How the CIA Writes History (Jefferson Morley)

[Octafish]

4. Missing News shows someone was censoring public information BEFORE 9-11.

CIA Chief Bush Suppresses the News

By Robert Gardner
FAIR Exclusive
May/June 1999

Documents obtained by FAIR, released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show that George Bush, as head of the CIA in 1976, tried to bottle up a news story that exposed the apparent duplicity of another former CIA chief, Richard Helms.

The story, broken on Oct. 1, 1976, by David Martin (now CBS Pentagon correspondent, then with Associated Press), revealed that Helms had given misleading testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John Kennedy. Helms testified that the CIA had not "even contemplated" making contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin. Through the FOIA, Martin obtained CIA memos showing that in 1960 the agency "showed intelligence interest" in Oswald and "discussed...the laying on of interviews" with him.

When Bush saw the AP story in the Washington Star, he asked for an internal CIA review to see if the story was true (it was) and if it would "cause problems for Helms." (Helms had lied to a Senate committee about the CIA's role in subverting Chilean democracy and would later be convicted of contempt of Congress.)

After investigating, Bush assistant Seymour Bolten reported back that the exposure of Helms' false testimony to the Warren Commission would probably cause Helms "some anxious moments," though not "any additional legal problems." But Bush was assured that a "slightly better" story had resulted from an Agency phone call to AP protesting that Martin's story was "sloppy." Additionally, Bush was told that an unnamed journalist had "advised his editors . . . not to run the AP story."

Bolten complained to Bush: "This is another example where material provided to the press and public in response to an FOIA request is exploited mischievously and in distorted form to make the headlines." One might more accurately describe it as an occasion where George Bush's CIA pressured one news outlet to back away from an accurate story while using an asset in the press corps to suppress it in another.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1491

That missing news may seem like old news until one considers how important a missing bit of information can be:

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.

Some, if not many, DUers remember the role Cheney and Rumsfeld played in covering up the death of CIA scientist Frank Olson. Too bad it also is censored history of the USA.

And if a bit of missing information is so important, it's tough imagining how much more important is a missing person and the information they represent, like an assassinated President.

PS: Thank you for caring, JEB. Your friendship means the world.