Post by Rob Caprio on Jul 12, 2019 19:45:04 GMT -5
All portions are ©️ Robert Caprio 2006-2024
www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2017/fall/images/warren-commission.jpg
This is from an article by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan published in Vanity Fair magazine.
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Back in 1964, asked whether his Commission's documents would be made public, Chief Justice Earl Warren replied, "Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public ("THE GHOSTS OF NOVEMBER", By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan)
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Not changed? The cold war was over for like 9 years wasn't it?
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The writers of the Warren Report fell back on painting Oswald as having "an overriding hostility to his environment." "We ducked the question of motive," Commission counsel Burt Griffin admitted years later.
"Within days," said former F.B.I. supervisor Laurence Keenan, "we could say the investigation was over. `Conspiracy` was a word which was verboten...The idea that Oswald had a confederate or was part of a group or a conspiracy was definitely enough to place a man's career in jeopardy...Looking back, I feel a certain amount of shame. This one investigation disgraced a great organization."
"There's not much question," said Congressman Don Edwards, after chairing House committee hearings in 1975, "that both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. are somewhere behind this cover-up. I hate to think what it is they are covering up - or who they are covering for." Edwards is himself a former F.B.I. agent. Long after his work on the Commission was done. Senator Richard Russell said simply, "We have not been told the truth about Oswald."
Our investigation establishes that skepticism about assassination orthodoxy is by no means limited to eccentric "buffs." The man who inherited the presidency, Lyndon Johnson, juggled conspiracy theories and did not believe in the analysis of the shooting on which the lone-assassin verdict is founded. Nor did several members of the Commission that endorsed it. And while the predominant conspiracy theory proposes that the Mafia killed Kennedy, the nature of the mysteries surrounding the case points to a more complex scenario.
"The monumental record of the President's Commission will stand like a Gibraltar of factual literature through the ages to come." said Gerald Ford. Yet a stream of prominent Americans have remained skeptics, including members of the Commission itself. Senator Richard Russell, for instance, later said of Oswald, "I'm not completely satisfied in my own mind that he did plan and commit this act altogether on his own." "I no longer feel we simply had no credible evidence or reliable evidence in proof of a conspiracy...," said John McCloy in 1978. The F.B.I.'s domestic-intelligence chief, William Sullivan, remained in doubter: "There were huge gaps in the case, gaps we never did close." The Dallas police chief at the time of the assassination, Jesse Curry, believed two gunmen were involved. (Ibid.)
The Secret Service agents who guarded President Kennedy never spoke on record. But we now know what the agent who sat with Kennedy in the limousine thought: Roy Kellerman's widow, June, says he "accepted that there was a conspiracy." Kennedy's close aide Kenneth O'Donnell rode in the car immediately behind the president's. O'Donnell told the late Tip O'Neill that he was pressured by the F.B.I. not to say what he firmly believed, that gunfire had come from in front of the motorcade. (Ibid.)
Richard Schweiker, the senator who spearheaded the Intelligence Committee probe, said he believed "the Warren Commission was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and that one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time." (Ibid.)
In the nineties, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library released a string of recordings of phone conversations. They show Kennedy's successor wheedling, flattering, and browbeating people as he struggled to form an acceptable Commission. Senator Richard Russell pleaded in tones of desperation that he did not have the time. "The hell...we'll just make the time," Johnson growled. "There's not going to be any time to begin with. All you gotta do is evaluate a Hoover report he's already made." (Ibid.)
F.B.I. director Hoover's report had not even been completed when that call took place, a week after the assassination, but it is clear what he and Johnson wanted. "The thing I am most concerned about," Hoover said in a call to the White House two hours after Oswald's murder, "is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." The new president appointed the Warren Commission to head off pressure for congressional investigation and to stop rumours of an international Communist conspiracy. (Ibid.)
Barely two hours after Oswald's arrest, according to Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei, Hoover was declaring himself "quite convinced they have found the right party." The next day, though, he told Johnson in a private call, "The evidence that they have at the present time is not very, very strong...The case as it stands now isn't strong enough to be able to get a conviction." (Ibid.)
Yet, in a later interview, Specter himself had no good answers to questions raised about his theory. At the time, doubters included members of the Commission itself and the president to whom they reported. John McCloy had difficulty accepting it. Hale Boggs had "strong doubts." And John Sherman Cooper remained "unconvinced." On one of the White House tapes, Richard Russell is heard telling President Johnson, "I don't believe it." And the president responds, "I don't either." (Ibid.)
There is no consensus among those who have seen the photographs and X-.rays. Some believe, contrary to the opinion of congressional consultants, that they have been tampered with. "These are fake X-rays," claimed Jerrol Custer, a technician who made some of the autopsy X-rays in 1963. The photographs are "phony and not the photographs we took," said Floyd Reibe, who took some of the pictures. One of the surgeons who worked on the president in Dallas, Dr. Robert McClelland, also examined the X-rays. "There is an inconsistency," he said in 1989. "Some of the skull X-rays show only the back part of the head missing... (Others) show what appears to be the entire right side of the skull gone...I don't understand that, unless there has been some attempt to cover up the nature of the wound." (Ibid.)
A physicist and radiation therapist at the Eisenhower Medical Center, Dr. David Mantik, submitted the X-rays to a technique called optical densitometry. "This data," he told us, "provides powerful and quantitative evidence of alteration to some of the skull X-rays. They appear to me to be composites." (Ibid.)
The evidence that the rifle was stored in the garage of the house where Oswald's wife was staying, and where he slept the night before the assassination, is thin. "The fact is," wrote Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler in a memo requesting changes to the draft of the Warren Report, "that not one person alive today ever saw that rifle in the...garage in such a way that it could be identified as that rifle." He was ignored. (Ibid.)
"We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle," former Dallas police chief Curry said in 1969. "No one has been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."
Once the mind is open to such issues (why would LHO be in the lunchroom at 12:15 PM), the questions come tumbling. Witnesses to the murder of policeman J.D. Tippit and the attempt to kill General Walker spoke of not one but two suspects near each crime scene. Witnesses to the assassination spoke of seeing two men with a gun on a high floor of the Depository. Two policemen encountered men behaving suspiciously on the infamous "grassy knoll." (Ibid.)
It is clear from a dozen witnesses that Oswald repeatedly spoke about John F. Kennedy in terms of admiration. He "showed in his manner of speaking that he liked the president," said a policeman who talked with him in August 1963. In a conversation about civil rights a month before the assassination, Oswald said he thought Kennedy was doing "a real fine job, a real good job." (Ibid.)
Until his retirement in the mid-nineties, John Newman was a major in U.S. Army Intelligence. He is not free to discuss precisely what he has been doing for the past two decades, except to say that it involved intelligence analysis and a stint at the highest levels of the National Security Agency. Newman is also a trained historian and the author of a book on the relationship between the C.I.A. and Lee Harvey Oswald.
"In a sense," said Newman, "it doesn't matter to me who killed Kennedy. What matters to me is whether we're told the truth about it today. If you study recent American history, the lies about Vietnam, Watergate, and on and on, and see the level of cynicism and malaise that's grown up, it's frightening." "What I can do that people without my background never could," the former intelligence officer asserted, "is to interpret these things, work out how many people saw a report, how often, when, and why. I can peer into the minds of the people who
handled Oswald's files." (Ibid.)
www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2017/fall/images/warren-commission.jpg
This is from an article by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan published in Vanity Fair magazine.
Quote on
Back in 1964, asked whether his Commission's documents would be made public, Chief Justice Earl Warren replied, "Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public ("THE GHOSTS OF NOVEMBER", By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan)
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What security matters could these be? It was one guy right?
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In 1998, when its mandate ended, the Review Board said it had confronted a cold-war culture of secrecy that had not significantly changed. In spite of all that it did achieve, and refreshing cooperation from some government agencies, others had been obstructive. It worried that, even now, "critical records may have been withheld." Why? (Ibid.)
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Not changed? The cold war was over for like 9 years wasn't it?
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The writers of the Warren Report fell back on painting Oswald as having "an overriding hostility to his environment." "We ducked the question of motive," Commission counsel Burt Griffin admitted years later.
"Within days," said former F.B.I. supervisor Laurence Keenan, "we could say the investigation was over. `Conspiracy` was a word which was verboten...The idea that Oswald had a confederate or was part of a group or a conspiracy was definitely enough to place a man's career in jeopardy...Looking back, I feel a certain amount of shame. This one investigation disgraced a great organization."
"There's not much question," said Congressman Don Edwards, after chairing House committee hearings in 1975, "that both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. are somewhere behind this cover-up. I hate to think what it is they are covering up - or who they are covering for." Edwards is himself a former F.B.I. agent. Long after his work on the Commission was done. Senator Richard Russell said simply, "We have not been told the truth about Oswald."
Our investigation establishes that skepticism about assassination orthodoxy is by no means limited to eccentric "buffs." The man who inherited the presidency, Lyndon Johnson, juggled conspiracy theories and did not believe in the analysis of the shooting on which the lone-assassin verdict is founded. Nor did several members of the Commission that endorsed it. And while the predominant conspiracy theory proposes that the Mafia killed Kennedy, the nature of the mysteries surrounding the case points to a more complex scenario.
"The monumental record of the President's Commission will stand like a Gibraltar of factual literature through the ages to come." said Gerald Ford. Yet a stream of prominent Americans have remained skeptics, including members of the Commission itself. Senator Richard Russell, for instance, later said of Oswald, "I'm not completely satisfied in my own mind that he did plan and commit this act altogether on his own." "I no longer feel we simply had no credible evidence or reliable evidence in proof of a conspiracy...," said John McCloy in 1978. The F.B.I.'s domestic-intelligence chief, William Sullivan, remained in doubter: "There were huge gaps in the case, gaps we never did close." The Dallas police chief at the time of the assassination, Jesse Curry, believed two gunmen were involved. (Ibid.)
The Secret Service agents who guarded President Kennedy never spoke on record. But we now know what the agent who sat with Kennedy in the limousine thought: Roy Kellerman's widow, June, says he "accepted that there was a conspiracy." Kennedy's close aide Kenneth O'Donnell rode in the car immediately behind the president's. O'Donnell told the late Tip O'Neill that he was pressured by the F.B.I. not to say what he firmly believed, that gunfire had come from in front of the motorcade. (Ibid.)
Faith in the Warren Commission was also shaken by congressional investigations. Probes by the Intelligence Committee in the Senate and.by the Constitutional Rights Subcommittee in the House left many convinced that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had something to hide.
Richard Schweiker, the senator who spearheaded the Intelligence Committee probe, said he believed "the Warren Commission was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and that one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time." (Ibid.)
In the nineties, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library released a string of recordings of phone conversations. They show Kennedy's successor wheedling, flattering, and browbeating people as he struggled to form an acceptable Commission. Senator Richard Russell pleaded in tones of desperation that he did not have the time. "The hell...we'll just make the time," Johnson growled. "There's not going to be any time to begin with. All you gotta do is evaluate a Hoover report he's already made." (Ibid.)
F.B.I. director Hoover's report had not even been completed when that call took place, a week after the assassination, but it is clear what he and Johnson wanted. "The thing I am most concerned about," Hoover said in a call to the White House two hours after Oswald's murder, "is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." The new president appointed the Warren Commission to head off pressure for congressional investigation and to stop rumours of an international Communist conspiracy. (Ibid.)
Barely two hours after Oswald's arrest, according to Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei, Hoover was declaring himself "quite convinced they have found the right party." The next day, though, he told Johnson in a private call, "The evidence that they have at the present time is not very, very strong...The case as it stands now isn't strong enough to be able to get a conviction." (Ibid.)
Yet, in a later interview, Specter himself had no good answers to questions raised about his theory. At the time, doubters included members of the Commission itself and the president to whom they reported. John McCloy had difficulty accepting it. Hale Boggs had "strong doubts." And John Sherman Cooper remained "unconvinced." On one of the White House tapes, Richard Russell is heard telling President Johnson, "I don't believe it." And the president responds, "I don't either." (Ibid.)
There is no consensus among those who have seen the photographs and X-.rays. Some believe, contrary to the opinion of congressional consultants, that they have been tampered with. "These are fake X-rays," claimed Jerrol Custer, a technician who made some of the autopsy X-rays in 1963. The photographs are "phony and not the photographs we took," said Floyd Reibe, who took some of the pictures. One of the surgeons who worked on the president in Dallas, Dr. Robert McClelland, also examined the X-rays. "There is an inconsistency," he said in 1989. "Some of the skull X-rays show only the back part of the head missing... (Others) show what appears to be the entire right side of the skull gone...I don't understand that, unless there has been some attempt to cover up the nature of the wound." (Ibid.)
A physicist and radiation therapist at the Eisenhower Medical Center, Dr. David Mantik, submitted the X-rays to a technique called optical densitometry. "This data," he told us, "provides powerful and quantitative evidence of alteration to some of the skull X-rays. They appear to me to be composites." (Ibid.)
The evidence that the rifle was stored in the garage of the house where Oswald's wife was staying, and where he slept the night before the assassination, is thin. "The fact is," wrote Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler in a memo requesting changes to the draft of the Warren Report, "that not one person alive today ever saw that rifle in the...garage in such a way that it could be identified as that rifle." He was ignored. (Ibid.)
"We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle," former Dallas police chief Curry said in 1969. "No one has been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."
Once the mind is open to such issues (why would LHO be in the lunchroom at 12:15 PM), the questions come tumbling. Witnesses to the murder of policeman J.D. Tippit and the attempt to kill General Walker spoke of not one but two suspects near each crime scene. Witnesses to the assassination spoke of seeing two men with a gun on a high floor of the Depository. Two policemen encountered men behaving suspiciously on the infamous "grassy knoll." (Ibid.)
It is clear from a dozen witnesses that Oswald repeatedly spoke about John F. Kennedy in terms of admiration. He "showed in his manner of speaking that he liked the president," said a policeman who talked with him in August 1963. In a conversation about civil rights a month before the assassination, Oswald said he thought Kennedy was doing "a real fine job, a real good job." (Ibid.)
Until his retirement in the mid-nineties, John Newman was a major in U.S. Army Intelligence. He is not free to discuss precisely what he has been doing for the past two decades, except to say that it involved intelligence analysis and a stint at the highest levels of the National Security Agency. Newman is also a trained historian and the author of a book on the relationship between the C.I.A. and Lee Harvey Oswald.
"In a sense," said Newman, "it doesn't matter to me who killed Kennedy. What matters to me is whether we're told the truth about it today. If you study recent American history, the lies about Vietnam, Watergate, and on and on, and see the level of cynicism and malaise that's grown up, it's frightening." "What I can do that people without my background never could," the former intelligence officer asserted, "is to interpret these things, work out how many people saw a report, how often, when, and why. I can peer into the minds of the people who
handled Oswald's files." (Ibid.)
John Newman found buried treasure in the files on the Mexico visit. He discovered a sin of omission, a gap in the record where it should chronicle the central theme of Oswald's life before the assassination - the Cuba connection. "This is one of the more sensitive pieces," said Newman, "an enormous internal lie by the Agency about Oswald. Mexico is part of a larger pattern, the withholding of information within the C.I.A. itself. It's premeditated, not accidental, and I can prove it. Some of the C.I.A. employees involved are alive. What we have here is a major problem for the C.I.A." "I'm now certain," Newman went on, "that Oswald was the center of attention of many people in the C.I.A. - he was either part of an operation or an operation was built around him." (Ibid.)
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