Mexico City at the time of Oswald's alleged visit there.
Bissell, with Vice President Richard M. Nixon the "action officer," pressed hard for an invasion of Cuba, but [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower was cautious. Under JFK, Bissell kept modifying his plans (he also organized CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro) to suit the inexperienced and skeptical President. Kennedy thought the idea was to let the exiles do the job themselves and if that didn't work, to fade into the mountains as guerrillas. JFK aide Arthur M. Schlesinger and others suspect that Bissell's real plan was to con the President into committing U.S. troops to an invasion on the theory that the U.S. never backs down. But JFK didn't bite and the invasion failed. The President was incensed at the CIA and soon let CIA chief Allen Dulles and Bissell know they could start looking for new jobs. Bissell, like Dulles a Rockefeller protege, stayed in close touch with the CIA by moving into a CIA think tank.
The CIA was under tremendous pressure from JFK, who complained the agency often acted on its own. Schlesinger noted JFK was attempting to cut back the agency's budget 20 percent by 1966. He assigned his brother Robert to breathe down the CIA's neck and the agency was forced to start laying off agents.
The CIA closely monitored the coup against the Diems of South Vietnam though it has not been proved that the agency instigated the murders, which occurred three weeks before JFK's death.
JFK, on learning of the assassinations, was shocked and stormed out of the room, several participants have noted. Shortly after that, he ordered 1,000 troops withdrawn from Vietnam and may have been planning to speed up the withdrawal that he had been contemplating for 1965.
Ex-New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, now a parish judge, said he believes the CIA hit Kennedy because he opposed a massive intervention in Vietnam. David and Nelson Rockefeller were both outspoken hawks on Vietnam.
JFK, who once said Kennedys "eat Rockefellers for breakfast," had swiped at the Rockefellers, and the Texas oil barons H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison Jr., by proposing a revision of the oil depletion allowance that would have seriously undermined the power of these families.
According to Jones, who won't cite his source, the night before JFK's murder, Nixon, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Murchison met in Dallas. (Hoover regularly vacationed at Hurchison's expense at a Murchison resort.) Nixon was in town as a New York lawyer on business with the Pepsi Cola account. Nixon, according to an FBI document, said in 1964 that he had left Dallas two days before the assassination. But years later he admitted he had been in town Nov. 22 but had left by 11:30 a.m., an hour before the slaying. Nixon also reportedly met with H.L. Hunt.
Immediately after the assassination, reports writer G. Gary Shaw, Hunt, escorted by FBI agents, took a flight from Love field. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, retired by JFK for right-wing indoctrination of his troops, soon joined Hunt at a hideaway in Mexico, surrounded by a platoon of ex-FBI agents, and stayed there until December, Shaw asserts.
Nixon was very nervous when Howard Hunt was captured in the Watergate affair. Hunt, on Nixon's behalf, had forged a cable implicating JFK in the Diem assassinations. Hunt had discussed with G. Gordon Liddy and a CIA doctor various means of murdering columnist Jack Anderson, but apparently Nixon hatchet man Charles Colson called that one off. (Later Hunt said they were just jesting.)
According to White House tapes released in the Watergate affair, what really alarmed Nixon about Hunt was the fact that he might blow the whistle on "the Bay of Pigs." H.R. Haldeman, a top Nixon functionary, later said he finally concluded that "the Bay of Pigs thing" was really a buzzword for JFK's assassination -- but Haldeman tied this into supposed Cuban retribution for CIA slay plots.
Colson is reported to have said that Hunt knew a lot about Nixon's role in the assassination and that Hunt's wife Dorothy was carrying documents with which she could blackmail Nixon into getting her husband out of jail at the time she died, along with 40 other persons, in a Chicago plane crash. Fifty FBI agents secured the crash site, according to one writer.
Colson, author of "Born Again," had an aide reply to a reporter's inquiry with a letter that neither confirms, denies nor disavows the purported statements. He left word that he was out of town when this reporter tried to interview him.
Nixon did not answer a registered letter of inquiry.
Hunt's lawyer responded to an inquiry with a hard-nosed, general reply, which did not answer several specific questions.
One of the moat ridiculous omissions in the Warren Report was Jack Ruby's ties to the Mafia. Ruby began as a low-level courier for Al Capone in Chicago and worked his way up to labor racketeering. He was associated with Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa's ally, mobster Paul Dorfman. He was in the building at the time a Chicago union official was slain.
Rubinstein, an FBI report says, was permitted to duck a House Un--American Activities Committee hearing in 1947 because he was "performing information functions for Richard Nixon." Shortly thereafter Ruby moved to Dallas. Nixon's protege, Murray Chotiner, had represented a number of gangsters.
In Dallas, Ruby was the mob's key man, corrupting the Dallas police with free liquor and free women. Ruby, like many of those named by Garrison as part of the slay plot, was homosexual or bisexual. Ruby on occasion made forays into Cuba, possibly running guns to Fidel Castro (the mob will sell guns to anybody). Meyer Lanksy was boss of Cuba, with Fulgencio Batista his ally and mobster Santos Trafficanto Jr. his aide. It seems likely Ruby would have had contact with Lanksy, who was also Jewish.
The mob greatly feared Attorney General Robert Kennedy who was relentlessly seeking to break the back of organized crime. Two notable enemies were Hoffa, associated with the Chicago mob, and Lansky protege Carlos Marcello, who [controlled] Louisiana like a feudal warlord. RFK's "get-Hoffa-squad" finally got him jailed (though Nixon freed him). Marcello had been cornered by JFK's men into fighting deportation as an undesirable alien. The day JFK was shot, Marcello was [freed].
Though neither a Ruby-Oswald link or a link between Ruby and Officer J.D. Tippitt can be proved, there is some evidence affirming such connections. If Ruby was a conspirator, what was his role? Reporters Seth Kantor and Penn Jones both saw Ruby at Parkland hospital right after the murder. Was he making sure JFK was dead?
Why would a canny, ruthless mobster suddenly be overcome with emotion and throw his life away by slaying Oswald. Could it be that Oswald, apparently the patsy, had somehow avoided being shot and [that] a mob overlord had gotten word to Ruby to finish the job himself, or else -- true to the Mafia code they'd get his family?
Though Garrison was lampooned in the national press, and though he failed to prove that Clay Shaw (who was later identified as a CIA contract agent by ex -CIA official Victor Marchetti) was involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK, his investigation did turn up a number of persons with CIA affiliations. However, Garrison, who palled around with gangsters, avoided bringing up the mob links. Was the Mafia laying down a little protective fire to prevent the CIA from dumping all the blame on them? [Garrison later told this reporter he had been very disappointed with this suggestion, but did not deny that he sometimes drank with mobsters in his off-hours.]
Whether Garrison had a good case or not is open to question, because governors -- in unprecedented moves -- refused to permit extradition of key witnesses to Louisiana. Ohio Gov. John Rhodes blocked extradition of Gordon Hovel, whom the CIA admitted was on its payroll. California Gov. Ronald Reagan in Dec. 1967 declined to permit the extradition of Eugene Hale Brading (alias Braden and Bradley), who had been spotted by a Dallas deputy sherriff in Dealey Plaza posing as a Secret Service agent and taking informa- tion from cops right after the assassination.
Despite dark hints by Lyndon B. Johnson, who appointed the Warren panel to stave off a congressional investigation, about possible Soviet complicity, no one has seriously suggested that the KGB would have rigged such a maneuver directly.
However, the CIA's predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was heavily infiltrated by Communist agents. Dulles, as OSS station chief in Switzerland, helped a young protege, apparently inadvertently, set up a Red spy ring active in postwar Western Europe.
Alger Hiss, a Rockefeller functionary and an architect of the Yalta accords, was identified as a Communist spy by Ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers.
During the early Cold War, the CIA's covert action branch carried out extensive operations against the East bloc. CIA historians and others characterize these efforts as mostly failures, with Red authorities apparently aware of U.S. moves. For years, there has been an internal battle raging at the CIA as to the possibility of Soviet 'moles' manipulating the agency.
What better may to get rid of a foreign leader, who had humbled Hikita Khruschev in the Cuban missile crisis, than to set up the foe's own intelligence service as the patsy?
[The] CIA serves only minimal counterintelligence functions in the U.S.; its budget and manpower are secret -- though they have been beefed up considerably under President Reagan. [And yet at] the time of the Kennedy murder -- as has been documented by post-Watergate official inquiries -- the CIA had an extensive internal intelligence network plugged into the mobs, the police departments, the Pentagon and the press.
During the course of this inquiry, this reporter noticed that he was under surveillance. The CIA has not responded to requests for information on the surveillance, despite provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI's Washington Jiendquarters denies knowing anything but mentioned that the field office might have files. The FBI's New Jersey field unit has not auswered a letter requesting to see surveillance files. The U.S. attorney for New Jersey, W. Hunt Dumont, has not responded to a request by this reporter's lawyer few a meeting.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Warren commission report
is riddled with gaping holes
By Roger Conant
President John F. Kennedy was shot to death on a Dallas street 21 years ago. Yet despite inquiries by the Warren Commission, the Rockefeller panel on CIA abuses, the Church intelligence review and the House assassinations panel, all of which examined allegations related to the JFK slaying, many questions remain.
For example:
- The evidence accepted by the Warren Commission for use in its final report proves that either Lee Harvey Oswald got a ride to the slaying of Officer J.D. Tippit or he didn't kill Tippit. The glossing over of such an elementary matter as the timing question strongly suggests the complicity of local and federal authorities in a coverup.
- How were the police able to enter the rear of the theater where Oswald was arrested? Theater fire doors don't open from the outside. The police sccenmts contain glaring contradictions.
- In order to substantiate the "lone gunman" theory, the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which did not find for a conspiracy until late in its probe) had to accept the idea that a single bullet from a rifle where Oswald was ostensibly located had hit the President in the back of the neck and exited his throat at the necktie. But photographic evidence proves JFK was facing the wrong way.
- A series of photos by different persons shows a man standing adjacent to the President, raising an open umbrella up and down at the moment of the first shot. After the gunfire, this man sits down at the curb next to another man who had been standing nearby with his arm raised oddly over his head during the shooting. The umbrella man calmly folds it up and hides it. It's a sunny day. While everyone is running around, this pair calmly split up and walk off in opposite directions.
- Various photos also show that the President's car, driven by Secret Service Agent William Greer, slowed down as the crowd began to thin out and that, as shots rang out, he didn't acellerate for six or seven seconds. rider. A man_can run 75 yards in that interval. Key evidence, a movie filmed by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder was altered while in the hands of either the CIA or Life magazine.
- Several boxcars rolled over the Triple Underpass in the moments the shots were fired and, as photos show, moved behind the grassy knoll area. Some time later, at least three alleged tramps were pulled off a boxcar that would have been on the same stretch of track. These men were freed and no records were kept concerning them.
- Oswald, branded a leftist defector "nut," had worked at a CIA base in Japan and had "taught himself" Russian and German while in the Marines. A number of his Texas and New Orleans associates have been linked to the CIA.
- Many persons who have had some knowledge of the assassination have been slain or have died prematurely.
A half hour, roughly, after the assassination, Oswald was spotted rushing into his rooming house in Dallas's Oak Cliff section by his landlady, Earline Roberts. He changed hurriedly and hustled outside, she said. It was no earlier than 1 p.m., she said. (If it had been, the [Warren] panel would have had difflculty explaining how he got all the:way to Oak_Cliff by bus and cab in such a short time.)
At 1:16 p.m. a citizen who had come upon the shooting of Officer J.D. Tippit called in the murder aver the patrol car radio, the radio log showed.
The commission said Oswald had walked briskly to 10th Street at Patton Avenue, in his rush to get away, and had encountered Tippit, who was about to arrest him.
Domingo Denavides drove by.Tippit and his assailant, who were facing each other across the hood of the cop car, and heard shots. He pulled over and then, as the commission put it, "waited until the gunman ran to the . corner," after which he dashed over and called in the report.
Mrs. Helen Markham was waiting to cross the'street at the intersection when she saw the assailant shoot Tippit as he was walking around the left front of the car. Peeking through her hands, she watched in terror as the gunman walked back toward the intersection -- "fooling with his gun -- and then jogged away from her toward Jefferson Boulevard. "I was afraid he was fixing to kill me," [s]he said.
Benavides testified, though the commission report did not say so, that he had waited "a few minutes" in his truck before doing anything. Even assuming Markham had made the call, is it likely she would have moved while the gunman was still in sight?
Taking the commission's account at face value places the time of the shooting as no later than 1:13 p.m. An FBI report filed a day after the murders said the bureau had been informed the Tippit killing occurred at "about 1:13 p.m."
Though it might be possible to trot to the slay site in 15 minutes from Oswald's rooming house, it is implausible in 13 minutes. Nil Alexander, at the time an assistant D.A. told writer Anthony Sommers years later that "we still don't know" how Oswald "got to where he was" even after checking cab records and bus drivers. But in 1963 Alexander raised no hue and cry over the discrepancy. The House probers slid over the Tippit affair.
At 1:45 p.m., the commission determined, a police dispatcher alerted police in the Oak Cliff section to a "suspicious man" in the Texas Theater, about eight blocks from the Tippit slaying. Squad cars converged on the scene and police dashed in and grabbed Oswakd after a scuffle, the panel said. According to this scenario, Patrolman M.N. McDonald had entered a rear door -- where he met a shoe salesman who supposedly had spotted Ouwaa rushing into the theater -- and was accompanied in by other police officers. McDonald walked carefully back to where Oswald was sitting, after checking two other patrons, and got into a scuffle. Other cops piled on and subdued Oswald, who had been pointed out to McDonald by the shoe salesman.
The commission skipped the question of how McDonald and the other cops got into the rear door or doors (there are two) by saying the shoe salesman, Johnny Brewer, "met them" at the door.
Other cops had rushed up to the balcony and ordered the projectionist to turn on the house lights, the commission said. McDonald asserted "the lights were up" when he entered.
Reports of officers who said they were at the rear doors clash.
McDonald testified that ''when I got to the front of the theater there were several police cars already at the scene, and I surmised that the officers were already inside the theater." He went around to the back alley and saw policemen with shotguns guarding the rear exits, he said. Then, he and three other cops "walked into" one of the rear doors. He didn't explain how they got in.
One policeman, T.A. Hutson, said he was the first one in the back alley with another two cops wheeling up behind him. Just as he reached the rear door, he said, salesman Brewer opened it and he pointed his pistol at Brewer, thinking it was the suspect, until Brewer corrected him. Brewer, however, did not mention how the cops got in, but did say he had tested the rear fire exits to be sure they were still locked. Had one been unlocked, it meant someone had exited.
Another cop, C.T. Walker, said there was a "plainclothesman" on "the ladder," but he wasn't sure why. In 1984 there is a fire escape leading to two balcony exits.
The most jarring discrepancy is, again, timing. The commission accepted McDonald's version but fails to explain why policemen weren't already swarming through the theater from the front entrance -- especially as the lights were on, meaning several car's-worth of police were already inside. Everyone seems to have waited for McDonald to saunter up the aisle.
Oswald was supposedly pointed out by Brewer. Even if true, why didn't the police simply order the 15 or so patrons to their feet and line them up -- a procedure used by McDonald and others when checking out a fleeing man report at a library earlier[?] Why did McDonald allegedly not have his pistol drawn when the suspect may have killed the President and a cop?
The day after Oswald's capture, the Associated Press ran a first- person account telling how he [McDonald] had sneaked into the darkened theater's rear door, gun drawn, and crept stealthily up an aisle until he spotted his man. At his capture, Oswald was shouting "police brutality" and "I am not resisting arrest."
Penn Jones, a retired Texas newspaperman, asserts Oswald worked at the theater part-time as a janitor and could have entered without arousing any suspicion. Jim Garrison, who prosecuted Clay Shaw as being part of a CIA plot to kill J17., noted that theaters are often used by intellthgence agents as meeting places. Garrison suggests Tippit was slain in order to have a reason to search the Oak Cliff area for Oswald, who then was to be shot resisting arrest. But Oswald managed to stay alive. If Oswald was indeed the "patsy," as he claimed. why he wasn't killed at the depository remains a mystery.
In another timing problem, JFK's limousine is shown just as it passed a sign pointing out the Stemmons Freeway, in a photo by Phil Willis. A movie by Abraham Zapruder, who was standing on the far side of the sign, indicates that the President reacted to the first shot just as he emerged from behind the sign. The Willis photo shows JFK looking sharply to the right at that point.
However, the Warren Commission and the House panel decided that a gunman had fired from the Texas School Book Depository at JFK's rear and that that sniper must have fired the first round just as JFK passed the sign, there being no clear line of fire sooner. That bullet allegedly entered the back of JFK's neck and exited his throat at the necktie, where a wound was recorded, However, if the first round had hit as described„ it would not have exited at the necktie.
The movie filmed by Zapruder, who was standing on a raised bit of [an adjacent] pergola, shows the motorcade rounding Houston Street onto Elm, driving past the Stemmons sign -- where the first shot hit -- and continuing down Elm while at least one more shot explodes part of JFK's head.
Zapruder's film was bought by Life magazine but, a declassified document shows, the film passed through the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center within days of the assassination, according to writer David S. Lifton.
Photo analyst Robert Groden told this reporter that he helped himself to a copy of the film sometime in 1963 or 64 when it passed through his employer's laboratory in New York. Groden's "enhanced" film is spliced in two places: When the limo rounds the corner and when it passes the sign as the first shot hit. The effect of these splices is to make the car appear to be going faster than it was. The Warren panel, using Zapruder's camera as a "clock," had fixed the limo's average speed at 11.2 mph. Groden, however, said the House panel used the version of the film with all frames supplied.
[This] reporter, using photographs, estimated the position of the sign in Dealey Plaza and judged its width at six feet. Using Zapruder's spot as a reference point, he calculated the distance -- no more than 15 feet -- from when JFK's head vanishes behind the sign to when it emerges.
By matching the number of frames at 18.3 per second against the distance, rate of speed is obtained. If all frames are accounted for, the car was going at 3.5 mph when the first shot hit. If six frames are missing, about 6 mph.
Groden pointed out that some witnesses said the limo stopped about the time the first shot hit. Actually, he said, another film by Orville Nix shows the car slowing to about 5 mph by the sign. The following car almost rammed JFK's car, he says. The Zapruder film shows [driver] Greer slouching down, glancing over his shoulder as the shots are fired, without stepping on the gas. Meanwhile, two men are standing next to JFK's car, apparently making signals with an arm and an umbrella.
No motorcycles were in front of Greer slowing him down and the lead car was four or five car lengths ahead, the commission said. The Stemmons sign was removed that afternoon. No explanations were given.
Oswald joined the Marines and went to radar school, ending up at an Air Force base at Atsugi, Japan. This was no ordinary air base. It was a U2 base, which was under the operational control of the CIA. The CIA's U2 program was under the iron-fisted control of Richard M. Bissell, an upper cruster known as a genius at clandestine operations. Though his titular boss was Allen M. Dulles, Bissell appears to have [had] great power. Dulles and Bissell both reported to Nelson Rockefeller in Eisenhower's White House and later to Richard Nixon. Bissell and Dulles were strongly aligned with the Rockefeller family interests.
No radar operator worked at a CIA base who wasn't under close supervision by the CIA. Maverick CIA agent Phillip Agee has revealed that CIA agents are often given military cover.
Another maverick, former Pentagon intelligence liaison Fletcher Prouty, insists there exists a national security establishment, or "secret team," which is adept at controlling the government through deception, secrecy and control of clandestine communications. He believes this "team" had JFK rubbed out.
In 1959 Oswald obtained a hardship discharge and then flew to Europe, where his visa was processed marvelously quickly. The ex-corporal either had plenty of money to pay for the flights or he caught a military hop. Or an imposter was sent.
In Moscow his defection was greeted with some skepticism by the Soviets, but after allegedly slashing his wrists, they kept him. He passed on secret information to the Soviets but in general his activities are murky. While he was in Russia, U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down.
The Soviets, no fools, would have suspected Oswald of being an agent, but treated him very kindly, giving him a good apartment, a healthy stipend and permitting him to marry a KGB official's niece, Marina Prusakova.
When he asked to- be repatriated, the way was smoothed for him by both the Russians and the Americans.
While in Russia, a "journalist" interviewed him. Priscilla Johnson, daughter of a well-heeled New York family who translated a manuscript by Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, was affiliated with the U.S. embassy in Moscow and has been affiliated with a CIA-backed think tank, Harvard's Russian Research Center. She eventually wrote a book, "Marina and Lee," which toes the Warren Report line.
Johnson started her career as a functionary of the World Federalists, a group listing many establishment figures that is primarily backed by the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers have for years been behind the "one word" movement, according to a sheaf of documonts obtained by this reporter.
The Rockefellers have also been very strong influences on the CIA, Dulles having been associated with one of their law firms for example. Cord Mayer, a CIA majordomo, is a past president of the World Federalists.
When Oswald returned to the U.S. he wasn't arrested as a traitor, but went to live in New Orleans. The FBI failed to place him on its Security Index and, while maintaining contacts with him, left him alone. When he applied for a new passport to go to Mexico in a vain attempt to got a visa for Cuba, no alarms went off in the State Department. He obtained his passport within 24 hours.
Oswald's acquaintances in New Orleans included David Ferrie, who commanded the Civil Air Patrol unit of which Oswald was a member while a teenager. Perhaps this is when Oswald was recruited for the CIA.
Ferrie, a brilliant misfit, at times worked for Louisiana-East Texas mob boss Carlos Marcello as an "investigator" and at times for the CIA as a contract pilot, running guns and agents into Castro's Cuba. (The CIA, and its predecessor the OSS, had worked closely together [with gangland] ever since Meyer Lansky struck a deal with the government during WWII. The CIA. ran a number of unsuccessful assassination plots against Castro with the connivance of Chicago boss Sam Giancana, Miami boss Santos Trafficante Jr. and Giancana's henchman. Johnny Rosselli.
Another of Oswald's likely associates was Guy Banister, ex-FBI agent and New Orleasn police official. He was associated with CIA Latin American operations, including gun-running by CIA-acked Cuban exiles. Oswald hung around -- supposedly as a Marxist Castroite -- Banister's building and passed out on one occasion pro-Cuba leaflets, which Garrison noticed had 544 Camp St. printed on them. This address is for a side door of Banister's building. Ferrie worked with Banister.
Oswald's friend in Dallas, a White Russian count named George de Mohrenshildt was a spy in World War II and [had been] monitored by the FBI as a possible Nazi agent. He was well-connected with the Texas oil community, including Rockefeller interests. He once showed up at a CIA guerrilla training base in Guatemala on a "walking tour."
The woman who put up Oswald's family in her Irving, Texas, home, came from an exclusive, rich family, as did her husband Robert. Ferrie, Giancano, Rosselli, de Mohrenshildt -- as with many tied to the affair -- have met violent death.
Groden's photo enhancements were shown to the House probers to point out that a figure is seemingly crouched over a bit of concrete wall next to where Zapruder was standing but in a subsequent photo the figure is not there. This spot provides a clear line of fire to JFK's head, just as he approached the Stemmons sign, photos show.
A reporter's inspection of Dealey Plaza reveals that the area behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, where witnesses saw smoke and heard bangs, provides poor lines of fire to the kill zone, because of the road's curve and the roll of the hill. However, neusman Jones pointed out a square manhole where the fence meets the railroad overpass that provides an excellent field of fire. Jones said the fence had recently been sawn prior to the murder, permitting a rifle barrel to poke through.
Because assassins use smokeless powder, the commotion that attracted witnesses by the fence was likely a diversion, perhaps with a smoke grenade.
Though policemen and railroad workers were standing on the bridge near this manhole, it could easily have been camouflaged with foliage. Other vantage points from high windows or rooftops would have provided fairly good lines of fire, but the best -- and closest spots - -appeared to be next to Zapruder and the square manhole. A vexing question raised by reporters in the ambush aftermath was why Oswald didn't pick off JFK as he drove toward him on Houston Street rather than waiting for the much more difficult shots after the car had turned the corner onto Elm. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover immediately suggested that trees were in the way on Houston Street. None:were -- though a tree did severely limit shooting opportunities on Elm.
In the seconds [bracketing the period when] JFK was being shot a train composed of several boxcars rolled across the bridge. One Willis slide, which reportedly did show the train, was returned to him by the FBI with no train visible. But a photo by Wilma Bonds moments after the gunfire reveals a boxcar showing through pergola latticework on the plaza's north side, adjacent to the kill zone. A previous photo shows no boxcar there. One track curves away from the bridge, bending behind the pergola and the depository.
Some 30 minutes to an hour later, news photographers. snapped pictures of three tramps being led from a boxcar that was reportedly on the plaza's south side, behind the postal annex, on the same stretch of track as the car seen in the Bonds photo.
Immediately after the assassination, cops and federal firearms agents swarmed the rail yards, but somehow failed to turn up these men. Perhaps someone in the annex had alerted authorities or perhaps some subterfuge was used.
These tramps -- one of whom had a distinctly military bearing -- were later released with no record kept of their names. Homicide chief William Fritz years later told writer Michael Canfield that only the FBI could explain why no records were kept.
About 10 other men, including an Army intelligence agent seized inside the depository -- were arrested in or near Dealey Plaza with no action taken against them, despite their suspicious behavior.
Two of the three seized on the train were described by writers A.J. Weberman and Canfield as looking very much like Watergate burglars Frank Sturgis and [E.] Howard Hunt. Sturgis was part of Hunt's CIA crew during the Bay of Pigs buildup, and probably earlier.
House panel photo analysts said the tramps were probably not Sturgis or Hunt, but the authors provided photo overlays which quite closely match features of the Watergaters aad the tramps. However, a photo apparently provided by Weberman and identified as CIA agent Daniel Carswell was examined by House experts and determined not to be Carswell.
The "Carswell' photo upon close inspection b [this] reporter appeared to be a clever montage -- a fake.
This reporter .discovered a photo, apparently uncovered by Jim Garrison's investigators, of a man dressed in guerrilla fatigues and holding a sten gun. He was identified as a Sturgis associate, Jerry Hemming. A comparison of certain characteristics of the mouth and the eye ridge, along with the facial expression, seems to bear a remarkable likeness to the tramp sometimes dubbed Frenchy. However, the photo of Hemming pictures a young man, whereas Frenchy appears middle-aged.
Hemming and Sturgis, according to what they supposedly told Weberman, were members of a CIA-affiliated guerrilla outfit they called tiro International Penetration Force/International Anticommunist Brigade. This group was one of a number that conducted guerrilla warfare against Cuba on behalf of the CIA. Hunt was one of the CIA's top operatives in Cuban exile affairs. Hemming is now imprisoned on a Florida narcotics charge, Weberman says.
Hunt sued Weberman and his publisher but later dropped the suit and paid court costs. Weberman claims Hunt, during suit proceedings, changed his alibi as to his whereabouts on Nov. 22, 1963.
The Church panel, which did not probe the JFK killing very deeply, issued a report blasting the CIA and the FBI for foot-dragging in the investigation and for not checking up on possible Cuban involvement.
Some of those on the Warren Commission did nicely for themselves. Gerald Ford became Nixon's choice for vice president. Counsel Arlen Specter is now a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. William T. Coleman was appointed Nixon's transportation secretary and moves in the stratosphere of Rockefeller business circles. Dallas attorney Leon Jaworski, a Warren staffer, vent on to prosecute Nixon's top aides for Watergate offenses. Other commissioners, John McCloy and ex-spymaster Dulles, were known as Rockefeller men.
However, Rep. Hale Boggs (D-La.), who came to voice doubts abort the commission's work died in an Alaska plane crash.
CBS TV ran a documentary, featuring Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, defending the Warren report. Rather tells the audience that Zapruder's film shows JFK's head lurching forward, indicating a shot from the rear, when in fact JFK's head jolts backward. Life [magazine] was still suppressing its film. it
Rather was standing near the [Triple] Underpass when JFK was slain.
A major stockholder in CBS is the Rockefeller bank, Chase Manhattan.
On Dec. 1, 1970, a New York Times review of Garrison's book on the slaying was in the first edition headlined "Who Killed Kennedy?" The head read "The Shaw-Garrison Affair" in later editions and a whole section of the review agreeing with Garrison and debunking the Warren report was edited out. The Rockefellers have at least three directors on the Times.
Life magazine in the fall of 1964 stopped the presses and changed the sequence of Zapruder frames it was publishing. The correct sequence would have indicated the head jolted to the rear, implying a second gunman.
Most reporters for the Hearst Corp., such as Marianne Means who was in Dallas that day, have upheld the Warren report. Dorothy Kilgallen, a Hearst columnist and old-line reporter wasn't cowed and blasted away at the Warren report in her columns. She was found dead in bed, reportedly of a drug overdose.
UPI's Merriman Smith, now dead, was the first person in the motorcade press corps to report JFK's shooting. Somehow he managed to do this two minutes after the gunfire. He later wrote in the N.Y. Times that there hadn't been the "slightest doubt" that the shots came from his rear, even though he said he was at the Triple Underpass when the shots rang out, putting him ahead of the motorcade. Smith was the only reporter invited to fly back to Washington on Air Force One.
Another reporter on the scene, Tom Wicker, has consistently backed the lone gunman theory. The [N.Y.] Times gave him a column and made him associate editor.
The AP issued a book, "The Torch is Passed," which is a glib version of the official line shortly after the murder. The news organization fails to raise a single question posed by many a good reporter in the assassination aftermath. AP, then under General Manager Wes Gallagher, is supposedly a cooperative. But, at the time, the Rockefeller-dominated AT&T gave special rates to the news services.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
turns up in net archive
The two-part 1984 feature written by this writer under the name Roger Conant was preserved in the Weisberg Archives. Conant's report drew no known response from editors, though other of his investigative reports had had national impact. Conant at the time suspected his movements were being tracked by federal agents.
Harold Weisberg, a lawyer and critic of the Warren commission, had amassed a vast collection of government and public information concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Tex., on Nov. 22, 1963.
Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt, a former clandestine operative for the CIA, in 1978 won a libel judgment against Liberty Lobby. Liberty Lobby's newspaper, The Spotlight, had run an article placing Hunt in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and linking him to the assassination. After Conant's article was disseminated in 1984, Lane gained a retrial and the jury found against Hunt. In 1984, Hunt threatened Conant with libel action, but never followed through.
Conant's JFK reports
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/P%20Disk/Probe%20News%20Features/Item%2002.pdf
The Weisberg Archive
http://jfk.hood.edu
'Whitewash' by Weisberg
http://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-The-Report-Warren/dp/162636110X
No comments:
Post a Comment