JFK Accountability

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.