John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JERRY KROTH IN INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE

 

“Two U.S. Soldiers Overheard JFK Assassination Plans”

 

Released assassination documents show that two people – Eugene Dinkin of the Army and David Christensen of the Air Force – intercepted  independently, in their official work with decoding and secret communications, some advance discussion of the Kennedy assassination. The names Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey were in the decoded material. Both men were committed to mental institutions for a time, the old Soviet trick to totally discredit someone.

 

Well, finally some really serious stuff from these record releases.

Much of what was released in the past made you wonder why the items were ever classified in the first place.

It is very interesting the name of the Corsican assassin coming up.

The greatest book ever written on the assassination was Anthony Summer’s original “Conspiracy” about forty years ago.

It is not to be confused with any of the later editions which are totally different books. Indeed, I’ve always suspected someone got to Summers for his later editions. The books tended to take the unconvincing Mafia-did-it slant which offialdom made great efforts to promote.

Summers, who was a gifted investigative reporter from Britain and did some other ground-breaking work, as with his books on J. Edgar Hoover and Marylin Monroe, mentioned the Corsican figure and trying to trace him in the original book.

Of course, the name Guy Bannister (retired Senior FBI agent from Chicago) is interesting too. He was in his retirement from FBI running some kind of dirty operation in New Orleans under a cover. Guns for anti-Cuba forces likely and other anti-Castro activity. He was a virulent American commie-hater type.

He had Oswald working at his shop, something we only learned by an accident.

Oswald was running a phony campaign about fair play for Cuba in which he handed out pamphlets to people which contained a form to be filled-out and mailed.

The concept is an old security agency trick for getting names of people who are sympathizers with some cause under suspicion.

The accident was Oswald’s in using an office stamp for Bannister’s Camp street office on the backs of some of the pamphlets. It connected them, and that wasn’t supposed to happen.

One eye witness also said Oswald was seen around the place. The Warren Commission ignored all such leads, anything which disagreed with the plotline created by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the people who did literally all of the investigative work of the Warren Commission. Hoover was a serious Kennedy-hater and had every motivation to see someone replace Kennedy, especially a crooked friend and fellow Kennedy-hater like Lyndon Johnson.

Oswald’s pamphlet activity has always been cited as yet more evidence of Oswald’s communism or sympathies with communism, but we know from many little facts that Oswald was not a communist. He was a patriotic type in fact. His statements about Marxism, made, mind you, at the time of working covertly with Bannister, were clearly legend-building stuff.

Just the opposite was true. He was being paid to hand out phony pamphlets and to do other tasks, working against Castro and with guys like red-neck Bannister.

Cuba is pretty much what the whole assassination was about, which is why the assassins needed someone identified as a communist as their patsy. There were large numbers of men associated with America’s security agencies at the time who were almost hysterical about Castro because he represented a serious challenge to an American Imperial Plantation System which had long kept an entire continent subservient.

And one of those particularly vicious types at the CIA was William Harvey, the third name mentioned on the intercepts. Harvey ran such dirty stuff as Operation Mongoose, a 1960 secret plan to decapitate Cuba’s leadership. He was known as CIA’s chief assassin.

Oswald’s earlier participation, when he was in the Marines, in a murky program of defectors to Russia to gain information about day-to-day life in the USSR – there were several such defections, and the later immensely-discredited James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, appears to have run the program – basically tarred Oswald as a defector and communist sympathizer and made him an ideal candidate as assassination patsy.

Oswald was, in fact, a patriotic young American, having joined the Marines underaged, and was enticed into a covert defection program which offered a sense of mystery and fed his sense of self-importance. He was taught Russian by experts, which we know he spoke well before going to Russia and saw his time in Russia as an opportunity both to serve his country and to have a grand adventure., pretty heady stuff for a young ambitious man with little formal education and a poor background.

When someone saying he was Oswald traveled to Mexico City, shortly before the assassination, to secure a visa for either Cuba or Russia, he was just helping build the Oswald legend, helping set up Oswald as the assassination’s patsy.

The CIA covers such embassies 24 hours a day with cameras., and it records all phone calls, as you might expect.

But when asked by investigators, to produce a photo of “Oswald,” a completely different-looking man was in it and no explanation was offered.

When asked for phone recordings, investigating officials were told that the tapes had been routinely recycled.

It was just all rubbish, as was the entire Warren Commission report.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON ASPECTS OF THE WARREN REPORT

 

Way back with the publication of the Warren Report, Bertrand Russell, who regarded it as a complete fabrication, asked a set of penetrating questions about it.

The most important question was to the effect that if the murder was the straightforward act of one man, as the Commission asserted, where was any issue of national security?

It, as is the case with the others, has never been answered.

And from that one unanswered question tumbles out the whole dirty, tangled mess we’ve witnessed for half a century.

In fact, there was no need for a commission, if the Commission itself was right.

Kennedy’s body should have been autopsied in Dallas, as in any normal murder, instead of being rushed away, literally at Secret Service gunpoint, to Washington.

Oswald should have been tried in Dallas, the rightful criminal jurisdiction, assassination of a president at that time not even being a federal crime.

The Warren Commission’s Report is nothing more than a poorly argued prosecutor’s brief created after Oswald was eliminated. It reflects absolutely none of the traditional judicial procedures such as cross examination or legal counsel for the accused, and it selected which bits of evidence it permitted to be entered while ignoring large amounts of other evidence. We know it even altered evidence which proved inconvenient.

The Commission, as many Americans do not appreciate still, actually did no investigation. All investigation was through J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and Hoover was a man who somehow mysteriously decided Oswald was his man within a very short time of the crime with virtually no tested evidence. Scores of good witnesses were ignored. Less important witnesses were treated as important. And some good witnesses who were questioned actually discovered their words had been changed when shown them printed in the Warren Report, this last being a not uncommon experience.

Hoover was also a man who intensely hated Kennedy and is said to have been pleased on hearing of his death. It is a matter of historical record that the CIA, supposedly working on its own in-house examination of events, lied and misrepresented to the Commission, as concerning recordings and surveillance photos from Mexico City. It kept large quantities of relevant files hidden, and it did not even inform the Commission of some very important matters, such as its program of cooperation with Mafia hoodlums in efforts to assassinate Castro. Some investigation the case got!

To my mind, nothing so clearly indicates the inept nature of the Warren Commission than Chief Justice Warren’s telling Jack Ruby in the Dallas Jail that he couldn’t take him to Washington for questioning, Ruby’s having practically begged him to do so because he had important things to say and felt unsafe saying them in Dallas. The Head of the Supreme Court and of the blue-ribbon commission couldn’t do that? Of course, he could. No one would dare stop him had he chosen to do so. He simply chose not to.

Clearly, other dark matters were involved, and it is those other matters that are at the heart of the assassination.

By the way, the one American journalist who ruthlessly pursued the truth at the time, popular columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, did somehow land the only press interview with Ruby. She then promised the public she would break the case wide open with the scoop of the century, but she was soon discovered in her apartment “suicided.” All notes from her interview and the write-up she started were gone and have never turned up.

Virtually the entire journalism profession in the U.S. acted just as they do today concerning America’s ugly acts abroad: they hid or lied. America’s press works today just as it did then, as an unofficial arm of government, taking its guidance from security agency winks and nods.

An interesting fact, often ignored, is that in the weeks up to Dallas, two other assassination plots were discovered. One was in Chicago and one in Tampa. In both cases, there was a similar pattern in the planning around Kennedy limousine rides during his visits. The shots were to be fired around a big turn which slowed down the car. There even were Oswald-like figures, the one in Tampa sharing a great deal of Oswald’s background as a former “defector” from the military.

When it comes to such high-level murder, there can be no such thing as that kind of coincidence.

The assassination involved an elaborate plot and a number of actors, and the ludicrous Warren Commission simply closed its eyes and constructed a kind of pastiche of selected bits of untested evidence that it judged adequate to satisfy public curiosity. Why they did this cannot be known at this time, but President Johnson in assembling the commission repeatedly pressured potential appointees with dark warnings about catastrophic events in which tens of millions would die.