JFK Accountability

Castro Did It - Again

Last week featured the debut on German television of a new documentary entitled Rendezvous with Death, the latest work to repeat the claims that Cuba was behind the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The film comes at a time when the ongoing saga of troubled tensions between the U.S. and Cuba has taken its latest twist, with the U.S. unwilling to extradite alleged terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, ostensibly based on fears that he would be handed over to Castro.

If there is anyone who doubts the clout of the Cuban exile community with the Bush Administration, they have only to look at the story in the Miami Herald (1/6/06), that "The U.S. government will decide by Jan. 24 whether to free Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles from an immigration facility in El Paso and allow him to stay in the country under supervision." Apparently what is not under consideration is the possibility of trying him for the terrorist bombing of a civilian airliner in 1976, for his assassination attempts against Castro in 2000, or even of extraditing him to countries where he is wanted for these crimes.

In this context, a film reviving very old stories about Oswald killing JFK for Fidel Castro deserves our attention for its political implications. Normally it would be best to suspend judgment until having seen the film, but the Posada outrage confirms that these are not normal times. What follows, then, are some thoughts on the film from what has been written about it.

Although the film relies on some new sources, it also revives some old and very discredited sources from the past, notably:

a) Sam Halpern, ex-CIA. Halpern was a prominent source for Gus Russo's Live by the Sword. Quoting from an essay by one of us (Scott) on the History Matters website (http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Chapter5.htm): "Halpern has been one of the most vociferous anti-Kennedy voices among CIA veterans, and some statements of his to Gus Russo can only be called disinformation." In the lengthy discussion of Halpern there, Scott considers an affidavit (believed to be by Halpern) to be "highly misleading if not perjurious."

b) Antulio Ramirez Ortiz. As Paul Hoch has noted, the HSCA stated in its Final Report:

• "The committee, in executive session, questioned Ramirez, who had been returned to the United States to serve a 20-year Federal sentence for hijacking.(149) He testified he was unable to describe the photograph he had allegedly seen and that the writing in the file was in Russian, a language he does not speak. …In the end, … the committee was forced to dismiss Ramirez' story about the "Osvaldo-Kennedy" file. The decisive factor was the committee's belief that the Cuban intelligence system in the 1961-63 period was too sophisticated to have been infiltrated by Ramirez in the manner he had described. While some details of his story could be corroborated, the essential aspects of his allegation were incredible." (see HSCA Report, p. 121).

Ramirez, author of a manuscript entitled "Castro's Red Hot Hell" (see CIA document 104-10408-10077), is not the only Cuban source for the film. Some are apparently new, though the film’s story of a red-haired negro and a $6500 payment to Oswald is certainly not.

There have always been people eager to invent, promote, or revive "Castro-did-it stories." Some of these attempts were crude and likely simple acts of opportunism. Other stories were, at least at first, promoted by CIA personnel and other insiders including the Ambassador to Mexico. Among these stories was the tale of Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte, who contacted the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City on November 25 1963. Alvarado claimed that he had earlier witnessed Oswald in the Cuban Embassy, taking $6500 from a red-haired negro to kill Kennedy. CIA personnel including David Phillips at first took Alvarado quite seriously, despite his initial false claim of being a Nicaraguan Communist (it was quickly learned that he was a penetration agent working on behalf of Somoza). Alvarado's story soon unraveled, and he ultimately failed a lie-detector test. For humor value, perhaps, his story included this exchange:

Red-haired Negro: "I want to kill the man."
Oswald: "You're not man enough. I can do it."

While Rendezvous with Death apparently does not rely on Alvarado's account, it incredibly has new sources for the very same story: red-haired negro, $6500 given to Oswald in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy. Either Alvarado was truthful, which seems highly dubious, or he happened to invent the precise scenario which the film’s new witnesses say actually happened, which is preposterous. The only other logical possibility would seem to be that they are all making the story up.

It is worth noting that this story has appeared in other forms from other sources - a man named Pedro Gutierrez Valencia told the authorities after the assassination that, back around the 1st of October 1963, he had seen Oswald taking money from a Cuban outside the Cuban Embassy. Apparently Oswald was being handed money in and around the Cuban Embassy on multiple occasions. He must have spent it quickly, given that his flight from the Texas School Book Depository on November 22 relied on a public bus.

Working with German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann on Rendezvous with Death has been Gus Russo, author of Live by the Sword, a book which portrays John and Robert Kennedy as obsessed with Castro, with a bewildered CIA dragged along. This flies in the face of such obvious truths as the fact that the plots to murder Castro began before Kennedy took office, and continued after he had been suddenly removed from it. The record is clear that hardliners in the CIA and military were, along with the Cuban exiles who had lost their homeland, far more militant than Kennedy on the matter of Cuba.

Another allegation of Cuban involvement in the JFK murder, discussed ominously in Russo's book, related to a Cuban Embassy employee named Luisa Calderon, who on the afternoon of the assassination was heard uttering on a tapped phone line: "I knew almost before Kennedy." This single statement, at best ambiguous, was pushed by CIA at the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The HSCA devoted significant effort trying to determine if Calderon were indeed expressing "foreknowledge" of the assassination. If an "assassination buff" overheard a U.S. official uttering such a line and tried to twist it into a conspiracy allegation, they would be rightly ridiculed. In any case, the problem with this story is that CIA files all along held the answer to the "mystery," in the form of a prior tapped call from the same day. In that earlier call, Calderon expressed complete surprise on hearing the news of Kennedy's death. Live by the Sword selectively quotes from the exonerating conversation to make the conspiracy allegation seem even more disturbing, while failing to mention that the same conversation renders the entire affair moot. For a fuller version of the Calderon story, see the essay More Mexico Mysteries, part 3, on the History Matters website).

To quote from the recently published book Ultimate Sacrifice (p. 772), by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann: "Even within the CIA, there were suspicious (eventually discredited) 'Castro-did-it' reports involving Miguel Casas Saez and Gilberto Lopez. David Morales and especially David Atlee Phillips were sources for such stories."

"Castro-did-it" stories, like "mob-did-it" stories, suffer from a central weakness: How could Castro plan for the Dallas parade route to pass under the windows of the Texas School Book Depository? How could Castro have arranged for Oswald to take a job at the TSBD? Could Castro have arranged for Oswald to be taken off the FBI Watch List just weeks before the assassination, with the result that he was not under any kind of surveillance on November 22? Could Castro have inspired the deliberate falsifications contained in pre-assassination CIA cables and other documents about Oswald, which suggest that in September-October 1963 (as well as earlier) the CIA was using Oswald documents in some kind of intelligence operation? And the "hired hand" Oswald theory suffers from the same central problem that the Warren Commission's lone gunman scenario suffered from--the glaring evidence, too lengthy to be recounted here, that Kennedy was fired upon by multiple gunmen.

There are indeed some mysterious aspects of the Oswald trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, the backdrop for most of the "Castro-did-it" allegations. Prime among them is the question of who impersonated Oswald on tapped telephone lines, seven weeks before he was to be arrested in Dallas. The FBI determined less than 24 hours after the assassination that the voice on these tapes did not match that of the captured Oswald. This was only one of several instances in which Oswald was impersonated prior to the assassination, usually in ways which accentuated his purported ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union, or made him appear to be a would-be killer. On the morning after the JFK murder, FBI Director Hoover informed President Johnson about an imposter "using Oswald's name" in Mexico City, noting that it "appears there was a second person down there." Surveillance photographs of a "mystery man" who may have been the impersonator were in the hands of the CIA and FBI on the afternoon of November 22. This, the best lead to the true conspirators behind Kennedy's murder, then received no follow-up whatsoever. Why?

There is also the problem of Warren Commission Exhibit 16, the typed “Kostin” letter of November 9, 1963, allegedly from Oswald but almost certainly not by him. In the letter “Oswald” plants intriguing clues suggesting an inexplicably deep relation between the writer and the Mexico City Soviet and Cuban Embassies. There were other false clues, notably a US Army Intelligence cable saying that Oswald had once defected to Cuba, that suggested an illicit relationship between Oswald and Castro’s Cuba. Are we to believe that either Oswald or Castro would lay down these false trails of evidence leading to both of them?

"Castro-did-it" stories have been revived from time to time in the past, notably in 1967 and 1971 (Jack Anderson, reporting the allegations of Johnny Roselli) and 1976 (Phillips again). Both of these occurred at a time when new investigations into Kennedy's murder were afoot (Garrison in the first instance, the Church Committee and House Select Committee in the latter). Such is not the case today, though the massive declassification of government files in the mid- and late-1990s provided startling new information about Kennedy's struggles with his own government over Cuba, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union. It also re-energized research into the assassination, and has engendered a growing consensus among those who study it, that Kennedy's murder was likely the result of the striking divisions within the U.S. body politic.

Although there is legitimate concern that the latest revival of this theory at this time may be a prelude to a revival of anti-Castro operations, it is also possible that it is a diversion. A diversion from the increasing revelations about the games that the CIA was playing with Oswald files just before the assassination. And a diversion from the growing consensus that previously-suppressed facts about Kennedy's policies on Cuba and the Cold War, which placed him at odds with powerful hard-liners in his own country, may indeed lie at the heart of the mystery about his murder.

- Peter Dale Scott
- Rex Bradford

For more information on Oswald's trip to Mexico and the allegations of communist conspiracy which quickly emanated from it, see these sources:

• Deep Politics II, by Peter Dale Scott, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications, 1996
• Overview to Deep Politics III: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico, by Peter Dale Scott
• The Fourteen Minute Gap and The Fourteen Minute Gap: An Update, by Rex Bradford
• More Mexico Mysteries, by Rex Bradford

Conference Videos

We will have the video of the conference reproduced shortly for sale. If you are interested, please drop us a note at truthisourclient@yahoo.com  and we will let you know the price and availability date.  I am out of town on vacation this week but it should not take long to reproduce them after that.

Jim

No Closer to Cracking the Kennedy Case

Meeting Yields Few Answers on Assassination

By George Lardner Jr., The Washington Post, November 21, 2005

The conference was optimistically titled "Cracking the JFK Case," but it was widely noted that many of the speakers and members of the audience had grown gray hair or lost much of it while looking for the answers.

One of the presentations at the three-day session revived doubts about the famous "single bullet theory" that the House Select Committee on Assassinations thought it had resolved in the late 1970s. Another demolished persistent claims that the Zapruder film -- the "clock" of the Kennedy assassination -- had somehow been altered or contradicted by other photographic evidence. Still another speaker demonstrated how the sounds on Dallas police tapes showed that four and perhaps five shots had been fired -- meaning that at least one other person besides alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had squeezed a trigger.

None of that solved the whodunit, although the conferees could still count themselves and like-minded historians and researchers winners in a way. Three out of every four Americans think President John F. Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, was the result of a conspiracy. Almost as many think there was a coverup.

But the proposition that drew about 135 people to a Bethesda hotel this past weekend -- that it is not too late "to solve the greatest mystery of the 20th century" -- has less traction with the public. According to the most recent poll, conducted in 2003 for the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination, 75 percent of the public does not want another government investigation.

Washington lawyer Jim Lesar, president of the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center, the main sponsor of the conference, was undeterred. "The lone assassin theory" -- the Warren Commission's conclusion in 1964 that Oswald was solely responsible for the killing -- "is more discredited than it has previously been," he said in opening remarks.

A key reason, he said, is that the CIA not only withheld crucial information from the commission about its assassination plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, but it also held back other vital information from the House assassinations committee, which concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."

The committee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, whose main suspect remains the late New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, explained his loss of confidence in the CIA in a talk Saturday night. The committee had relied on the late George Joannides, a CIA officer called out of retirement, to help it find and review CIA documents during its investigation. But the agency never told the committee that Joannides had been the case officer for a CIA-funded anti-Castro exile group that had contacts with Oswald and an ostensible confrontation with him in New Orleans before the assassination.

"The agency set me up," Blakey said. Joannides, he recalled, frequently blocked the efforts of the House panel's young researchers to obtain relevant CIA records, but when they complained to him, Blakey said he accepted the CIA's assurances that his aides were being too pushy and suspicious. Looking back on it, he said, "I have no confidence in anything the agency told me."

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck said the agency had no immediate comment.

Other highlights of the conference included a study by two scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who said that bullet fragments taken from Kennedy's brain, from Texas Gov. John Connally's wrist and from the floor of the presidential limousine were too small and too metallurgically complex to be identified as having come from only two Mannlicher-Carcano bullets such as those Oswald is believed to have fired.

The House committee said neutron activation tests showed it was "highly likely" that the fragments from Connally's wrist came from a largely intact Mannlicher-Carcano bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital after first hitting Kennedy -- the so-called magic bullet -- and that the other fragments came from a second bullet that hit Kennedy in the head.

But the Livermore scientists said the fragments could have come from one or as many as five bullets and could have been fired by a Remington or some other rifle. The neutron tests, they said, were inconclusive and new technology has shown them to be unreliable.

Josiah Thompson, author of "Six Seconds in Dallas," a 1967 study contending there was more than one gunman, produced a slide show to demonstrate that no discrepancy has ever been found in any of the films taken in Dealey Plaza.

Prizewinning scientist Richard Garwin offered a long-promised report to show that gunshot-like sounds on Dallas police tapes were random noises that took place 30 to 60 seconds after the assassination.

He was upstaged, however, by Donald B. Thomas, an entomologist and admittedly no acoustics expert, who showed how the noises coincided precisely with frames from the Zapruder film and echoes off buildings in Dealey Plaza reflecting the gunfire. Garwin held his ground, but said he had not studied the echoes.

Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and Intelligence Failures

In the discussions over how the U.S. went to war in Iraq and the prospects for that conflict, the Vietnam War has been raised repeatedly. These discussions typically focus on the prospects in Iraq (e.g., "is it a quagmire?"), but rarely mentioned are the troubling details of how the decision to go to war in Vietnam was made. It is now generally conceded that Congressional authorization for President Johnson to pursue that war vigorously was granted in the wake of what we now know was an "intelligence failure" - the supposed second attack on U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened. As in Iraq, there remain serious questions about how aggressively officials moved to use the mistaken reports without verifying them, in order to pursue desired policy goals. Also, it has long been known that the naval vessels in question were engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers, in support of OPLAN 34A, a program of covert attacks against North Vietnam.

What does this have to do with the assassination of President Kennedy?

For one thing, the authorization for the OPLAN 34A program is contained in NSAM 273, the first National Security Action Memorandum signed by President Johnson (on November 26, four short days after President Kennedy's murder, following an emergency meeting on Vietnam on the 24th). This NSAM was drafted the day before Kennedy's fateful motorcade ride in Dallas, but the draft version differs markedly in the scope of authorization for such a program, and in any case Kennedy never saw or signed it.

Beyond the above is the larger question of Kennedy's policies and plans in Vietnam. Here, serious gaps in the record have been filled in since the passage of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The gaps have been filled in with more details on the plans for complete withdrawal from Vietnam which were drawn up in the spring of 1963, and initiated on October 11 with NSAM 263. This gave the order for an initial pullout of 1000 men before the end of 1963, an event which never occurred.

With the filling in of the record - why were these documents a state secret for 35 years? - the debate among historians has shifted.  No longer is the issue whether there was a plan to withdraw - the question has moved to whether it was "serious enough" to survive the change in reporting of the battlefield conditions which occurred in the wake of Kennedy's murder, from optimistic to pessimistic. Some historians, including David Kaiser (American Tragedy) and Howard Jones (Death of a Generation) now argue that Kennedy was determined to withdraw despite a change in conditions, joining Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, and no less than Robert McNamara. Many mainstream historians and others - including Noam Chomsky whose book Rethinking Camelot is largely a rebuttal of this view - maintain that Kennedy's assassination was not a factor in the progress toward war in Vietnam.

Just like the questions swirling around how the U.S. went to war in Iraq, the questions about Kennedy and Vietnam should not be lightly brushed aside.

For more information, see:

Exit Strategy, by James K. Galbraith. The son of John Kenneth Galbraith argues that Kennedy was committed to unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam.

Rethinking Camelot, by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's book-length rebuttal of the withdrawal argument is available online.

The Kennedy Assassinationa and the Vietnam War, by Peter Dale Scott. Scott wrote about this long before anyone else.

JFK, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone, by Gary Aguilar. Dr. Aguilar highlights the vociferous attack on Stone for presenting this viewpoint on Kennedy Vietnam policy in the film JFK.

Kennedy and Vietnam, on www.maryferrell.org. The new Mary Ferrell Foundation website features this issue, including links to essays and declassified documents, video clips of Peter Dale Scott, and more.

-- Rex Bradford
-- Gary Aguilar

New website - www.maryferrell.org

The Mary Ferrell Foundation website is now available at www.maryferrell.org.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation website is devoted to education and research on the matters surrounding the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The mission of the Mary Ferrell Foundation is to carry on the legacy of Mary Ferrell, whose integrity and fierce dedication to truth is an inspiration to many.

The website features the largest electronic archive of JFK assassination records, fully browseable and accompanied by a sophisticated search engine. The archive also features secondary source materials such as books and essays, and "starting points" which introduce topics and provide links for further exploration. Other features include interactive projects such as Mary Ferrell's name database, a comment system for attaching analysis and opinions to the site's materials, and a help desk forum for aid in using and locating materials on the site.

Most site features are open to all visitors. To use the site's comment system and help desk, a free membership is required. Until January 1, 2006, all site features are open to free members. Starting then, full use of the site's sophisticated search engine will require a low-cost subscription membership. Other features of the site will remain free.

Visit www.maryferrell.org and see this innovative and vast research and education resource.

G. Robert Blakey's 2003 Addendum to 1993 Frontline Interview

[ed. note: G. Robert Blakey was Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Based on new information uncovered by journalist Jefferson Morley (see Morley's essay on the History Matters website), Blakey issued this scathing attack on CIA obstruction of the HSCA inquiry.]

I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee. My reasons follow.

The committee focused, among other things, on (1) Oswald, (2) in New Orleans, (3) in the months before he went to Dallas, in particular (4) his attempt to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil or DRE.

These were crucial issues in the Warren Commission's investigation; they were crucial issues in the committee's investigation. The Agency knew it full well in 1964; the Agency knew it full well in 1976-79. Outrageously, the Agency did not tell the Warren Commission or our committee that it had financial and other connections with the DRE, a group that Oswald had direct dealings with.

What contemporaneous reporting is or was in the Agency's DRE files? We will never know, for the Agency now says that no reporting is in the existing files. Are we to believe that its files were silent in 1964 or during our investigation?

I don't believe it for a minute. Money was involved; it had to be documented. Period. End of story. The files and the Agency agents connected to the DRE should have been made available to the commission and the committee. That the information in the files and the agents who could have supplemented it were not made available to the commission and the committee amounts to wilful obstruction of justice.

Obviously, too, it did not identify the agent who was its contact with the DRE at the crucial point that Oswald was in contact with a George Joannides.

During the relevant period, the committee's chief contact with the Agency on a day-to-day basis was Scott Breckenridge. (I put aside our contact with the office of chief counsel, Lyle Miller).

We sent researchers to the Agency to request and read documents. The relationship between our young researchers, law students who came with me from Cornell, was anything but "happy." Nevertheless, we were getting and reviewing documents. Breckenridge, however, suggested that he create a new point of contact who might "facilitate" the process of obtaining and reviewing materials. He introduced me to Joannides, who, he said, he had arranged to bring out of retirement to help us. He told me that he had experience in finding documents; he thought he would be helpful to us.

I was not told of Joannides background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.

That the Agency would put a "material witness" in as a "filter" between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.

The committee's researchers immediately complained to me that Joannides was, in fact, not facilitating but obstructing our obtaining of documents. I contacted Breckenridge and Joannides. Their side of the story wrote off the complaints to the young age and attitude of the people.

They were certainly right about one question: the committee's researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency's integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides.

For these reasons, I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald. Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency, may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understated the matter.

What the Agency did not give us none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on any point, you may reject all of his testimony.

I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known.

Significantly, The Warren commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government had cooperated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.

We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.

Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.

I am now in that camp.

Upcoming Conference in DC

This November 18 in Washington DC a powerful lineup of speakers will address the JFK assassination, its relevancy to modern times, and new findings which continue to emerge from the recent declassifications. Confirmed speakers include:

Gary Hart - former U.S. Senator from Colorado and co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century.  Senator Hart was part of a two-senator subcomittee (the Schweicker-Hart subcommittee) of the Church Committee which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy and will speak on "The Church Committee and the Still Unanswered Questions."

G. Robert Blakey - Chief Counsel of the congressional committee that investigated Kennedy's murder, giving a talk entitled "Second Thoughts."

Joan Mellen - Author of the soon-to-be-released book "A Farewell to Justice:  Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History."

David Talbot - Founder of salon.com, speaking on the meaning of the silence of Robert Kennedy in the aftermath of his brother's murder.

Peter Dale Scott - Noted author of several books including "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK", giving a talk entitled "Joseph Milteer, Pedro Del Valle, Northwoods, and the Strategy of Tension."

James Bamford - Author of "Body of Secrets", speaking on "Seven Days in May: The Military vs. JFK."

Josiah Thompson - Author of Six Seconds in Dallas, whose talk is entitled "Bedrock Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination: Where Can You Find It?"

John Newman - Author of "JFK & Vietnam" and "Oswald and the CIA", speaking on "James Angleton and the Assassination of President Kennedy."

D.B. Thomas and Richard Garwin will appear together to debate the House Select Committee's scientific acoustics evidence, which found that more than three shots were fired, one from the "grassy knoll."

Other speakers and panelists include Prof. David Wrone, Jefferson Morley, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Randolph Robertson, Richard Whalen, Dr. Patrick Grant, Dr. Eric Randich, Dan Alcorn, Prof. Gerald McKnight, and Jim Lesar, president of the AARC.

See the right-hand sidebar for a PDF announcement with more details.   To register for the conference, email us at truthisourclient@yahoo.com or phone us at (202) 628-6608.

Accountability in the murder of President Kennedy

This Web site is intended to stimulate public debate about the causes and consequences of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.  In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq to destroy non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the imperative of understanding catastrophic intelligence failures is greater than ever.

The purpose of this site is two-fold:  First is to facilitate understanding of the available evidence, with full respect for the range of opinion that the evidence generates. A second goal is to help forge consensus about the urgent and continuing necessity to enforce the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992, and to insure the immediate release of assassination-related records now illicitly withheld from the public domain by U.S. government agencies.

The approach is to apply the standards of journalism, scholarship and forensic science to a subject which has suffered from the lack of consistent application of all three.

The posts here will examine some of the evidence and tell some of the more important stories, and provide pointers to other credible sources available online.

What is needed now is societal accountability. As some of the recent civil rights cases have shown, this is still possible even after more than 40 years.

- Jefferson Morley
- Rex Bradford