Mark Lane, JFK assassination expert, has died.

[Octafish]

The New York Times reported the sad news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/us/mark-lane-who-asserted-that-kennedy-was-killed-in-conspiracy-dies-at-89.html

Mr. Lane was an outstanding American. He served in the US Army. A great Democrat and liberal New York state assemblyman. He was an honest lawyer. Mr. Lane was a true Patriot.

It was my privilege to hear him speak at Duquesne University in 2013.

[hack89]

1. Interesting life. His role in Jonestown is certainly eye opening. nt

[Octafish]

14. Mark Lane was a Social Justice Warrior before there was such a term.

Here's info on his bio:

http://www.marklane.com/citizen-lane.htm

[hack89]

19. He was also crazy as a loon, at least in regards to his role in Jonestown.

He may have been a SJW but he was also a conspiracy peddler of the highest order.

[Octafish]

31. The CIA instructed its ''Media Assets'' to demonize Mark Lane in 1967.

This document caused quite a stir when it was discovered in 1977. Dated 4/1/67, and marked "DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED", this document is a stunning testimony to how concerned the CIA was over investigations into the Kennedy assassination. Emphasis has been added to facilitate scanning.

CIA Document #1035-960, marked "PSYCH" for presumably Psychological Warfare Operations, in the division "CS", the Clandestine Services, sometimes known as the "dirty tricks" department.

CIA Instructions to Media Assets

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors) , pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

Source: http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html

Copy of actual memo: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=24678&search=concerning_criticism+of+the+warren+report#relPageId=1&tab=page

Proud to say that I wrote about this on DU in 2003: CIA memo: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report. Time flies.

Also proud to write that if it weren't for DU, many people would never know about it.

[hack89]

33. Not according to your link

they don't seem to think too highly of his book.

In any case, refuting =/= demonize. Lane was a nut case - no one could have viewed him as a real threat.

[Octafish]

39. Links go to the document.

You're right, though, it doesn't say ''demonize.''

b. To employ propaganda assets to (negate) and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

What do you think about the CIA admitting to controlling assets in the news media? Isn't that against the law?

[hack89]

40. I don't know if it it illegal or not.

perhaps you have a particular law in mind?

[Octafish]

41. Yes. CIA by law was limited to overseas operations, no domestic operations.

The CIA - at Home

excerpted from the book

The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies

by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976


p135
Responding to enormous pressure from President Johnson to uncover the foreign links to the growing unrest of the late 1960s, the CIA opened up a new division within its Counter-Intelligence Branch. Over the next seven years, the program conducted by this special staff, known as Operation CHAOS, spied on more than 7,000 American citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations.

This was the most extensive, but not the first, CIA spying operation against Americans. For years the agency had been opening mail, burglarizing homes, wiretapping phones, and secretly watching the movements of unsuspecting individuals within the United States, all in violation of its legislative charter.

In 1947, when Congress voted to create the CIA as part of the National Security Act, there was great concern about whether the CIA could operate in the United States and against Americans.

Congress wanted to assure the public that this agency would not lead to the growth of a secret police. Responding to these suspicions, Dr. Vannevar Bush, an administration witness, explained that the agency was concerned only with intelligence "outside this country," and not with "internal affairs. To make sure, Congress wrote into the ClA's charter that the agency was prohibited from exercising "police, subpoena, or law-enforcement powers or internal security functions." Congressional debate made it clear that Congress anticipated that the CIA would simply not operate at home.

Two years later, with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, congressional apprehensions were again calmed by the assertion that the CIA had no jurisdiction within the United States, that it "has no connection with the FBI; it is not under the FBI, it does not do the same kind of work as the FBI. These public assertions, however, did not coincide with the ClA's secret growth of operations within the United States and the surveillance of Americans abroad.

Because of the public uproar that would have ensued if the agency had openly expanded its domestic operations, the CIA wrote its own secret charter. Through internal directives, executive orders, and pacts with other government agencies, the CIA expanded its authority to operate at home so that it eventually encompassed activities that unquestionably violated the law, as well as its congressional charter.

From the beginning, CIA justified its involvement in domestic activities in terms of supplementing its covert operations and intelligence gathering abroad. As was discussed in Chapter Two in detail, the CIA created an intricate system of front organizations and companies to provide cover for its clandestine work. It set up its own airlines and business firms, and formed dummy foundations to funnel secret money into domestic student groups, educational publications, and labor unions. Recruiting its agents from almost every sector of the private domain, the CIA turned students, missionaries, and journalists into spies abroad. The agency also used its authority to protect its "sources and methods" to justify spying on Americans in the United States.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/CIA_Home_LS.html

[hack89]

44. Ok. Mark Lane was still a loon however. nt

[Octafish]

46. That's what you and CIA wrote. That's not what history shows.

An example from 1991:

An Interview with Mark Lane

Dr. Grover B. Proctor, Jr.
November 14, 1991

EXCERPT...

Proctor: Presumably when you undertook to become "a counsel for Lee Oswald" in 1963-64, and later when you wrote Rush to Judgment, you didn't begin with the idea that the CIA had killed President Kennedy. When did you seriously begin to question (to quote your book jacket) "Was the CIA involved in the assassination of JFK?"

Mark Lane: The first book I wrote, as you know, didn't deal with who did it. It took the Warren Commission Report and compared each of the essential conclusions of the Warren Commission to the evidence which the Warren Commision said it relied upon, and demonstrated that the evidence did not support the conclusions. In addition to that, I did my own interviews, as you know, and showed that [they] even further challenged the Warren Commission conclusions, as did some of the documents. All I was trying to do with Rush to Judgment was, not show who killed the President, but in essence who did not. I was trying to demonstrate that the Warren Commission report, which was an obstacle to going forward for a full investigation, was a fraudulent document. That's all I dealt with.

I had no idea who killed the president then. I never had an idea at that time. I never speculated for a moment, either when I wrote or when I thought about it or when I talked about it. I never knew; that's all. I did know, of course, that there were powerful forces involved in covering up the facts. I didn't know then, but I know now, that the Central Intelligence Agency reviewed my book Rush to Judgment before I got a copy of it, and what they said about it, and that they thought it was dangerous and had to be stopped. I didn't know that then but I was feeling the effects of the influence of the intelligence organizations through the news media, although I never specifically was able to demonstrate at that point that it was in fact the intelligence organizations which were responsible for what was taking place.

I suppose (it was) when I first met Marita Lorenz in the mid-70s. I had known about her but I had never met her and never talked to her. I had been living in New York, but I wasn't living in New York at that time. There was a story in the New York Post which said that Frank Sturgis had been arrested because, according to her, he had threatened to kill her and her daughter. It told what her address was. I found her and I interviewed her. Everything she told me, which is in Plausible Denial, everything she has said to the jury in her deposition, everything she has said since then in the videotaped interview, has always been consistent. And so in the mid-70s, I had her position, which was that the CIA had killed President Kennedy, that she was part of the team, and she knew exactly what she was talking about. I had her statement, but there was no forum, no place to publish it.

Thereafter, when I tried the (Liberty Lobby) case, I knew I was going to call her as a witness if I could find her. That was many years later, and I was able to. I started looking around at other evidence, and then I uncovered this additional evidence, which is the heart of the Mexico City scenario where you see that Earl Warren was briefed. I found that really interesting and corroborative evidence because that alone demonstrates the CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, and how Warren was manipulated, and how the CIA was setting up Oswald in September 1963 for a crime which was not going to take place for two months. It wasn't a cover-up anymore, it was planning. That alone demonstrated CIA involvement, as did Marita Lorenz' testimony alone demonstrate CIA involvement. But taken together these two separate bodies of evidence, I think, prove conclusively what took place.

So, taking the long way of answering your question, it was in the mid-70s after talking with Marita Lorenz that I began to believe that maybe the CIA did it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.groverproctor.us/jfk/jfk91b.html

That sounds like someone in command of his critical faculties and the facts at hand. We've learned a lot since then, thanks to Mark Lane.

[hack89]

47. Take a close look at his role in Jonestown. Pure batshit crazy to put it mildly.

he was complicit in those deaths.

[Octafish]

49. Please show how.

Your word is swell, but a link or source would be of help.

[hack89]

50. Sure

In September 1978, Lane visited Jonestown, spoke to Jonestown residents, provided support for the theory that intelligence agencies conspired against Jonestown and drew parallels between Martin Luther King and Jim Jones.[36] Lane then held press conferences stating that "none of the charges" against the Temple "are accurate or true" and that there was a "massive conspiracy" against the Temple by "intelligence organizations," naming the CIA, FBI, FCC and the U.S. Post Office.[36] Though Lane represented himself as disinterested, the Temple paid Lane $6,000 per month to help generate such theories.[37] Regarding the effect of the work of Lane and Freed upon Temple members, Temple member Annie Moore wrote that "Mom and Dad have probably shown you the latest about the conspiracy information that Mark Lane, the famous attorney in the ML King case and Don Freed the other famous author in the Kennedy case have come up with regarding activities planned against us—Peoples Temple."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lane_%28author%29#Jonestown_tragedy

[Octafish]

56. Doesn't seem loony, considering CIA works its magic on Wikipedia.

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

By John Borland
Wired, 08.14.07

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

SNIP...

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

CONTINUED...

http://archive.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker?currentPage=all

I'll go with what I know. Thanks for the link, though.

[hack89]

60. So working with a mad man in the jungles to brainwash a bunch of people

to the point that they would drink poison doesn't seem loony to you? Ok.

[Octafish]

61. But Lane didn't do any of that, did he?

Don't mix blame for Jim Jones with hate for Mark Lane.

Mark Lane’s 93-minute talk about the MLK murder and his subsequent legal representation of both James Earl Ray and Grace Walden (the one person who saw the actual gunman immediately after the shooting and who was put into a mental institution for ten years when she would not “sign off” on James Earl Ray) is beyond textbook definitive. Being his collaborator, Donald Freed says many of the exact same words as Mark Lane, but with the overview of a Greek tragedist looking for human archetypes in situations that span thousands of years. Jim Jones’ comments on the Black Panthers, political assassinations, LSD experiments – you name it – are very ahead of their time and insightful, yet also have an idiotic Gomer Pyle humor to them. (His mispronunciation of “hegemony” compared to how Noam Chomsky says the same word speaks volumes.) His endless incorrect allusions to Donald Freed being the screenwriter of The Parallax View (rather than the actual Executive Action) are amusing/confusing/strange. Jones’ double-faced praise and damning of Mark Lane are indicative of the insanity that was to come. Lane is either a saint brought by God to save them or a provocateur/government mole sent to bring their failure and demise.

http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=31948

So, I'll go with what I know.

[hack89]

62. ok. nt

[milestogo]

67. You don't know what you're talking about.

Better to keep silent than open your mouth and prove yourself to be a fool.

[hack89]

69. He was a genuine conspiracy theory peddling nut case.

Nothing he has ever peddled has been proven to be correct. It takes a unique talent to end up in a jungle helping a madman brainwash people to the point that they are willing to drink poison.

[Octafish]

84. Not at all. Ask Robert K. Tanenbaum.

From the introduction of Mark Lane’s 2011 book, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK:

In early 1977, I first met Mark Lane. At the time, I was deputy chief counsel to the congressional committee investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. During the course of the investigation, I set aside an afternoon every week to listen to individuals who had information they wished to share with me and the committee. On one such afternoon, Mark Lane came to see me. Before that, I had never met or spoken to him. When he entered the office, I stood to welcome him and asked him to be seated. He refused. Instead, he handed me a sealed envelope. I asked him if he had any suggestions or thoughts about its contents. He said, “When you read the contents, I believe you’ll know exactly what to do.” Immediately, he left. I never spoke to him again during the course of the investigation and for more than a decade thereafter.

The document in the envelope was a memo dated November 23, 1963, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to all bureau supervisory personnel. In substance, it stated that the FBI agents who had questioned Lee Harvey Oswald for approximately seventeen hours had listened to a tape of a conversation between an individual who identified himself as “Lee Oswald” and an individual in the Cuban embassy. The conversation had taken place inside the Russian embassy in Mexico City by this faux alleged Oswald who telephoned the Cuban embassy. The call was made on or about October 1, 1963, just about seven weeks before the assassination. The Hoover memo noted that the agents categorically concluded that the voice on the tape was not that of Lee Harvey Oswald. Based upon the evidence adduced during the investigation, I had reason to believe that David Phillips, the third-ranking member of the CIA in charge of Western Hemisphere operations, employed a nom de guerre, Maurice Bishop. Bishop had significant involvement with anti-Castro Cubans and Lee Harvey Oswald.

I had Phillips subpoenaed to appear before our committee in executive session. I asked him under oath where we could locate the tape of the so-called Oswald conversation of October 1, 1963, while inside the Russian embassy in Mexico City. Phillips stated that it was CIA policy at the time to recycle the tapes every six or seven days and it was no longer in existence after the first week in October 1963. I then handed him the Hoover memo which, according to the FBI director, clearly revealed that the tape was evidently available in Dallas on November 22 and 23, 1963. Phillips read the memo, then folded it, placed it in his jacket pocket, arose, and walked out of the meeting.

I immediately urged the committee to recall Phillips and advise him to obtain legal counsel so that he be given an opportunity to purge potential criminal charges of contempt and perjury. Also, there were many more questions that he needed to answer. I further advised the committee of the urgency of the matter and gave them legal options. They chose to do nothing. Thereafter, our staff phones were denied long distance telephone access, “franking privileges” were withdrawn, and staffers’ pay was withheld.

Prior to my assignment with the Congressional Committee, I served as an assistant district attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office under legendary D.A. Frank Hogan. While there, I tried hundreds of cases to verdict. I was Bureau Chief of the criminal courts, ran the Homicide Bureau, and was in charge of the training programs for the legal staff.

From experience as a prosecutor, I knew well that there is no political way to investigate a case. There is no liberal or conservative way to gather evidence and there is no Democratic or Republican way to evaluate it. Unfortunately, the congressional committee played politics with our investigation and subverted it. The members breached the trust reposed in them by the American people. They assured me that whatever the facts revealed would be forthrightly presented to the public. Regrettably, that was false.

Ironically, Mark Lane was a major moving force to have the committee organized and come to fruition. He supplied compelling evidence that should have energized the congressional probe; instead, ultimately this evidence led to its demise in terms of credibility and integrity. Recognizing that the committee was less than sincere in its search for the truth, Chief Counsel Richard Sprague and I tendered our resignations.

[Zen Democrat]

51. How about the establishment documents of the CIA. It expressly prohibits operations inside the US.

Do a quick search of Operation Mockingbird to see how the CIA has been subverting this prohibition since the 1950's.

[firebrand80]

2. Did he die under "mysterious circumstances?" nt

[Dr Hobbitstein]

3. It was the BFEE, obviously.

[Octafish]

6. George H.W. Bush should be considered a suspect, based on what he told the FBI.

On Nov. 22, 1963, in the hour of the death of President John F. Kennedy, Texas oilman George Herbert Walker Bush named a suspect to the FBI in a "confidential" phone call. He then added he was heading for Dallas. My problem with that is that he warned the FBI only after President Kennedy was dead.

The laughing emoticon brigade needs not take my word for it, that's what Poppy told the FBI:



Here's a transcript of the text:

TO: SAC, HOUSTON DATE: 11-22-63

FROM: SA GRAHAM W. KITCHEL

SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECT;
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY

At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.

BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.

BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt Mrs. FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.

BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.

# # #

Gee. Why was Poppy Bush in Dallas when JFK was assassinated?

Could it be, he was on official business? I suspect he was on Secret Government business. After all, his eldest son bragged during his Texas Air National Guard and Harvard grad school days that his daddy was CIA.

Here's an FBI document from the same week of the assassination in which FBI Director J Edgar Hoover briefed one "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." Some strange coincidence there, wot?



Here's a transcript of the above:

Date: November 29, 1963

To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State

From: John Edgar Hoover, Director

Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963, advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U. S. policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U. S. but to all of Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.

The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

# # #

I do remember that GHWB was head of the CIA when the Church Committee was looking into the CIA assassination programs. He made things all friendly-like and turned what had been a serious hunt for truth under previous DCI Colby into another dog-and-pony show that was big on show and light on facts.

Regarding Dallas: Now I don't know if Poppy was a trigger man, was only there to watch what happened or what just happened to be there. I do know Poppy Bush has never explained these memos. He's never even admitted where he was the day JFK was killed.

Seeing how he would go on to become President, as would his dim son, I believe it's vitally important that we learn the Truth.

Why? The United States and the world haven't been the same since November 22, 1963. And not a single major player in the nation's mass media have stepped up and demanded a real investigation. So, it's up to us, We the People.

What's more, Poppy Bush sheltered mass-murdering jet-bombing terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

7. TL;DR

Ran out of foil.

[Octafish]

8. Nothing says, ''I don't have a clue'' as your post.

Thanks for the input.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

9. The BFEE made me do it.

It's all a conspiracy. HW was the second gunman on the grassy knoll. From the left, to the right. Left, to the right. Left. To. The. Right.

$20 in the bank.

[Octafish]

11. Those are FBI documents.

Seeing how you don't have anything to add to them, allow me:

CIA director withheld information about JFK assassination

By Shawn Price
UPI, Oct. 13, 2015

LANGLEY, Va., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- A declassified CIA report reveals former director John McCone withheld information to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A secret report written in 2013 by CIA historian David Robarge and declassified in fall of 2014, alleges McCone led a "benign cover up" that kept "incendiary" information about the CIA from the Warren Commission, the report said.

McCone's cover up was designed to keep the commission focused on "what the agency believed was the 'best truth' - that Lee Harvey Oswald, ... acted alone in killing John Kennedy," the report said.

SNIP...

Robarge told Politico, the agency had declassified the report "to highlight misconceptions about the CIA's connection to JFK's assassination." A common conspiracy theory is that the CIA was in some way behind the killing.

CONTINUED...

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/10/13/CIA-director-withheld-information-about-JFK-assassination/4701444710907/

I don't mind you disagreeing. What I find offensive is your sense of humor, Dr Hobbitstein.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

12. Cool story.

I find conspiracy theorists hilarious!

[Octafish]

17. Learn then: JFK had to order Hoover to integrate the FBI.

James Carroll, the son of an FBI man promoted by JFK to be the first head the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides detail:

Another reason we felt like princes as we entered that auditorium was the FBI's role as the front line of Bobby Kennedy's own twin preoccupations: the fight against the Reds, for which he'd first become famous as an aide to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his newly launched campaign against Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby Kennedy, we felt, would look on us as special allies in the struggles he took most seriously. So imagine my surprise when what Bobby -- the hair, the teeth, the rolled-up sleeves -- chose to speak about that day was neither Reds nor the mob but the rights of colored people. In my mind, the NAACP might as well have been on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, thought I knew as little about it as I did about the Lincoln Brigade.

I remember the shrill pitch of his voice and the open palm of his hand slapping the podium. I remember his direct invitation to come back to Washington after graduation to join a new American crusade. "My fundamental belief," he said once, and I recall his saying something like it that day, "is that all people are created equally. Logically, it follows that integration should take place everywhere."

Fundamental belief? Powerfully faced with his, I had to admit that it was mine too. I remember, as it were, a light going on in my dull head: the flip side of "created equal" is "integraton." It was an era when such lights went on all over the place. Arthur Schlesigner Jr. reports that after Bobby Kennedy and an aide took an early tour of the Justice Department, Kennedy asked, "Did anything occur to you as strange in our visit around the offices?" The aide referred only to how hward everyone seemed to be working. Kennedy repolied, "But did you see any Negroes?"

SOURCE: "An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us," pp. 129-130.

http://bit.ly/1nvAHpu

That is just some of the important information missing from the corporate owned news and lackademia. Thank goodness for DU, huh Dr Hobbitstein, otherwise people would miss important parts of history.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

18. "Important parts of history"

Like bullshit that conspiracy theorists write? Count me out. Mark Lane was a hack and a fraud. Those that believe him are gullible.

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/no-st-study-scientists-find-conspiracy-theorists-will-anything-other-conspiracy

[Octafish]

20. I'll take Dick Gregory over Dr Hobbitstein of DU any day.

“Citizen Lane is a major contribution to the cause of equal justice in America. Lane has risked his life for us on more than one occasion, and even more than that, he has applied his incredible skill to causes and struggles all throughout our country. His work is unparalleled because his life has been.” -- Dick Gregory

[Dr Hobbitstein]

21. We also know you love some Paul Craig Roberts.

I wonder if you've ever read or said anything based in a factual reality.

[Octafish]

22. I've never called him a douche, if that's what you mean.

While I don't agree with him politically, I quoted him in regards to Gov. Don Siegelman once on DU and have heard a lot about it ever since whenever I write something that hurts someone's little feelings.

Here's what Dr. Roberts wrote the other day:

When They Killed JFK They Killed America

By Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org, May 7, 2016

EXCERPT...

Unlike most presidents, Kennedy was able to break with the conventional thinking of the time.

From his experience with the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Joint Chiefs’ “Operaton Northwoods,” Kennedy concluded that CIA Director Allen Dulles and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lemnitzer were both crazed by anti-communism and were a danger to Americans and the world.

Kennedy removed Dulles as CIA director, and he removed Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thus setting in motion his own assassination. The CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the Secret Service concluded that JFK was “soft on communism.” So did the Bill Buckley conservatives.

JFK was assassinated because of anti-communist hysteria in the military and security agencies.

The Warren Commission was well aware of this. The coverup was necessary because America was locked into a Cold War with the Soviet Union. To put US military, CIA, and Secret Service personnel on trial for murdering the President of the United States would have shaken the confidence of the American people in their own government.

CONTINUED...

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/05/07/when-they-killed-jfk-they-killed-america-paul-craig-roberts/

Thanks for remembering. Paul Craig Roberts, a Republican, today agrees with the conclusions Mark Lane, a Democrat, made in 1964.

[rperlberg]

73. Confidence in the government?

To put US military, CIA, and Secret Service personnel on trial for murdering the President of the United States would have shaken the confidence of the American people in their own government.

Like we have any confidence in the government now?

[Octafish]

74. That's the Thing.

As you observed, there is very little faith in the government today. It stems directly from that awful day more than half a century ago.

For most of the last 52 years -- from Vietnam to Afghanistan, from Somalia to El Salvador and elsewhere -- money trumps peace. The ENEMIES of JFK and Democracy now use their wealth to gain power and use power to protect their wealth and position, just like in feudal days. It is especially evident when you consider the rich, warmongers, and the traitors who lie America into war are above the law and are never held to account.



JFK was a Democrat in the New Deal tradition. He believed in using the powers of government to make life better for ALL Americans. He also believed in democracy for other countries, from Congo to Vietnam.

Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

“In assessing the central character ...
Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
— Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio
CTKA, From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)

EXCERPT…

The Self-Education of John F. Kennedy

During Kennedy’s six years in the House, 1947-1952, he concentrated on domestic affairs, bread and butter issues that helped his middle class Massachusetts constituents. As Henry Gonzalez noted in his blurb for Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street, he met Kennedy at a housing conference in 1951 and got the impression that young Kennedy was genuinely interested in the role that government could play in helping most Americans. But when Kennedy, his father, and his advisers decided to run for the upper house in 1952, they knew that young Jack would have to educate himself in the field of foreign affairs and gain a higher cosmopolitan profile. After all, he was running against that effete, urbane, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge. So Kennedy decided to take two seven-week-long trips. The first was to Europe. The second was a little unusual in that his itinerary consisted of places like the Middle East, India, and Indochina. (While in India, he made the acquaintance of Prime Minister Nehru who would end up being a lifelong friend and adviser.)

Another unusual thing about the second trip was his schedule after he got to his stops. In Saigon, he ditched his French military guides and sought out the names of the best reporters and State Department officials so he would not get the standard boilerplate on the French colonial predicament in Indochina. After finding these sources, he would show up at their homes and apartments unannounced. His hosts were often surprised that such a youthful looking young man could be a congressman. Kennedy would then pick their minds at length as to the true political conditions in that country.

If there is a real turning point in Kennedy’s political career it is this trip. There is little doubt that what he saw and learned deeply affected and altered his world view and he expressed his developing new ideas in a speech he made upon his return on November 14, 1951. Speaking of French Indochina he said: "This is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be born and those desperately trying to retain what they have held for so long." He later added that "the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been kindled and are now ablaze....Here colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men." He then criticized the U. S. State Department for its laid back and lackadaisical approach to this problem:

One finds too many of our representatives toadying to the shorter aims of other Western nations with no eagerness to understand the real hopes and desires of the people to which they are accredited.

The basic idea that Kennedy brought back from this trip was that, in the Third World, the colonial or imperial powers were bound to lose in the long run since the force of nationalism in those nascent countries was so powerful, so volcanic, that no extended empire could contain it indefinitely. This did not mean that Kennedy would back any revolutionary force fighting an imperial power. Although he understood the appeal of communism to the revolutionaries, he was against it. He wanted to establish relations and cooperate with leaders of the developing world who wished to find a "third way," one that was neither Marxist nor necessarily pro-Western. He was trying to evolve a policy that considered the particular history and circumstances of the nations now trying to break the shackles of poverty and ignorance inflicted upon them by the attachments of empire. Kennedy understood and sympathized with the temperaments of those leaders of the Third World who wished to be nonaligned with either the Russians or the Americans and this explains his relationships with men like Nehru and Sukarno of Indonesia. So, for Kennedy, Nixon’s opposition toward Ho Chi Minh’s upcoming victory over the French in Vietnam was not so much a matter of Cold War ideology, but one of cool and measured pragmatism. As he stated in 1953, the year before the French fell:

The war would never be successful ... unless large numbers of the people of Vietnam were won over from their sullen neutrality and open hostility. This could never be done ... unless they were assured beyond doubt that complete independence would be theirs at the conclusion of the war.

To say the least, this is not what the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen had in mind. Once the French empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower an overt American intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen Dulles sent in a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer Edward Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was replaced by the American version.

CONTINUED…

http://www.ctka.net/pr199-africa.html

Jim DiEugenio also is a DUer.

PS: Welcome to DU, rperlberg. Hope to read more of your thoughts on matters of interest and import. If Americans don't underrstand how much things have changed since the assassination of President Kennedy, they need to read more. Television isn't bringing it up, nor do the trolls online.

[Rex]

35. So you come in here and crap in the thread...stay classy.

Pathetic.

[Logical]

99. You are the most clueless CS poster on this board. Almost a parody of CS everywhere. nt

[Octafish]

102. Personal attacks are so you, Logical.

They reveal your ignorance, not mine.

[Fast Walker 52]

24. oh for god's sake... how pathetic

[Rex]

36. There are very pathetic people that post here and support the Bush family.

As clearly can be seen.

[Zen Democrat]

55. Pure unmitigated ignorance.

[NuclearDem]

30. ALCOA!

[Octafish]

15. He suffered a heart attack.

What NYT reported.

[RobinA]

23. I Never Actually Thought

he was a loon, I kinda just figured he got way too invested in the whole thing and lost the ability to question his own thinking. I was always open to the idea of some conspiracy but not that interested in the whole murky business, but years later a friend who was a hardcore JFK conspiracy believer convinced me to read Lane's book. I had read things here and there, but it was all just a bit out there (riflemen jumping out of manhole covers, etc.) This was in the '90's. I finished the book, and my reaction was that if this was the best the leading not-Oswald believer could come up with after 30 years, there wasn't much evidence of anybody other than Oswald to be had. The reasoning in Lane's book is pretty bad. E.g. A lot of people around Ruby died before their time, they must have been in on something and killed.

I realize that the fact that Lane couldn't make a good case does not mean there wasn't/isn't a good case to be made, but I have yet to see a convincing one based on solid reasoning. Maybe we'll get a Castro deathbed confession. I'm left with, It was Oswald unless I see a good alternative theory. I got no problem facing the fact that a lone loser can take out the President of the United States.

[Octafish]

28. With all respect, I do have a problem with the lone loser theory.

There had been several attempts on JFK's life in the weeks leading up to Dallas. Author Edwin Black detailed them...same M.O. as Dallas, ambush, high-power rifles, high-rise, and one patsy by the name of Thomas Arthur Vallee, a USMC veteran from a U-2 base in Japan. The plot was broken up by the Secret Service in Chicago. Not that they wanted to, they sort of had to when the local cops got a call from a landlady with the guns, passports, maps and "parade route" in Highlighter still on the bed.

This file has been transcribed from a poor set of photo-copies. The images in those photocopies are, at best, very poor and I chose not to include them except to reference them and provide any subtext attached.The text in the original article was formatted in one to three columns per page and, to make referencing the original a bit easier, I’ve referenced those columns as well. I hope I’ve maintained the integrity of the original article to everyone’s satisfaction.

But first…

Five years ago on a commission from Atlantic Monthly, I began investigating a Chicago conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy just 20 days before Dallas. When I asked the wrong questions and came too close to sensitive information, I was followed and investigated by a Defense Intelligence Agency (D. I. A.) operative. By examining my own file, I identified him and embarrassed the DIA into halting the harassment. There's a record of their "project" in the credit bureau where it began, Credit Information Corporation. (named Cook County credit bureau at the time). The DIA's inquiry listed my employer as Atlantic Monthly although, that assignment was my only work for the magazine.

Unfortunately, the harassment didn't end until after my apartment was broken into. No valuables were taken. But all my files were obviously and clumsily searched.

But that was five years ago, before Watergate, a different era. Today, when reporters edge close to dirty government secrets, it is the agencies who become nervous. And they think thrice before attempting the retaliation and tactics once common to the game.

My investigation, revived within the past eight months, took me to New York, Long Island,Houston and Washington as well as through courts, warehouses, police stations and federal offices in Chicago. Hundreds of hours scrutinizing federal, state and local documents,dozens of interviews, hundreds of leads. And always with the Secret Service and FBI working against me, doing what they could to make the investigation tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Perhaps they hoped the investigation would just disappear after all the obstructions.

I hope they now know they must come up with the answers. It is simply unacceptable to wait until the 21st century for the release of seventy or so top secret Warren Commission documents.

(image: Edwin Black’s signature)

Very important read in PDF: http://www.thechicagoplot.com/The%20Chicago%20Plot.pdf

Thank you for your kind reply, RobinA. If you get a chance, I'd recommend "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James W. Douglass. It was published by Orbis. It picks up on what Lane found and builds a strong case that the assassination of President Kennedy was conducted by the national security apparatus of the United States.

PS: Once a New York Times reporter, Black is the author of "IBM and the Holocaust" and "War against the Weak."

[RobinA]

25. I Think

in Lane's world, ALL deaths are mysterious. This could be why Jeb never could get his head around running for President. Poppy wanted to see Lane gone, so the Jebster was the designated snuffer. Personally, I would have picked W for the job, but he did do the president thing for 8 years, so it was Jeb's turn.

[Octafish]

94. This I will tell you: Your life is better for Mark Lane having lived.

Some people are like that. Others, no. It'd be better for all of us the other way.

Mark Lane, though, was a real Democrat. He was friends with Jack and Bobby Kennedy. And his work brought to light some of the things our government does with its powers -- particularly secret agents and secret agencies -- to destroy Life, Liberty and Justice for private gain, profit and power.

You don't have to believe me about Mark Lane. I know what he was talking about. I lived for some of the time when President Kennedy and Senator Kennedy lived. Look around with your own eyes and listen with your own ears, this is not the world they envisioned and worked for.

President Kennedy told the warmongers in his administration, Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street and beyond, "No." when they demanded war -- including war over the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam. As President he set the nation's sights on the moon, achieving what had been considered impossible. On earth, he was willing to try more of the same, working to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and to create a prosperous economy that served all Americans. Of course, following in his footsteps, Sen. Kennedy had just won the California primary on a platform of peace in Vietnam.

The people leading America since those days have largely put things the exact opposite: Today, "money trumps peace." Listen to George W Bush express the philosophy that obviously his Poppy and Granddaddy Prescott also believed:

"Commercial interests are very powerful interests," said George W Bush on Feb. 14, 2007 White House press conference in which he added, "Let me put it this way, ah, sometimes, ah, money trumps peace." And then he giggled and not a single member of the callow, cowed and corrupt press corpse saw fit to ask a follow-up.

Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan tried to bring it to our nation's attention back in 2007. I don't recall even one reporter from the national corporate owned news seeing it fit to comment. Certainly not many have commented on how three generations of Bush men -- Senator Prescott Sheldon Bush, President George Herbert Walker Bush and pretzeldent George Walker Bush all had their eyes on Iraq's oil.

I wish the Press had done its job. Those in authority would have to do their job. Millions might still be alive, the People might use the money spent on wars in better ways, and the Republic might see a return to Justice. To get that started requires jailing those who lied America into war, not making them into heroes cough Bush.

[FLPanhandle]

4. "expert"?

I always viewed him as a loon, but whatever...

[Octafish]

16. Bertrand Russell respected Mark Lane.

16 Questions on the Assassination

By Bertrand Russell
The Minority of One, 6 September 1964, pp. 6-8

The official version of the assassination of President Kennedy has been so riddled with contradictions that it is been abandoned and rewritten no less than three times. Blatant fabrications have received very widespread coverage by the mass media, but denials of these same lies have gone unpublished. Photographs, evidence and affidavits have been doctored out of recognition. Some of the most important aspects of the case against Lee Harvey Oswald have been completely blacked out. Meanwhile, the F.B.I., the police and the Secret Service have tried to silence key witnesses or instruct them what evidence to give. Others involved have disappeared or died in extraordinary circumstances.

It is facts such as these that demand attention, and which the Warren Commission should have regarded as vital. Although I am writing before the publication of the Warren Commission’s report, leaks to the press have made much of its contents predictable. Because of the high office of its members and the fact of its establishment by President Johnson, the Commission has been widely regarded as a body of holy men appointed to pronounce the truth. An impartial examination of the composition and conduct of the Commission suggests quite otherwise.

The Warren Commission has been utterly unrepresentative of the American people. It consisted of two Democrats, Senator Russell of Georgia and Congressman Boggs of Louisiana, both of whose racist views have brought shame on the United States; two Republicans, Senator Cooper of Kentucky and Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, the latter of whom is a leader of his local Goldwater movement and an associate of the F.B.I.; Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mr. McCloy, who has been referred to as the spokesman for the business community. Leadership of the filibuster in the Senate against the Civil Rights Bill prevented Senator Russell from attending hearings during the period. The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren, who rightly commands respect, was finally persuaded, much against his will, to preside over the Commission, and it was his involvement above all else that helped lend the Commission an aura of legality and authority. Yet many of its members were also members of those very groups which have done so much to distort and suppress the facts about the assassination. Because of their connection with the Government, not one member would have been permitted under U.S. law to serve on a jury had Oswald faced trial. It is small wonder that the Chief Justice himself remarked that the release of some of the Commission’s information “might not be in your lifetime” Here, then, is my first question:Why were all the members of the Warren Commission closely connected with the U.S. Government?

If the composition of the Commission was suspect, its conduct confirmed one’s worst fears. No counsel was permitted to act for Oswald, so that cross-examination was barred. Later, under pressure, the Commission appointed the President of the American Bar Association, Walter Craig, one of the supporters of the Goldwater movement in Arizona, to represent Oswald. To my knowledge, he did not attend hearings, but satisfied himself with representation by observers.

In the name of national security, the Commission’s hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy?

At the outset the Commission appointed six panels through which it would conduct its enquiry. They considered: (1) What did Oswald do on November 22, 1963? (2) What was Oswald’s background? (3) What did Oswald do in the U.S. Marine Corps, and in the Soviet Union? (4) How did Ruby kill Oswald? (5) What is Ruby’s background? (6) What efforts were taken to protect the President on November 22? [font size="5"][font color="green"]This raises my fourth question: Why did the Warren Commission not establish a panel to deal with the question of who killed President Kennedy?[/font color][/font size]

CONTINUED...

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/sixteenQues.htm

[Nye Bevan]

5. Damn. They finally got him. (nt)

[Octafish]

29. Did you hear about Cheney and CIA Assassination cover-up?

Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots

White House Aide Dick Cheney Spearheaded Editing of Report to Dampen Impact

New Documents Cast Further Doubt on Commission’s Investigation, Independence

National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 543
Edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
Posted - February 29, 2016

Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 – The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.

Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.

This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.

Among the highlights of today’s posting:

* White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad.

* Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots.

* Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character.

* The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation.

* Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations.

* President Ford passed investigative materials concerning assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well.

* The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.

CONTINUED...

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB543-Ford-White-House-Altered-Rockefeller-Commission-Report/

Jerry Ford, the then-congressman who altered the Warren Report to say President Kennedy was shot through the neck, and not the back, so the Lone Nut Magic Bullet nonsense would sound more plausible.

Many Great DUers remember the role Cheney and Rumsfeld played in covering up the death of CIA scientist Frank Olson. Too bad it's censored history for most of the USA.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

10. Hmmmm.

[Octafish]

45. Truman criticized CIA after the assassination of JFK. Fired CIA boss Dulles demanded retraction.

When Dulles didn't get it, he forged it. The story:

Harry S Truman wrote the following op-ed piece that appeared in early editions of the Washington Post and, evidently, very few other newspapers after that:

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

So. One month after the assassination, President Truman expressed public concern CIA had strayed off the reservation from intelligence gathering of foreign news sources to cloak-and-dagger operations. Time -- and the Church Committee -- has since shown CIA operated, illegally, domestically.

Allen Dulles, on behalf of CIA, even asked Truman to retract it. From Ray McGovern...

Fox Guarding Hen House

The well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination.

Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.

So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman.

No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”

No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case.

A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it.

In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”

CONTINUED...

SOURCE: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122909b.html

Democracy.

[GreatGazoo]

13. RIP Mark Lane

still love the Buckley debate. Classic.

[yourpaljoey]

27. very interesting

[Octafish]

70. They couldn't out-think him, so they had to smear Mark Lane.

Wow! I had not previously seen that program cover to cover.

Old Bill knows how to go for the jugular: Your reputation is that of "a left liberal with respect to New York politics."

The nice crew cut to a station break just as Lane was detailing conspiracy.

Here's a bit o' transcript:

Buckley: ...You have, apparently, succeeded in persuading the majority of the American people that we cannot trust the most august conceivable panel to do a responsible job.

Lane: Yes, I believe that that is true. We cannot trust them.

Buckley: I think the criticism is different from that. I think we are entitled to say that this august panel didn't do the kind of a job which would protect them against the Mark Lanes of the future
and should have, that is very different from the first charge.

Lane: Well I think what we can say – I think we can go a bit beyond that – that the American people have a right to say we cannot trust Earl Warren or the other four Republicans or the two southern Democrats who made up the commission which the New York Times referred to as a politically well-balanced commission.

Buckley: why did you say ‘southern Democrats.’ Did you mean to insinuate something?

Lane: Well, of course.

Buckley: What? That they're racists?

Lane: Surely you understand that in the Democratic Party there is a split, and that we ended up with a commission, which the New York Times assured us was politically well-balanced. But, in fact, we ended up with a commission that was made up without a single Kennedy supporter. I think that raises a question at the outset of faith. I'd like to go beyond that because, I think that faith –

Buckley: Not a single Kennedy supporter?

Lane: No.

Buckley: Would you say Warren was anti-Kennedy?

Lane: I don't know if he was anti-Kennedy. He was a Republican. He was a Republican Governor. He was a Republican attorney general. He was a Republican candidate for the vice presidency.

Buckley: But, he's not a Kennedy supporter? Do you think that he would prefer Nixon to Kennedy in 1960?

Lane: That's a question you'd have to put to him. I don't know what his politics are.

Buckley: But, You appear very much interested by this. This is the workings of your mind.

Lane: No -

Buckley: Two southern Democrats and no Kennedy supporter.

Lane: Don't you think --

Buckley: Equals a fix.

Lane: That's your conclusion, certainly your right. And you may be right.

Buckley: There are intonations, I think. You're an interesting man, and the way you approach it is in and of itself interesting.

Lane: The way I approach it is this way: I say if it was a politically well-balanced commission, which it was not, it is still not entitled to our faith. You talk about faith in these institutions, or faith in the FBI, as if it's a religious experience to read the Warren Report. I think to the contrary, that all that we are to have faith in a democracy, is in our own ability to look at the facts and reach our own conclusions. I have not known you, in the past, to have invested in such a vast amount of faith in either in the government or Earl Warren. I'm surprised in this one instance you're willing to.

CUT TO STATION BREAK (my transcription, any errors are Octafish's)

Thank you, GreatGazoo! I’m proud to write that we must be two of those Mark Lanes of the future Billy Buckley talked about.

[Fast Walker 52]

26. he lived a long and important life

[Octafish]

63. He did. Another important eyewitness is still with us: Abraham BOLDEN

Former U.S. Secret Service Agent Abraham BOLDEN was the first African American Secret Service agent to serve in the White House detail. He was literally hand-picked by President John F. Kennedy. Agent Abraham Bolden reported overt racism by his fellow agents and outright hostility toward the "n... loving president," quoting fellow Secret Service agents on the JFK detail.

In addition to enduring all manner of personal indignities, he was concerned at the lack of professionalism in those assigned to protect the president and reported his concerns. He was told, "OK. Thanks" by his superiors. When the problems weren't addressed, Bolden requested transfer back to the Secret Service office in Chicago.



Abraham Bolden speaks at JFK Lancer.



The story of a man who told the truth:

After 45 Years, a Civil Rights Hero Waits for Justice

Thom Hartmann
June 12, 2009 11:52 AM

A great miscarriage of justice has kept most Americas from learning about a Civil Rights pioneer who worked with President John F. Kennedy. But there is finally a way for citizens to not only right that wrong, but bring closure to the most tragic chapter of American presidential history.

After an outstanding career in law enforcement, Abraham Bolden was appointed by JFK to be the first African American presidential Secret Service agent, where he served with distinction. He was part of the Secret Service effort that prevented JFK's assassination in Chicago, three weeks before Dallas. But Bolden was framed by the Mafia and arrested on the very day he went to Washington to tell the Warren Commission staff about the Chicago attempt against JFK.

Bolden was sentenced to six years in prison, despite glaring problems with his prosecution. His arrest resulted from accusations by two criminals Bolden had sent to prison. In Bolden's first trial, an apparently biased judge told the jury that Bolden was guilty, even before they began their deliberations. Though granted a new trial because of that, the same problematic judge was assigned to oversee Bolden's second trial, which resulted in his conviction. Later, the main witness against Bolden admitted committing perjury against him. A key member of the prosecution even took the fifth when asked about the perjury. Yet Bolden's appeals were denied, and he had to serve hard time in prison, and today is considered a convicted felon.

After the release of four million pages of JFK assassination files in the 1990s, it became clear that Bolden -- and the official secrecy surrounding the Chicago attempt against JFK -- were due to National Security concerns about Cuba, that were unknown to Bolden, the press, Congress, and the public not just in 1963, but for the next four decades.

SNIP...

Abraham Bolden paid a heavy price for trying to tell the truth about events involving the man he was sworn to protect -- JFK -- that became mired in National Security concerns. Bolden still lives in Chicago, and has never given up trying to clear his name.

Will Abraham Bolden live to finally see the justice so long denied to him?

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/after-45-years-a-civil-ri_b_213834.html

After the assassination, he went to Washington on his own dime and reported what he saw to the Warren Commission. For his trouble -- and despite an exemplary record as a Brinks detective, Illinois State Trooper, and Secret Service agent -- Bolden was framed by the government using a paid informant's admitted perjury and spent a long time in prison. The government also drugged him and put him into psychiatric hospitals.His real crime was telling the truth.

Americans know the Truth: the country hasn't been the same since Nov. 22, 1963. President Kennedy kept the nation out of Vietnam and started toward the moon. Imagine what the New Frontier could have become for us today? Certainly would not be a time where "money trumps peace."

Here's a decent home webcaster from "Brother Ron":

On Thom Hartmann:

After all the honest Secret Serve agent endured in prison for simply telling the TRUTH, we today are privileged to know his story. As a Democrat, I feel particularly honored to share it.

[Fast Walker 52]

65. that's right-- thanks for the reminder. I heard him interviewed a few years back

http://whowhatwhy.org/2012/05/02/secret-service-vet-with-very-strange-jfk-story/

[avebury]

32. His book Plausible Denial is a pretty interestin read.

Lane agreed to represent the magazine when it dawned on him that it would put him in a position to depose then current and past CIA personnel. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.



https://www.amazon.com/Plausible-Denial-Involved-Assassination-Kennedy-ebook/dp/B00FUQQTDG?ie=UTF8&me=&ref_=mt_kindle

In this bestseller, Plausible Denial reveals starting new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mark Lane, author of Rush to Judgment, previously revealed the cover-up by the government in his critique of the Warren Commission Report. Now he reveals documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and startling revelations obtained during his examination of former CIA operatives and officials during Lane’s legal defense of a newspaper in a defamation case. A Washington D.C. based newspaper published a story written by former CIA operative Victor Marchetti linking ex-CIA operative and convicted Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt to the assassination of JFK. When Hunt sued the newspaper for printing a false story about him, Lane set out to prove the truth of the allegations involving Hunt and the CIA. In the build-up to the trial, Lane subpoenaed and deposed some of the highest echelon of CIA agents and leaders including Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, G. Gordon Liddy and Hunt himself. The defense led by Lane was victorious, demonstrating the conspiracy and cover-up. After the verdict, the jury forewoman stated that Lane “was asking us to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe that John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy.” Continuing its tradition of suppressing the truth about the assassination, the establishment media barely noted this historic conclusion. Compelling and articulately written, Lane again leads the way to uncovering the ongoing vast conspiracy to censor the role played by our government in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

[Octafish]

86. Great book. Great case. And E. Howard Hunt was a real piece of wetwork.

Hunt was mad as hell that Marchetti named him as one involved in the assassination. Hunt's own family thought he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Something else that's telling:

As an employee of the Nixon administration, E. Howard Hunt planted phony cables in a White House safe to implicate JFK in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.



SOURCE: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19730508&id=8ghPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=RAIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4888,5163727

Hunt was a professional disinformationist. His boss at CIA, Richard Helms also spread stories like Robert Kennedy was ordering hits on Castro when Helms was doing so "on his own authority."



That's a dirty trick of the treasonous kind.

Here' E Howard Hunt talks about his business -- check out before the archives get scrubbed:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041109091003/http://slate.msn.com/id/2107718/

A little-remembered association of Hunt: He worked for Averell Harriman, close business associate of Prescott Bush and Allen Dulles.

Killer Political Instincts

By Linda Minor
April 14, 2005
Sanders Research Associates Ltd.
Issues & Answers

EXCERPT…

Between 1968 and 1970, Chuck Colson and E. Howard Hunt, both alumni of Brown University—Hunt in the class of 1940 and Colson a 1953 grad—were seeing each other on a regular basis. Hunt had become a naval officer and an agent of the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 until its demise. A Guggenheim fellowship then paid him to travel in Mexico while writing his first novel (later a best-seller), before landing a job on the staff of Ambassador Averell Harriman, then a partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers, Harriman.

In 1948 Hunt left Harriman’s employ, recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency by Frank Wisner. In the meantime, he had married one of Harriman’s secretaries, who had spent the war years in Bern, Switzerland in the Treasury Department’s Hidden Assets Division, looking for hidden Nazi assets. Coincidentally, or not, it was Bern where later C.I.A. chairman Allen Dulles spent the war years. Hunt thus had very powerful references on his resume!

By the end of April 1970 all details fell in place for Hunt’s “retirement” from the C.I.A., and his employment one day later at Mullen & Company. According to Hunt in his autobiography, Undercover, he got the job through the “CIA’s placement service,” and was told by the placement officer that “the Mullen firm had ‘cooperated’ with CIA in the past.

After Hunt was installed at his new office, Mullen sold his firm to Robert F. Bennett. Though miffed by the change in management, Hunt was stroked by Colson, who only a few months later telephoned him with the opportunity of a lifetime, to work at the White House. In July 1971 Hunt was hired to work on Colson’s staff as a consultant on a part-time basis until the end of the 1972 election, while still maintaining his position with Mullen & Company.

SOURCE (busted link):

http://www.sandersresearch.com/Sanders/NewsManager/ShowNewsGen.aspx?NewsID=1173

Harriman was one of the players in the debacle in South Vietnam.

Capitalism's Invisible Army must've thought otherwise. From DU2:

'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam



A bit of history from the last weeks of President Kennedy's life,
courtesy of The Education Forum by DUer John Simkin :

'SPOOKS' MAKE LIFE MISERABLE FOR AMBASSADOR LODGE

'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam

Richard Starnes
The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, October 2, 1963, p.3

SAIGON, Oct.2 - The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power.

Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, according to a high United States source here.

In one of these instances the CIA frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington because the agency disagreed with it.

This led to a dramatic confrontation between Mr. Lodge and John Richardson, chief of the huge CIA apparatus here. Mr. Lodge failed to move Mr. Richardson, and the dispute was bucked back to Washington. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Chief John A. McCone were unable to resolve the conflict, and the matter is now reported to be awaiting settlement by President Kennedy.

It is one of the developments expected to be covered in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's report to Mr. Kennedy.

Others Critical, Too

Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA.

"If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically.

("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.)

CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis.

An American field officer with a distinguished combat career speaks angrily about "that man at headquarters in Saigon wearing a colonel's uniform." He means the man is a CIA agent, and he can't understand what he is doing at U.S. military headquarters here, unless it is spying on other Americans.

Another American officer, talking about the CIA, acidly commented: "You'd think they'd have learned something from Cuba but apparently they didn't."

Few Know CIA Strength

Few people other than Mr. Richardson and his close aides know the actual CIA strength here, but a widely used figure is 600. Many are clandestine agents known only to a few of their fellow spooks.

Even Mr. Richardson is a man about whom it is difficult to learn much in Saigon. He is said to be a former OSS officer, and to have served with distinction in the CIA in the Philippines.

A surprising number of the spooks are known to be involved in their ghostly trade and some make no secret of it.

"There are a number of spooks in the U.S. Information Service, in the U.S. Operations mission, in every aspect of American official and commercial life here, " one official - presumably a non-spook - said.

"They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone," he added.

Coupled with the ubiquitous secret police of Ngo Dinh Nhu, a surfeit of spooks has given Saigon an oppressive police state atmosphere.

The Nhu-Richardson relationship is a subject of lively speculation. The CIA continues to pay the special forces which conducted brutal raids on Buddhist temples last Aug. 21, altho in fairness it should be pointed out that the CIA is paying these goons for the war against communist guerillas, not Buddhist bonzes (priests).

Hand Over Millions

Nevertheless, on the first of every month, the CIA dutifully hands over a quarter million American dollars to pay these special forces.

Whatever else it buys, it doesn't buy any solid information on what the special forces are up to. The Aug. 21 raids caught top U.S. officials here and in Washington flat-footed.

Nhu ordered the special forces to crush the Buddhist priests, but the CIA wasn't let in on the secret. (Some CIA button men now say they warned their superiors what was coming up, but in any event the warning of harsh repression was never passed to top officials here or in Washington.)

Consequently, Washington reacted unsurely to the crisis. Top officials here and at home were outraged at the news the CIA was paying the temple raiders, but the CIA continued the payments.

It may not be a direct subsidy for a religious war against the country's Buddhist majority, but it comes close to that.

And for every State Department aide here who will tell you, "Dammit, the CIA is supposed to gather information, not make policy, but policy-making is what they're doing here," there are military officers who scream over the way the spooks dabble in military operations.

A Typical Example

For example, highly trained trail watchers are an important part of the effort to end Viet Cong infiltration from across the Laos and Cambodia borders. But if the trailer watchers spot incoming Viet Congs, they report it to the CIA in Saigon, and in the fullness of time, the spooks may tell the military.

One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.

Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither.

There is naturally the highest interest here as to whether Mr. McNamara will persuade Mr. Kennedy something ought to be done about it.

SOURCE:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7534&mode=threaded

ADDENDUM from Education Forum writer:

“The most important consequence of the Cold War remains the least discussed. How and why American democracy died lies beyond the scope of this introductory essay. It is enough to note that the CIA revolt against the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – the single event which did more than any other to hasten its end – was, quite contrary to over forty years of censorship and deceit, both publicly anticipated and publicly opposed.

No American journalist worked more bravely to thwart the anticipated revolt than Scripps-Howard’s Richard Starnes. His ‘reward’ was effectively to become a non-person, not just in the work of mainstream fellow-journalists and historians, but also that of nominally oppositional Kennedy assassination writers. It could have been worse: John J. McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, sought his instant dismissal; while others within the agency doubtless had more drastic punishment in mind, almost certainly of the kind meted out to CBS’ George Polk fifteen years earlier.

This time, shrewder agency minds prevailed. Senator Dodd was given a speech to read by the CIA denouncing Starnes in everything but name. William F. Buckley, Jr., suddenly occupied an adjacent column. In short, Starnes was allowed to live, even as his Scripps-Howard career was put under overt and intense CIA scrutiny - and quietly, systematically, withered on the Mockingbird vine.”

From “Light on a Dry Shadow,” the preface to ‘Arrogant’ CIA: The Selected Scripps-Howard Journalism of Richard T. Starnes, 1960-1965 (provisionally scheduled for self-publication in November 2006).

As far as I am aware, the remarkable example (above) of what Claud Cockburn called “preventative journalism” has never appeared in its entirety anywhere on the internet. Instead, readers have had to make do with the next-day riposte of the NYT’s Arthur Krock. The latter, it should be noted, was a veteran CIA-mouthpiece and messenger boy.

Dick Starnes was 85 on July 4, 2006. He remains, in bucolic retirement, a wonderfully fluent and witty writer; and as good a friend as any Englishman could wish for.

I dedicate the despatch’s web debut to Judy Mann, in affectionate remembrance.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7534

The Education Forum is an outstanding resource for those interested in President Kennedy, his administration, and his assassination.

From what we've learned in the last few years is that Lodge also was disregarding orders -- from President Kennedy.

More here:

Vietnam and Iraq Wars Started by Same People

Know your BFEE: Hitler s Bankers Shaped Vietnam War

JFK Would NEVER Have Fallen for Phony INTEL!

Thank you for caring and remembering, avebury!

[avebury]

88. The funny thing about the Hunt lawsuit is that, based on Hunt's testimony,

Hunt never should have won the original trial.

According to Hunt's testimony, on the day in question he went to work at the office for a while then his wife picked him up. On their way home they stopped at a grocery store where he sat in the car while she ran inside to pick up some items. I think he heard the news of the assassination while waiting for his wife. They went home and watched the news on the tv. The kids came home and they all sat around the TV watching the news. If that is is version of events then why on earth would his family think he was in Dallas the day JFK was killed if he was home? His trial testimony alone should have got the lawsuit tossed and that was what allowed Lane to win the appeal.

[Capt. Obvious]

34. Mark Lane arrives at the pearly gates

He finally meets god and asks, "God, who was really behind JFK's assassination?"

God sighs and responds, "Lee Harvey Oswald. He acted alone."

Lane: This cover up goes way higher up than I ever imagined.

[HOPNOSH]

37. Dont give up your day job

Comedy is obviously not your thing Capt.

[Nye Bevan]

43. I thought it was pretty funny (nt)

[Tommy_Carcetti]

48. LOL nt

[Dreamer Tatum]

58. Now THAT is a funny joke. nt

[Fast Walker 52]

66. I laughed

[Rex]

38. I see the DU children are happy he died, why are they so pathetic Octafish?

All these years later and they are still just as pathetic as the day they signed up on this site.

[Octafish]

72. Their pathetic nature is due to their ignorance.

If they could, they would attack Lane's arguments. As they are unable to refute Lane, they must attack his person.

Their pathetic avocation attacking those who don't agree with their prejudice shows they must lead very uninteresting lives.

[Archae]

42. Mark Lane was a kook.

He was convinced that the CIA killed JFK, and was a good friend of the bullshit movie maker Oliver Stone.

Just look back in history, at the presidential assasins.

Were they government plants, or big-time conspiracy killers?

All the *CREDIBLE* evidence says Oswald shot and killed JFK.

[Zen Democrat]

53. There is NO credible evidence that Oswald shot at JFK, much less killed him.

There is NO evidence that Oswald was on the 6th floor during the assassination, while a number of eyewitnesses saw him on the 1st floor. The Dallas Chief of Police, Curry, admitted same in 1969. You need to keep up. If you deny Oswald was an intelligence operative then YOU have your head in the sand. We know much more about the assassination today than we did in the 60's, 70's, 80's or 90's. The document drop of millions of previously unearthed government documents are still dribbling out from the AARB. We now know that Kennedy wasn't behind the murder of the Diem brothers. We now know that Kennedy was definitely pulling out of Viet Nam by 1965. We also know that Lee Oswald killed no one. We have lots of information about Allen Dulles, who Kennedy fired and who Johnson put on the Warren Commission. We now know that both Hale Boggs and Dick Russell refused to sign the Warren Report because they believed Oswald did not act alone. They were promised that a paragraph would be attached to the final report that they had questions about the single-bullet theory. They were lied to, and mad as hell later. There's a You Tube of Russell telling his story and how the Warren Commission was dishonest. The truth is out there.

RIP Mark Lane. A great American.

[Zen Democrat]

54. I've studied the murder of JFK since I was 15 years old.

The perps (and there were many) were ultra right-wingers as the operation - called The Big Event by E. Howard Hunt - was funded by Texas oilmen and defense contractors. I don't believe it was just CIA, because I'm pretty certain that Crazy Curtis LeMay was involved since the transcripts from the flight of Air Force One carrying the dead president completely wiped the calls to LeMay. Just a few years ago a cleaner transcript was uncovered including calls to LeMay. And still we don't have the complete transcript.

There's no way to pin this on Oswald because:

After Oswald was killed, the FBI destroyed the note from Oswald left at the FBI Dallas office on November 17th. The FBI said it included a threat from Oswald. If it did, why was it destroyed?

The government continues to classify Oswald's IRS return for 1962, and also for his mother Marquerite. Why?

The State Department paid for Oswald to return from Russia with a wife and baby, after he had threatened to turn over radar secrets to the Russians. At the height of the Cold War. Right.

I could go on and on, but Lee Harvey Oswald killed no one.

[Dreamer Tatum]

59. What do you want for your 16th birthday? nt

[NuclearDem]

64. *snort*

[Fozzledick]

68. Lee Harvey Oswald killed Mark Lane!!!

Anyone who says he couldn't have just because he's dead is nothing but a conspiracy theorist!!

[Zen Democrat]

89. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a realist and a student of history and our times.

To say Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, is not just wrong, but totally ignorant. You people who scoff are blind, know-nothings and snark doesn't work against the truth. Most importantly, people should understand that psychos like Alex Jones aren't part of the research community. There are idiots out there who use "conspiracy" to rile people up about whatever is their agenda. There are also people who have studied the Warren Report and the 26 volumes of background material and transcripts of testimony that the Report was based upon - and they don't match!

To wit, John Pic was Oswald's older half-brother from his mother's first marriage. When shown the picture of Lee Oswald at the Bronx Zoo when he was 13, at the time Oswald was actually living with Pic and his wife in NYC, Pic testified, "That's not my brother." The kid in the photo was NOT the Lee Oswald living in his home. Yet that picture remains as proof that Oswald was a truant and a problem child sent to a juvenile house. Multiply this incongruency by 10,000 and you'll have a rough idea of what a house of cards the whole assassination report is.

We know so much now. We know who DeMohrenschildt was. We know that all the Russians Oswald socialized with in Dallas, and DeMohrenschildt himself were strongly anti-Communist White Russians. We know that DeMohrenschildt was a good friend of George HW Bush. We know that DeMohrenschildt was Oswald's CIA handler in Dallas, before being handed off to Michael and Ruth Paine.

It's the story of the century, and it has never been solved. Nor property investigated. Oswald had NO nitrates from the paraffin test. He had NOT fired a rifle that day. It goes on and on and on.

Oswald was seen by co-workers on the first and second floors of the TSDB during the shooting. They gave testimony to the FBI but were not called to testify before the Commission. Multiply that by the many people who gave statements to the FBI that did not correspond to the spin of the Warren Commission.

LBJ told Cronkite that he didn't believe the single bullet theory.
Warren Commission member Dick Russell didn't believe the single bullet theory
Warren Commission member Hale Boggs didn't believe the single bullet theory
Warren Commission member John Sherman Cooper didn't believe the single bullet theory

So who were the ones who strong-armed the Commission?

Not Earl Warren, while he made the trip to Dallas to talk to Ruby, Warren attended very few meetings and had little input.

The Bad Guys were:

Allen Dulles, former Director of the CIA who was fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Gerald Ford, known as J. Edgar's man on the Committee.
John J. McCloy, a player for the ages
Arlen Spector, the man who created the convoluted and crazy single bullet theory
J. Lee Rankin, the legal counsel pushed through by Allen Dulles
David Belin, a sad little legal counselor for both the Warren Commission and the Rockefeller Commission (and we know how that report was clipped by George HW Bush, Director of the CIA, and Dick Cheney, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Ford White House at that time.

A study of the Kennedy Assassination is a study of foreign and domestic policy in the early 60's. It's not about creeps with radio shows such as the awful Alex Jones talking nonsense.

[Fozzledick]

90. You're not very good at recognizing sarcasm though.

Try reading my post again, maybe a little slower.

I originally considered mixing some ones in with the exclamation points but I thought that would be overkill. Apparently not.

FWIW I consider the physical evidence most convincing: three shots fired from behind and two from the front, producing three entry wounds and two misses, with a clear one and a half seconds visible on the Zapruder film between the shots that hit JFK in the back and front of the throat and the shot that shattered Governor Connelly's wrist causing him to drop his hat.

[Octafish]

114. Lane said the only evidence linking Oswald was CE399.

The Magic Bullet -- and only IF one accepts that it really came from President Kennedy or Gov. Connaly's body, falling out unscathed onto a hospital gurney after passing through both men; and that Oswald really bought the Mannlicher-Carcano police eventually unearthed behind some boxes in the TSBD, even though there is no evidence he did.



JFK Exhibit F-294

Photo of 5 bullets fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle: (left to right) the "magic bullet" (CE 399), two bullets fired into cotton wadding(CE 572), a bullet fired through a goat rib (CE 853), and a bullet fired through the wrist of a human cadaver (CE 856).

http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=95#relPageId=339

The magic bullet appears to have been fired into cotton wadding.

That makes clear why the Warren Commission's case is bogus.

[Octafish]

115. Excellent summation. FTR: Gen. LeMay lied about his whereabouts.

Gen. LeMay was airborne that awful day and not on vacation, as he said. JFK Conference: Bill Kelly introduced new evidence - adding Air Force One tape recordings...

As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend the Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Duquesne University. One of the many important things discussed there was what historian and researcher, William E. Kelly, Jr. presented to the conference. He added new information to the historical record: a more complete record of the Air Force One radio transmissions made on Nov. 22, 1963. Now a fellow DUer, please welcome Bill Kelly, should he pop up on a thread.



In his presentation, Mr. Kelly described the provenance of the new recording -- discovered among the personal effects of Gen. Chester Clifton, an aide to President Kennedy who was aboard Air Force One on the trip to Dallas. The new tapes add content to what was on the version held by the National Archives.

To get as much information as possible from the new material, Mr. Kelly contacted Ed Primeau, the audio expert who had assisted in the analysis of 9-11 recordings in the Trayvon Martin case. Mr. Kelly and Mr. Primeau combined the tapes and created a transcript. It is available online:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Interestingly, the more complete tape still does not have information that was, evidently, available in the mid-1960s when authors Theodore White, William Manchester and JFK Press Secretary Pierre Salinger quoted from them in their books. Among the points those authors made that are not on the tapes available: Sections of military personnel conversations from the plane to Washington; President Lyndon B. Johnson was concerned about Soviet involvement in the assassination; McGeorge Bundy was in charge of the Situation Room at the White House; Bundy contacted Air Force One to report Oswald arrested and there was no conspiracy.

Here's an overview of what the new Air Force One tapes:

http://vimeo.com/76173546

The new combined Air Force One tape is about an hour and half long. It still may be a small fraction of what may still be available in some archive, based on the amount of material referenced and the normal procedure to tape all transmissions between Air Force One and the various governmental and military authorities. Mr. Kelly estimates there may be as much as 8 hours of AF1 tapes from that terrible day in Dallas.

Some important background on the tapes and the history:

Chilling tape from Air Force One on day JFK shot just released.

CBS News, Jan. 31, 2012

It's been nearly a half-century since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

EXCERPT...

The full audio of transmissions from White House Communications Agency (which captured the tapes) that day includes 42 minutes edited out of the original public version. It's likely to peak the interest of conspiracy theorists who are already asking why this material was cut out of the original.

Then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay had been a frequent opponent of Kennedy's. His whereabouts on the day of the assassination has always been a mystery.

In the newly public audio, we learn that LeMay was airborne, even as JFK's body was being flown back to Washington. And an aide to LeMay tried urgently to reach his boss.

"General LeMay," the aide said, "is in a C 140. ... He's inbound. His code name is Grandson. And I wanna talk to him. ... If you can't work him now, it's gonna be too late, because he'll be on the ground in a half-hour."

Historian Robert Dallek suggests doubters will wonder if the aide's comments about not reaching LeMay within 30 minutes may be "too late" could have some sinister meaning. "I'd doubt these tapes will put the conspiracy theory to rest," he says. "They continue to believe it was a conspiracy and again, they just can't accept the proposition that a lone wolf, a single, and someone as dysfunctional as Lee Harvey Oswald, could have carried off this assassination of the president."

CONTINUED...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57368696/chilling-tape-from-air-force-one-on-day-jfk-shot/

For those new to Gen. Curtis LeMay and his relationship with President Kennedy:

JFK Cuba crisis tapes released

By Jon Marcus
Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) -117 ‹ At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, one of President John F. Kennedy's top military commanders warned him that failing to invade the island would be like backing down to Hitler's initial demands in Europe.

"This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay told Kennedy on Oct. 19, 1962, according to newly declassified White House tape recordings released Thursday.

LeMay's comment "was an amazing thing to say to any president, but it was a particularly amazing thing to say to this president," said Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where the tape recordings were released. "It's a deep personal insult."

Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, served as U.S. ambassador to Britain at the time of the 1938 Munich conference, where the British and French agreed to let Nazi Germany take land from Czechoslovakia in exch ange for a short-lived promise of peace. The elder Kennedy's support of appeasement later was strongly criticized and may have cost him any hope of running for national office.

LeMay, like other military leaders, advocated immediate military intervention to destroy the Soviet missiles and unfinished silos that had been detected by aerial reconnaissance in Cuba. He said blockading ships bound for Cuba, as other presidential advisers urged, would lead to war anyway.

President Kennedy, who privately called LeMay "field marshal," did not respond to the remark and the meeting went on to cover other military and diplomatic issues.

CONTINUED...

http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1996_1373492/tapes-from-cuban-missile-crisis-reveal-insult-by-k.html

The tapes show that Col. Dorman wanted desperately to reach Gen. Curtis LeMay to know before he landed. The tapes also show Gen. LeMay disobeyed an order from Air Force Secretary Zuckert to return to Andrews Air Force Base on Nov. 22, 1963, choosing instead to fly to Washington National Airport. Mr. Kelly explains why this is important:

WAS GENERAL LEMAY AT CAMP X ON 11/22/63?

Where was General Curtis LeMay at the time president Kennedy was assassinated?

by Bill Kelly
JFK Countercoup, June 4, 2012

Was he on vacation hunting and fishing in upstate Michigan, as his official biographies attest, or was he at Camp X or at a secret command & control bunker overseeing the Dealey Plaza operation?

An official biography of Air Force General Curtis LeMay reports that at the time President Kennedy was assassinated he was on vacation, hunting and fishing with family members in upstate Michigan.

"Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay," by Thomas M. Coffey (p.430) reports that LeMay's wife was from Michigan and he had apparently told his biographer he was in Michigan on vacation and "hurried back to Washington in time for the funeral."

But an Andrews Air Force base log book, that was salvaged from the trash and almost destroyed, indicates that LeMay ordered a special Air Force jet to pick him up in Canada shortly after news of the assassination was widely broadcast, which indicated to some that he wasn’t hunting and fishing in Michigan.

Exploring the possibility that Gen. LeMay attended JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda, as Navy medical corpsman Paul O’Conner attests, Doug Horne, the Chief Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board, made note of LeMay’s presence in Canada rather than Michigan, as his official biography reports.

And Larry Hancock, author of “Someone Would Have Talked” and “Nexus,” also thought it significant and notes: "I was struck by the fact that it (LeMay’s bio) made a big deal of his being so remote that he was out of contact and was not even able to make it back to Washington until the funeral. I don't see that as a minor thing, the book definitely creates the impression that he was not back in Washington that weekend. This really is an important point, if Doug is right and can be verified it looks pretty certain that LeMay was handing out disinformation and there would need to be a good reason for that. After all, it would not be unusual for him to rush back to DC or to some other AF base where he could achieve command and control capability. What seems to me not at all understandable is why he would go to Bethesda, and then lie about it."

From the salvaged Andrews Air Force Base Log Book for 11/22/63, it is officially noted that a special order to pick up LeMay in Toronto was requested at 1:20 PM CST (2:20 PM EST, 1420 GMT) and a special SAM – Special Air Mission C-140 jet took off Andrews at 1446 (1:46 PM CST 2:46 PM EST) to pick him up in Toronto, but after the plane took off (1:50 PM CST 2:50 PM EST) it was redirected to Wiarton, a Canadian Air Force base north of Toronto.

The official internet web site for Wiarton includes a photo of the Air Force base, but also makes tantalizing references to Camp X, the secret training camp for spies used by the British and Americans during World War II, and used as a hideaway for a prominent Soviet defector during the Cold War.

CONTINUED...

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/search?q=lemay+whereabouts

Why it matters.

Democracy depends on Truth. The Republic depends on Justice. That is, the reality that ours is a nation under law.

Once a criminal is, or criminals are, allowed to go free, Justice has been denied. We find ourselves operating under a falsehood, we are living a Big Lie.

We as a Nation have been on the criminal path since November 22, 1963.

DUers know you don’t need to read a history book or watch a tee vee special to know: It shows. Since 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s been a series of wars without end for profit. And in the process, the rich became super-rich -- the richest and most powerful people in history.

Thanks for reading this piece from 2013. Keep spreading the Truth, DU! The next 50 years can be different -- they can be decades of peace and prosperity for ALL: They can be Democratic. Thank you for caring about Justice and Democracy and all that matters, ZenDemocrat.

[Octafish]

71. You compared discussing the assassination of President Kennedy to beating a dead horse.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024158313#post18

If it's such a joke, why do you bother to post? And where is your "CREDIBLE" evidence?

[Archae]

78. Here.

"Oh but they are in on the conspiracy!"

[ViseGrip]

52. Get a copy of Barry and the Boys by Daniel Hopsicker....the story lives on.

[Octafish]

105. David Ferrie, Barry Seal and Lee Oswald: Patsies or Participants?

Hopsicker found and taped people who still remember when those three crossed paths in the skies and woods of Louisiana and Alabama.

Former Louisiana Civil Air Patrol cadets were eyewitnesses to the high weirdness surrounding David Ferrie, pilot, pedophile and CIA recruiter, who met Lee Harvey Oswald and Barry Seal at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in July 0f 1955.

Eddie Shearer recounts watching Ferrie use hypnotism to stop the bleeding of a young cadet who’d sliced his hand open. And long-time Louisiana pilot James Poche corroborates evidence that Ferrie ran the Lakeshore Airport operations of CIA subsidiary Civil Air Transport, using five DC-4's which—after Ferrie's apparent "suicide"—ended up in the hands of CIA pilot Barry Seal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.madcowprod.com/2015/10/12/david-ferrie-lee-oswald-barry-seal-patsies-or-principals/

Puts together parts of the Unspeakable like few others are able to do. Daniel Hopsicker is a great journalist and a brave man.

[blm]

57. Sorry dear O-fish…..

I know how much he matters to you….to many.

[Octafish]

82. Thank you for your kindness, blm.

Your kindness has lightened the weight upon my heart.

[blm]

83. ((Octafish))

.

[Kaleva]

75. It's telling that the members of the Warren Commission are silent about his passing.

[YoungDemCA]

96. Why honor a peddler of conspiratorial BS?

Would be stupid of anyone to give such people any legitimacy.

[Octafish]

108. The commissioners all have passed. Some staff are still with us.

What one said last year re the Warren Commission findings:

Crumbling consensus: Warren Commission staffer recants, says there was a JFK conspiracy

by Jefferson Morley

EXCERPT...

From Politico, a Warren Commission staffer recants

In 1964 Slawson exemplified the lawyers chosen to investigate JFK’s murder. The product of the finest universities and law school, they were the ones who could put to bed the “rumors” and the “speculation” about the crime of Dallas. They were superior to what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” They were smart, honest, and they knew how Washington worked. And they trusted the very best men of the CIA.

Now they know better. Howard Willens, a colleague of Slawson’s on the Commission, told JFK Facts last year, “I was naive, to say the least, about the CIA.” CIA deputy director Richard Helms and counterintelligence chief James Angleton were “untruthful” with investigators, he admitted.

Slawson told Shenon it had never occurred to him that the CIA “tried to sabotage us.”

CONTINUED w/links to sources, etc....

http://jfkfacts.org/the-consensus-is-crumbling-warren-commission-staffer-recants-says-there-was-a-jfk-conspiracy/

The CIA lied. The CIA director who literally and figuratively ran the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles, hid evidence from the panel, including how the CIA contracted with the Mafia for murder in 1960, under his watch.

[JonLeibowitz]

76. Excellent information, Octafish, thanks for posting.

The JFK assassination narrative is something I want to investigate and study in some depth, when I have some time available.

Sad to hear of Mr. Lane's passing.

[Octafish]

113. You are most welcome, JonLeibowitz! I very much appreciate that you understand and care.

You understand how important something that happened more than half a century ago is upon our political, social, environmental, and economic reality today. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy changed the trajectory of the country. We went from a nation that could do anything -- from peace on earth to going to the moon. Imagine what we could have done if we were still led by men and women of vision? Now we are told we can't afford to do anything, let alone try raising taxes on the wealthy in the wealthiest times in history.

Mr. Lane worked to expose the government's lies regarding the assassination of the President, even if it included defending the accused assassin in public. It's pretty clear that the nation has not been a working democracy in a long time. We now are manipulated and misled by oligarchs and plutocrats and their toadies on tee vee and in Washington while getting misused and abused by the banksters and warmongers. These people have zero interest in peace, let alone the well-being of 99-percent of the planet.

Mr. Lane stood up to power. He said the Warren Commission case -- based on FBI investigations led by J. Edgar Hoover and information passing through gatekeepers that included the former (and still-head in his mind) head of the CIA, Allen Dulles -- did not make sense. He said they ignored eyewitnesses, evidence and logic to build a case, a theory, that Oswald was the lone assassin.

Mr. Lane discovered the actual reasons for ignoring the facts supporting conspiracy -- from the evidence in Dealey Plaza, such as shots from behind the picket fence, where most eyewitnesses are recorded as saying some fire came; to the plots broken up in Chicago and Miami (and possibly Tampa and other places) where the conspirators had tried to assassinate President Kennedy -- and the resulting cover-up.

President Johnson apparently realized that plotters, including officials in intelligence community, had intentionally created a false trail leading to Oswald and from Oswald to Cuba and from there to the Soviet Union and the KGB. LBJ had to twist Chief Justice Warren's arm to get him to cross over to forbidden territory from his branch of government by stating if he didn't, 150 million Americans might die in a nuclear war with the Soviets.

So, they came up with a commission that buried the truth and avoided war. It's only been recently that we've been able to put together a somewhat more complete picture, wherein those who benefited the most from the assassination -- the Military-Industrial Complex and secret government that manages it and us, the ultra rich cronies of Allen Dulles and Prescott Bush.

I'm proud to write I learned a lot of it on DU and am so thankful you and so many DUers care. Thank you for your kind words, JonLeibowitz! Very much appreciate that you care about Mr. Lane and what he dedicated much of his life.

[MerryBlooms]

77. My condolences. I know from your posts, he was an important figure in your life.

I'm sad to see the ridicule and outright cruel comments to you.

Take care.

[Octafish]

81. Thank you for your kindness, MerryBlooms.

You really have lightened the weight upon my heart.

[burrowowl]

79. K&R!!!!!!

[Octafish]

92. Here's an excellent radio interview with Mr. Lane via Project CENSORED

Helps explain what happened to Democracy. Thank you for caring, burrowowl!

[Duppers]

80. My first memories of Mark Lane was from the 1967 interview

in Playboy magazine.
https://archive.org/stream/nsia-Playboy/nsia-Playboy/Playboy%20002_djvu.txt

He and Garrison of New Orleans convinced me that all was not right in D.C. and that there definitely were huge cover-ups.

Most everyone who brought the subject up over the years called me a CT nutcase. Hell with them. It's the same mindset that will not accept the facts of corruption today.

Thanks for all your great work bringing these exposed injustices to our attention, Octafish.

for Mr. Lane.

[Octafish]

110. Thank you very much, Duppers. Here's what James DiEugenio wrote last week...

Outstanding article and interview, yours. FTR:, the backgrounds of the commissioners McCloy and Dulles demonstrate a preference for capital over democracy, to put fascism mildly.



[font size="2"]Mark Lane and Bertrand Russell[/font size]

The Death of Mark Lane

By James DiEugenio
Posted May 10, 2016

I finally understood the influence and reputation that the late Mark Lane had in America when I arrived in Pittsburgh for the Cyril Wecht Symposium at Duquesne in the fall of 2013. At the airport, I was picked up in a private car and driven to my hotel. The driver asked me what I was in town for. I replied a JFK conference on the 50th Anniversary at Duquesne. He asked me if Mark Lane was going to be there. I said yes he was. He replied that he wrote his first research paper back in college many years ago on the JFK case, and he used a lot of the work of Lane in doing it. He asked me to thank Lane for that inspiration. When I arrived at the hotel, I did see Mark and I conveyed the debt of gratitude from my driver.

After I did so I went up to my room and thought: Geez, there must be literally tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people across America who feel that way about Lane. For the simple reason that Lane was literally the prime mover in the dissent movement against the official version of the Kennedy assassination. Within just three weeks of Kennedy’s death, Lane had issued the first legal arguments against the public stampede to condemn the memory of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in the custody of the Dallas police. Lane wanted to publish his defendant’s brief in The Nation. But that liberal journal—and several other periodicals-- would not accept it. So he went to the even more leftist journal The National Guardian.

At that conference in Pittsburgh, there were a few copies of that original essay on a coffee table. Lane picked one up and said to me, “They had to print several reprints of this issue. They eventually sold a hundred thousand of them.” This was in mid-December of 1963, two weeks after the first meeting of the Warren Commission, when every major media outlet in America was accommodating leaks from people like Jerry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles about how compelling the case against Oswald was. But there was Mark Lane, the one attorney standing up for a dead man who was being walked over by every public and private institution in America.

Marguerite Oswald, mother of the murdered suspect, heard about Lane’s polemic. She wanted him to act as her murdered son’s defense advocate. But the Warren Commission would not allow it. When Lane forwarded his request to the Commission, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wired back to him the following message: “The Commission does not believe that it would be useful or desirable to permit an attorney representing Lee Harvey Oswald to have access to the investigative materials within the possession of the Commission or to participate in any hearings to be conducted by the Commission.” (See Lane’s A Citizen’s Dissent, e-book version, Part 2, “The Great Silence.&quot

In fact, one of the many travesties of the Commission was that Oswald was not granted counsel throughout the ten-month legal procedure. In that respect, the proceeding was a runaway prosecution. Lane was allowed to appear before the Commission twice, once in March and once in July. These were clearly token, adversarial appearances. In fact, it is hard to find another witness who the Commission treated with such hostility. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 243-45)

At around this time in 1964, Lane began to be surveilled by the FBI. Because he was doing JFK lectures abroad, he was also placed on the federal government’s “lookout list” for international air travel. Whenever Lane returned from abroad, the FBI was alerted he was back. (See Lane, op. cit) But beyond that, the FBI now began to interview certain radio hosts who had chosen to place Lane on the air. These Bureau visits resulted in Lane being banned from certain media outlets. And the buzz about those visits discouraged other outlets from having him on.

CONTINUED....

http://www.ctka.net/2016/marklane/the-death-of-mark-lane.html

Jim DiEugenio is a DUer, proud to say. Proud to be your friend, too, Duppers!

[Duppers]

112. Wow! Thanks for posting that article link and...

the link to that other long DU thread. I've Just begun reading it but since I must leave for a long road trip, I'll have to finish it later.


You and your diligent work is sincerely appreciated, Octafish!

[Gomez163]

85. This sounds fishy to me. I bet he's still alive.

[PAMod]

87. Condolences to you & to his family, friends & followers -

I don't support his conclusions, but I recognize his diligence to his lifelong crusade.

[Octafish]

111. Thank you, PAMod. Please know I very much appreciate your perspectives.

Gen. Patton was wont to say to his staff while planning for a battle or exercise: "If everyone is thinking alike, nobody is doing any thinking."

Getting other perspectives is how we learn. For example, the following was published in the Washington Post and, evidently, few other newspapers at the time:

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

So. One month after the assassination, President Truman expressed public concern CIA had strayed off the reservation from intelligence gathering of foreign news sources to cloak-and-dagger operations. Time -- and the Church Committee -- has since shown CIA operated, illegally, domestically.

Allen Dulles, on behalf of CIA, even asked Truman to retract it. From Ray McGovern...

Fox Guarding Hen House

The well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination.

Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.

So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman.

No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”

No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case.

A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it.

In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”

CONTINUED...

SOURCE: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122909b.html

Democracy. Thank you, no matter what, for caring about it, PAMod.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

91. did he say anything about Cruz's father ?

[Octafish]

93. I don't know. Do know the guy who did is dead by gunshot under suspicious circumstances.

We may never know how he found out what he reported, but the guy had a reputation for telling the truth.

http://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2016/04/investigative-journalist-ties-cruz.html

It would be interesting know Mr. Lane's thoughts on all that. That's one of the bad things about when somebody dies. You can't learn anything else from them about what they knew, as far as I know.

[YoungDemCA]

95. Looks like "they" got another one!

[Octafish]

100. Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and CIA-Cuban “Deep Politics”

Do you know who George Joannides was, YoungDemCa?

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and CIA-Cuban “Deep Politics”

By Larry Chin
Global Research, May 09, 2016

During a Fox News telephone interview in which he criticized his fellow presidential aspirant Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump cut loose with potshot that Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was involved with Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.

Shortly after this incident, Ted Cruz ended his 2016 presidential bid. But the incident itself and its ramifications remain significant. The fact that Trump dared bring up the JFK assassination is remarkable. It is a further demonstration that Trump is unpredictable—and why he is feared and reviled by the Washington establishment and ruling elite.

Whether it was done thoughtlessly or with more studied intent, it does not matter. In evoking the JFK assassination, Trump yanked aside the curtain of secrecy just enough to cause a small firestorm, allowing another glimpse at the forbidden truth that the American elite has spent 53 years covering up.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trump-ted-cruz-and-cia-cuban-deep-politics/5524156

Here is a clip of the Trump interview:

EXCERPT...

As exposed by Jim Garrison and numerous JFK researchers (and fictionally depicted in Oliver Stone’s film JFK), the CIA began setting up for the JFK assassination by creating a propaganda legend for Oswald, their chosen “patsy”. Oswald was set up to appear to be a pro-Castro Communist agent provocateur.

What you see is this CIA propaganda operation in motion. Lee Harvey Oswald is handing out pro-Castro leaflets at the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, which at the time was teeming with anti-Castro Cuban exiles, CIA assets intent on murdering JFK. The International Trade Mart was owned by the CIA and run by CIA operative Clay Shaw. Oswald was part of the CIA’s Operation Mongoose, code name for numerous covert operations aimed at toppling Fidel Castro, in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Mongoose team and its network of operatives and assassins also carried out the JFK hit. But Oswald, unbeknownst to him, was being set up.

The Newman Building in New Orleans housed the CIA (Guy Bannister’s office of 5312 Lafayette Street), Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee FPCC front (544 Camp Street), and numerous anti-Castro groups that it was managing. It also housed offices with Mafia connections.

At the behest of his CIA handlers, which included George DeMohrenschildt, Bannister, and Shaw, Oswald’s orders were to play a pro-Castro Communist sympathizer for the media cameras. This event also included a “fist fight”, staged purely for propaganda deception, with Cuban exile and CIA asset Carlos Bringuier, of the militantly anti-Castro/CIA/Mafia-connected Cuban Revolutionary Council, and the anti-Castro student group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil), or DRE. This was followed by a radio debate between Oswald and Bringuier, also staged in order to set up Oswald’s credentials as a Communist and oddball.

Oswald’s FPCC leaflets were stamped with the address of 544 Camp Street. Oswald’s mistake later infuriated CIA operative Guy Bannister, who found out about it shortly after JFK was killed. Bannister was frantic that his cover would be blown.

Here is where we come to the Cuban men helping Oswald hand out leaflets. They have never been identified or they were dismissed in the official assassination panels. But logic dictates that they had to have been CIA assets. The Agency would have allowed outsiders into the midst of a delicate operation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trump-ted-cruz-and-cia-cuban-deep-politics/5524156

Weird how many people who investigate these things die by suicide. You ever hear of Garry Webb? Mark Lombardi? Danny Casolaro? If you never heard of them, I don't blame you. Your lack of awareness is the fault of the news media and acadaemia.

[YoungDemCA]

97. It's truly sad to see someone who dedicated his life to crackpot "theories" pass away

Since he never got a chance to restore any shred of credibility he might have had before descending into conspiratorial nuttery.

RIP.

[Octafish]

101. Now THAT is asinine.

Here's what my friend Russ says:

“Rush to Judgment, the book, bravely informed Americans about the many questions surrounding the president’s murder and the subsequent “investigation.”

?resize=300%2C169

Mark Lane, right, with President John F. Kennedy.

“Rush to Judgment, the movie, vividly illustrated those questions with a matter-of-fact presentation of one-on-one interviews. Many of these Q&A segments are absolutely mesmerizing, i.e. Mr. Holland from the overpass, Lee Bowers from the train tower, and Jack Ruby associates, Joe Johnson and Nancy Perrin Rich.”

You may be happy thinking it's "Case Closed," like the CIA stooges say. That's your business, YoungDemCA, not mine.

For those interested in learning: http://jfkfacts.org/

[Logical]

98. I ASSUMED MURDERED!!!!!! The truth is out there!!!! nt

[Octafish]

103. What do you know about Mark Lane?

When Mr. Lane started, all he had were the facts as reported by the FBI and later the Warren Commission. Even when J Edgar Hoover said they'd found no conspiracy, Mark Lane found their evidence weak and analysis slipshod, but also intentionally skewed to make Lee Harvey Oswald guilty without benefit of trial or a public examination of the evidence. He found that railroading of Oswald un-American.

Here's his presentation at Duquesne on C-SPAN, followed by Joan Mellen's presentation:

http://www.c-span.org/video/?315655-1/kennedy-assassination-conspiracy-theories-mark-lane-joan-mellen

One important part he talked about was the reason for the official cover-up: President Johnson wanted to avoid an accidental nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He had to invoke the "Little incident in Mexico City" to get Chief Justice Earl Warren to cross the line dividing the three branches of government to give legitimacy to the President's Commission to Investigation the Assassination of President Kennedy" -- the Warren Commission.

Which reminds us that at a meeting in July 1961, CIA head and later Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles counseled JFK to attack in the Fall of 1963, when the USA would enjoy optimum strategic and tactical superiority. It's something important that's been missed by journalists and historians due to all copies but one getting burned...

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?

Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994

During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.

But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.

The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.

CONTINUED...

http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963

''And we call ourselves the human race.'' - President John F. Kennedy, after walking out of that briefing.

It took Mark Lane standing up to power, and his purusuit of truth through the FOIA and an act of Congress establishing the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And now -- thanks to the continuing efforts of his colleagues and those who follow in his footsteps -- we have pretty much the exact picture of what happened, Who did What, Where, When, How, and To Whom -- but also to the "Why?"

[Logical]

104. Sounds like a good man, but that does not mean he is right about jfk. Nt

[Octafish]

109. So why do you have to insult his memory and smear his good name?

If you disagree, show why.

Here's some of why he is correct regarding the CIA playing a role in the death of the president:

KENNEDY MOVES AGAINST THE CIA

In his best-selling, Plausible Denial in which he pinpoints the CI A's role in the JFK assassination conspiracy, veteran JFK assassination investigator Mark Lane commented on the CIA's move against the president:

"If the CIA operatives, officers, and former officers believed that the defense of their Agency and their nation required the elimination of President Kennedy because he was about to dismantle their organization, one could comprehend, while neither accepting nor condoning their viewpoint, that their concept of self-defense required them to use deadly force. Most relevant, therefore, is not what Kennedy was or was not about to do vis-a-vis the CIA, but what the leaders of the Agency believed he might do.

"John F. Kennedy made it clear that he planned to destroy the CIA. The New York Times reported on April 25, 1966, under a subheadline, "Kennedy's Bitterness,' that 'as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, [Kennedy] said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted 'to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'

"He clearly was not suggesting a modest legislative proposal or executive order to modify or reform the organization. The total destruction of the Agency was his apparent objective."

SOURCE: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Assassinations_page/Chapters_Nine-Sixteen_FJ.html

PS: You can disagree, I really don't mind as I learn from those who show me where I'm wrong. Just don't expect me to to take your word on it, Logical. Post your evidence for why you say Lane was wrong.

[MinM]

106. Dalton Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted hollywood screenwriter, co-wrote Executive Action with Mark Lane...


Executive Action also featured, blacklisted hollywood actor of Grandpa Walton fame, Will Geer.

[Octafish]

107. Trumbo's lesson: The Right will do anything to get its way.

Last edited Wed May 18, 2016, 05:42 PM - Edit history (3)

Shred the Constitution and destroy good people with impunity. Make wars for profit. Kill a President who stands in their way. I remember seeing the film at the local theater when it came out. The scene where the conspirators' leaders are gathered around a conference table included a chart or presentation board that showed:

John F. Kennedy: 1961-1969

Robert F. Kennedy: 1969-1977

Edward M. Kennedy: 1977-1985

For the powerful people who didn't like the FDR and the New Deal -- cough the enemies of Maj. General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC -- that would be the prime motivation for stopping the New Frontier before it could reach the next station.



In JFK's time, the CIA and Pentagon wanted him to order an all-out sneak attack on the USSR to end global communism once and for all.

The best time? "The fall of 1963." That's what the minutes of the meeting say, recorded by LBJ's military liaison one Col. Howard Burris, USAF.

President Kennedy died in the fall of 1963. And all the "evidence" presented by the CIA pointed to communist Cuba and the USSR. What a coincidence.