"Shoot Him Down": NBC, the CIA and Jim Garrison
Written by William Davy



Author William Davy writes about how NBC and the CIA worked in tandem to discredit JFK assassination investigator Jim Garrison.
garrison
Jim Garrison

With the arrival of the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, it was hardly surprising that one of the major television networks attempted to make the case for Lee Oswald's sole guilt. Despite four decades of solid research indicating a conspiracy, the American viewing public was once again treated to a one-sided, unfair and unbalanced presentation. In light of this, it might be instructive to look at how one of the other networks tackled the case for conspiracy some 37 years ago. The mystery of the assassination is still a popular subject among people of all ages. A college student might not know how to ask a girl out, but you can bet they have strong opinions on the JFK assassination based solely on the network specials that run every so often.

On June 19th, 1967 NBC aired an hour long "analysis" of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation titled, The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison. While unnecessary to rehash Garrison's case here, in summary Garrison's investigation focused on three individuals: A former Eastern Airlines pilot and probable CIA asset, David Ferrie; ex-FBI man and private detective Guy Banister; and Managing Director of the International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw. Garrison believed all three were connected to American intelligence and had, at a minimum, conspired to set up Oswald as a potential patsy in the JFK assassination. Barely three months into his investigation, Garrison's main suspect, the forty-nine year old David Ferrie, died apparently of natural causes. Banister had also passed away in 1964 as a result of a heart attack. On March 1st, 1967 Garrison arrested the surviving member of this trio, the CIA connected Clay Shaw. By mid-March both the Grand Jury and a three-judge panel had ordered Shaw to trial.

Garrison's case was big news and predictably the news media swung into attack mode. None was more vicious or had more resources at their disposal than NBC. For the job as lead investigative reporter, NBC assigned Walter Sheridan. Shortly after Shaw's arrest Sheridan arrived in New Orleans and began questioning witnesses �" perhaps bribing and intimidating would be a better choice of words. Sheridan questioned a former electronics expert and CIA asset Gordon Novel and immediately put him on a $500 a day retainer. (Novel had briefly consulted with Garrison's team). Sheridan then urged Novel to skip town to avoid being indicted and paid him an additional $750 while Novel was in Columbus Ohio. Attorney Dean Andrews, who received the call from a "Clay Bertrand" to represent Oswald, was promised a recording studio if he cooperated with Sheridan. Andrews was overheard bragging, "I can get the equipment here. All I have to do is make a phone call, I'll have open credit, I can pay off on any terms. Look, Bobby Sarnoff promised me those facilities. He'd better pay off, baby." Bobby Sarnoff was, of course, Robert Sarnoff, NBC president and later chairman of the board of its parent company RCA.

Garrison's main witness at the time was Perry Russo, a young insurance agent who had claimed he overheard a conspiratorial conversation between Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald at Ferrie's home. Sheridan "interviewed" Russo and seriously distorted his statements during the broadcast. As the New Orleans States-Item reported, "Russo said Sheridan, WDSU-TV reporter Richard Townley and Saturday Evening Post writer James Phelan repeatedly visited his home in attempts to persuade him to cooperate with NBC and the defense." Russo said he met with the trio with the full knowledge of the district attorney's office and reported everything that happened to Asst. DA Andrew Sciambra. Russo said, "Sheridan offered to set me up in California, protect my job and guarantee that Garrison would never get me extradited back to Louisiana" if he cooperated. He accused Townley of threatening him with public humiliation unless he changed his story and cooperated with the NBC program. The 25-year-old witness said members of the trio told him both, "NBC and the Central Intelligence Agency are out to wreck Garrison's investigation." Of course, Russo's accusations were met with denials, but as we shall see Russo's claims seem to have been accurate.

Another of Garrison's witnesses was Vernon Bundy, a heroin addict and prisoner who had testified at the preliminary hearing that he had seen Shaw and Oswald together at the Lake Pontchartrain seawall. Once Bundy had been exposed in the preliminary hearing, he was now fair game for Walter Sheridan and NBC. In their attempt to discredit Bundy, NBC aired interviews with two fellow convicts, Miguel Torres and John Cancler. Cancler, a convicted burglar and pimp, appeared first and said Bundy had told him he was going to lie to the DA's office to get out of prison. Torres, whose own record of heroin abuse, burglary, pimping, assault, and suspected murder out rivaled Cancler's, was currently serving a nine-year sentence for robbery. He said that Bundy told him he was going to make up a story about Shaw to get the DA to "cut him loose" from prison. After the airing of the NBC special, Garrison invited Messrs. Torres and Cancler to repeat their stories in front of the Grand Jury. Both pleaded the Fifth Amendment and were subsequently convicted of contempt. Another problem with Torres' story is his accusation that Bundy needed the DA to "cut him loose" from prison. In a recently released memorandum from the New Orleans DA's files, former aide William Gurvich wrote of his investigation of Bundy. Gurvich states, "Shortly after my interview with Bundy, I contacted local narcotics officers for background information on him. I also made an extensive inquiry into his criminal history." Of his heroin use Gurvich writes, "[Bundy] uses four or five capsules of heroin daily... This amount is considered sufficient for addiction, but is not an excessive amount as the more heavily addicted use as much as 20-30 capsules daily." Gurvich goes on to write "Bundy claimed he was in Parish Prison at the time because he went there voluntarily when he felt himself reverting back to the use of narcotics and feared the consequences of his addiction. Official records corroborate this." Bundy was on probation for breaking into a cigarette machine, but was not serving time. So much for Bundy needing to be "cut loose." Since NBC offered to relocate Perry Russo to California and provide him with a job if he changed his original testimony one can only imagine what incentives Sheridan offered Cancler and Torres.

Garrison's one time "aide", the aforementioned William Gurvich also assisted Sheridan having left the DA's office several weeks earlier. As Garrison noted shortly after the broadcast Gurvich didn't so much resign as "drift away about six weeks ago" and that since that time he had been in contact with Walter Sheridan. Gurvich also admittedly made off with the DA's master file. The CIA was so smitten with Gurvich that they wanted to make sure he was in touch with Shaw's lawyers. In their enthusiasm to give Shaw's lawyers all the help they could the CIA recommended:

Shaw's attorneys ought to talk to William H. GURVICH. This is an excellent suggestion. It is assumed they have done so, or plan to, but we should try to assure that they do.

One other witness Sheridan used makes for an interesting case study of Sheridan's abuse of power. Fred Leemans, the owner of a Turkish bath house in New Orleans, originally stated that Shaw had frequented his establishment using the name of Clay Bertrand. By the time Sheridan and company got to him, he went on the NBC special claiming he had been offered a $2500 bribe by one of Garrison's men in exchange for his incriminating testimony. After the NBC special had aired, Leemans came forward with the truth. In a sworn statement Leemans admitted that part of the reason he participated in the show was threatening phone calls "relative to the information that I had given Mr. Garrison." Leemans also recalled a visit from a man with a badge who stated that he was a government agent. The man supposedly told Leemans that the government was checking bar owners in the Slidell area for possible income tax violations. The man also warned him "it was not smart" to be involved in the Clay Shaw case "because a lot of people that had been involved got hurt." An anonymous caller told Leemans to change his statement and claim he had been bribed. The caller also suggested that Leemans contact Irvin Dymond, one of Shaw's attorneys. After contacting Dymond, Leemans was introduced to Walter Sheridan. Leemans claimed Dymond offered an attorney and bond in the event he was charged with giving false information to the DA's office. Leemans said his appearance on the show was taped in the office of Aaron Kohn, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, in the presence of Sheridan and Dymond.

The newly released CIA files present an interesting biography of "reporter" Sheridan. In 1955 Sheridan was security approved as an investigator for the CIA. A month later this was cancelled because Sheridan accepted a position at the ultra-secret National Security Agency. In 1956 he was security approved once again by the CIA so that he could attend their "Basic Orientation Course". After leaving the NSA, Sheridan went to work for Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department in the "Get Hoffa" squad, where his tactics in nailing Hoffa earned him a rebuke from none other than Chief Justice Earl Warren and paved the way for Hoffa's eventual release. With this background in the intelligence communities Sheridan was now apparently qualified to work for NBC as a reporter, despite having no previous journalism experience. However, documents reveal that Sheridan did not sever contact with the CIA. In early May of 1967 the Counter Intelligence office of the CIA issued a memorandum for the Deputy Director of Plans which stated:

Richard Lansdale, Associate General Counsel, has advised us that NBC plans to do a derogatory TV special on Garrison and his probe of the Kennedy assassination; that NBC regards Garrison as a menace to the country and means to destroy him. The program is to be presented within the next few weeks. Mr. Lansdale learned this information from Mr. Walter Sheridan of NBC.]

As noted previously, during Sheridan's tenure in New Orleans he enlisted the aid of Richard Townley from NBC's affiliate, WDSU-TV. Townley's loose tongue offered further proof that the NBC White Paper was no more than a deliberate attempt to sabotage the investigation and to ruin Jim Garrison. A recently released FBI memo reads:

A local FBI agent reported that Richard Townley, WDSU-TV, New Orleans, remarked to a special agent of the New Orleans office last evening that he had received instructions from NBC, New York, to prepare a one hour TV special on Jim Garrison with the instruction "shoot him down."

After the program aired, Garrison petitioned the FCC who agreed that the program was biased and granted Garrison a 30-minute rebuttal to air on July 15 at 7:30 P.M. --- hardly equal time. Nevertheless, the NBC program aided greatly in the discreditation of the DA's office and potentially contaminated the Shaw jury pool.

In addition to the aforementioned Richard Townley, the local New Orleans news media seemed to have more than its fair share of newscasters willing to flack for the intelligence agencies. Ed Planer, also of WDSU, offered to share information he had relative to the Garrison probe with the FBI. Also reporting to the FBI was Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Palmisano. In a May 12th memo from the New Orleans office to Director Hoover, Palmisano stated that he had received information that NBC was planning a White Paper concerning Garrison and that this news special would destroy the credibility of Garrison's investigation.

As these repeated and obviously orchestrated attacks on the DA's office continued, Garrison decided to fight back. On July 7 Walter Sheridan was charged with four counts of public bribery and Richard Townley was charged with attempted bribery and intimidation of witnesses. Sheridan's New Orleans attorneys of record were Milton Brener, a former Assistant D.A. under Garrison, now vociferously anti-Garrison, and Edward Baldwin of Baldwin and Quaid. In May of 1967, Baldwin's partner James Quaid wrote a letter to Richard Helms, then Director of the CIA, requesting that the Agency place his name "on their referral list of qualified attorneys in this area." However, Sheridan's Washington representation is much more illuminating.

Herbert Miller was a former head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice who had worked closely with Walter Sheridan. In the aftermath of the assassination Miller was the Department of Justice's point man in Dallas coordinating the Justice, FBI and Texas investigations. After leaving the DOJ, Miller entered private practice in the Washington firm of Miller, McCarthy, Evans, and Cassidy --- the Evans in this case being former FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans. In 1967 Miller went to work for the CIA representing the Agency's interests in the Hans Tofte case. (Tofte was a long-time CIA covert operative who worked in the Domestic Operations Division with his protégé, Tracy Barnes. In 1966 he was fired by the Agency for apparently hoarding classified material in his apartment.) While he was representing the CIA in the Tofte flap, Miller found time to interject himself into the Garrison investigation. On May 1, 1967, Miller began offering intelligence on the Garrison investigation to the CIA.

Later that week Miller called CIA Associate General Counsel Richard Lansdale to inform him of the expected arrival in Washington of Alvin Beauboeuf. Beauboeuf was one of assassination suspect David Ferrie's close friends, having accompanied him on his mad dash to Texas on the day of the assassination. Miller's source on Beauboeuf was Walter Sheridan. As Lansdale notes in his memo, "[the NBC special] is expected to 'bury' Garrison because everyone is convinced that Garrison is a wild and dangerous man." Miller went on to assure the CIA that "Beauboeuf would be glad to talk with us or help in any way we want." Garrison would note that after Beauboeuf's Washington trip "a change came over Beauboeuf; he refused to cooperate with us further and he made charges against my investigators."

To recap, we have evidence that NBC reporter Sheridan was providing intelligence on the Garrison investigation to a CIA lawyer, a situation that indicates certain sinister possibilities. In fact, recently declassified records show that Sheridan wasn't satisfied with solely presenting his own warped view of Garrison. A May 11th CIA memo reveals that Sheridan wanted to meet with the CIA "under any terms we propose" and that Sheridan desired to make the CIA's view of Garrison "a part of the background in the following NBC show."

While Sheridan's litigation was pending, Miller began doing double duty as a conduit between Shaw's lawyers and the CIA. In May of 1968 Miller wrote to the CIA's Lansdale:

Dear Dick:

Enclosed are the documents I received from Clay Shaw's attorney, Ed Wegmann.

Best Regards,

Herbert J. Miller, Jr.

The following month Miller provided the Agency with at least two more such packages.

Miller was certainly a very busy man during this time frame. While Miller was acting as a CIA courier for Shaw's lawyers and representing Walter Sheridan, he was also performing similar duties for Gordon Novel. While Novel was fighting extradition from Ohio, Miller came to his aid and was successful in getting an Ohio court to quash Garrison's subpoena. Miller also provided the CIA with the transcripts from Novel's civil suit against Garrison and Playboy. After Novel successfully avoided Garrison's extradition he sent a clipping to former CIA Director Allen Dulles. In his own handwritten marginalia to Dulles, Novel took great pride in Miller's victory, noting what a great job "Miller the Killer" did for him. It is interesting to note that the supposedly itinerant Novel now had four lawyers representing him: Miller, Stephen Plotkin, Jerry Weiner, and Elmer Gertz. Gertz, who had also represented Jack Ruby, was one of Novel's lawyers in his civil suit. When answering a list of interrogatories posed to him by Playboy's lawyers Novel stated that payment of legal fees to Weiner and Plotkin were "clandestinely remunerated by a party or parties unknown to me." It was later revealed to a Garrison investigator by a former member of the CIA that Plotkin was receiving his fees from the CIA via a cutout, Stephen Lemman. As for Miller, just a few short years after the Shaw trial ended, he represented President Richard Nixon as his post-resignation attorney.

What brings the Sheridan affair full circle is a friend of Sheridan's, one Carmine S. Bellino. Bellino was a former FBI agent and Kennedy insider who worked with Robert Kennedy on the McClellan Committee in the fifties and was brought on to Sheridan's "Get Hoffa" squad in the sixties. In 1954 Bellino actually shared his office with CIA/Mafia go-between, Robert Maheu. But what is troubling about the Bellino/Sheridan relationship is that Bellino once worked with none other than Guy Banister, performing background checks for the Remington Rand Corporation. In the seventies Bellino became an investigator on the Watergate Committee and did his best to steer the committee away from investigating any CIA involvement in the crime.

In a 1967 memo the CIA outlined several mass media approaches to counter Garrison's charges. One of their recommendations was to make sure that CIA Director Helms assure that various media outlets "receive a coherent picture of Garrison's 'facts' and motives. In anticipation of a trial, it would be prudent to have carefully selected channels of communication lined up in advance." Certainly the evidence above indicates that NBC was one such "channel."

 OSWALD AND THE CIA: WILCOTT'S TESTIMONY

    James B. Wilcott was a CIA accountant who disbursed CIA station funds in Tokyo, Japan. His duties routinely brought him in contact with all station people, and in particular with operational agents. On many occasions he had conversations with CIA personnel concerning Lee Harvey Oswald's employment as a CIA agent. Wilcott swore in a secret session of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that money he himself had disbursed was for "Oswald" or for the "Oswald project." He knew several other CIA employees who knew about the "Oswald project" and knew that Lee Harvey Oswald was paid by the CIA.

    Wilcott was told on several occasions that "so and so" (names not mentioned) had worked on the "Oswald project" back in the late 1950s. Wilcott told the HSCA that Oswald was recruited by the CIA for the express purpose of a double agent assignment in the USSR. Following the assassination Wilcott said there was "very heavy talk" from November 22 through January, 1964 about Oswald's connection to the CIA. He also told a Garrison investigator that it was from these conversations that he learned that the "project" (assassination of JFK) may have been under the direction of Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell. It was done, he said, in retaliation for Kennedy reneging on a secret agreement with Dulles to support the invasion of Cuba. Elaborate preparations had been made to firmly put the blame on Castro, and an immediate attack on Cuba would follow the assassination. After Oswald (HARVEY) was killed by Jack Ruby, Wilcott discussed this with a close circle of friends. They had no doubt that Oswald had been a "patsy" and that former gun-runner and "cut-out" Jack Ruby was instructed by the CIA to kill Oswald. After 9 years of employment with the CIA, Wilcott resigned in April, 1966.

    The document excerpted below was acquired by John Armstrong after his JFK Lancer presentation in Dallas in 1997. Selected pages from the National Archives are presented graphically; the remainder, to preserve bandwidth, are excerpted typographically. A link to the complete text of Wilcott's testimony is provided near the bottom of this page.

    See reproductions of pages 1, 7 and 8 of the secret HSCA report.

EXECUTIVE SESSION

ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 1978

        House of Representatives,
        John F. Kennedy Subcommittee
        of the Select Committee on
        Assassinations,
        Washington, D.C.

[. . . . ]

    TESTIMONY OF JAMES B. WILCOTT, A FORMER EMPLOYEE
    OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY:

    Mr. Goldsmith. For the record, would you please state your name and address and occupation?

    Mr. Wilcott. My name is James B. Wilcott. My address is 2761 Atlantic Street, in Concord, and my occupation is electronic technician.

[ . . . . ]

    Mr. Goldsmith. And, Mr. Wilcott, is it true that you are a former employee with the CIA and that you are here today testifying voluntarily without a subpoena?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes.

    Mr. Goldsmith. During what years did you work for the CIA?

    Mr. Wilcott. I worked from the years, May, of 1957 to, April, of 1966.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And in what general capacity did you work with the CIA?

    Mr. Wilcott. All in the finance--in accounting all of the time.

[. . . .]

    Mr. Goldsmith. Drawing your attention to the period immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, at that time, did you come across any information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald's relationship with the CIA?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes, I did.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And will you tell the Committee what that relationship was?

    Mr. Wilcott. Well, it was my understanding that Lee Harvey Oswald was an employee of the agency and was an agent of the agency.

    Mr. Goldsmith. What do you mean by the term "agent?"

    Mr. Wilcott. That he was a regular employee, receiving a full-time salary for agent work for doing CIA operational work.

    Mr. Goldsmith. How did this information concerning Oswald first come to your attention?

    Mr. Wilcott. The first time I heard about Oswald being connected in any way with CIA was the day after the Kennedy assassination.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And how did that come to your attention?

    Mr. Wilcott. Well, I was on day duty for the station. It was a guard-type function at the station, which I worked for overtime. There was a lot of excitement going on at the station after the Kennedy assassination. Towards the end of my tour of duty, I heard certain things about Oswald somehow being connected with the agency, and I didn't really believe this when I heard it, and I thought it was absurd. Then, as time went on, I began to hear more things in that line.

    Mr. Goldsmith. I think we had better go over that one more time. When, exactly, was the very first time that you heard or came across information that Oswald was an agent?

    Mr. Wilcott. I heard references to it the day after the assassination.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And who made these references to Oswald being an agent of the CIA?

    Mr. Wilcott. I can't remember the exact persons. There was talk about it going on at the station, and several months following at the station.

    Mr. Goldsmith. How many people made this reference to Oswald being an agent of the CIA?

    Mr. Wilcott. At least--there was at least six or seven people, specifically, who said that they either knew or believed Oswald to be an agent of the CIA.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Was Jerry Fox one of the people that made this allegation?

    Mr. Wilcott. To the best of my recollection, yes.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And who is Jerry Fox?

    Mr. Wilcott. Jerry Fox was a Case Officer for his branch, the Soviet Russia Branch, [REDACTED] Station, who purchased information from the Soviets.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Wilcott, did I ask you to prepare a list of CIA Case Officers working at the [REDACTED] Station in 1963?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes, you did. [Witness then recites a lengthy list of case officers and station names, quite a few redacted in this document--jh]

[. . . .]

    Mr. Goldsmith. At the time that this allegation first came to your attention, did you discuss it with anyone?

    Mr. Wilcott. Oh, yes. I discussed it with my friends and the people that I was associating with socially.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Who were your friends that you discussed this with?

    Mr. Wilcott. [REDACTED] George Breen, Ed Luck, and [REDACTED].

    Mr. Goldsmith. Who was George Breen?

    Mr. Wilcott. George Breen was a person in Registry, who was my closest friend while I was in [REDACTED].

    Mr. Goldsmith. Was he a CIA employee?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes, he was.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And would he corroborate your observation that Oswald was an agent?

    Mr. Wilcott. I don't know.

    Mr. Goldsmith. At the time that this allegation first came to your attention, did you learn the name of Oswald's Case Officer at the CIA?

    Mr. Wilcott. No.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Were there any other times during your stay with the CIA at [REDACTED] Station that you came across information that Oswald had been a CIA agent?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes.

    Mr. Goldsmith. When was that?

    Mr. Wilcott. The specific incident was soon after the Kennedy assassination, where an agent, a Case Officer--I am sure it was a Case Officer--came up to my window to draw money, and he specifically said in the conversation that ensued, he specifically said, "Well, Jim, the money that I drew the last couple of weeks ago or so was money" either for the Oswald project or for Oswald.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Do you remember the name of this Case Officer?

    Mr. Wilcott. No, I don't.

    Mr Goldsmith. Do you remember when specifically this conversation took place?

    Mr. Wilcott. Not specifically, only generally.

    Mr. Goldsmith. How many months after the assassination was this?

    Mr. Wilcott. I think it must have been two or three omths [sic] after the assassination.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And do you remember were this conversation took place?

    Mr. Wilcott. It was right at my window, my disbursing cage window.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Did you discuss this information with anyone?

    Mr. Wilcott. Oh, yes.

    Mr. Goldsmith. With whom?

    Mr. Wilcott. Certainly with George Breen, [REDACTED] the circle of social friends that we had.

    Mr. Goldsmith. How do you spell [REDACTED] last name?

    Mr. Wilcott. [REDACTED] (spelling).

[. . . .]

    Mr. Goldsmith. Did this Case Officer tell you what Oswald's cryptonym was?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes, he mentioned the cryptonym specifically under which the money was drawn.

    Mr. Goldsmith. And what did he tell you the cryptonym was?

    Mr. Wilcott. I cannot remember.

    Mr. Goldsmith. What was your response to this revelation as to what Oswald's cryptonym was? Did you write it down or do anything?

    Mr. Wilcott. No; I think that I looked through my advance book--and I had a book where the advances on project were run, and I leafed through them, and I must have at least leafed through them to see if what he said was true.

    [Three pages of discussion about Wilcott's "Request for Advance" book follows but is omitted here. --jh]

    Mr. Goldsmith. And for purposes of clarification, now, if Oswald was already dead at the time that you went to this book, why did you go back and examine the book?

    Mr. Wilcott. Well, I am sorry--if Oswald was what?

    Mr. Goldsmith. At the time you went to look at the book, Oswald was already dead, is that correct?

    Mr. Wilcott. That is right.

    Mr. Goldsmith. Why did you go back to look at the book?

    Mr. Wilcott. Well, the payments that were made especially to substations like Oswald's was operated--it was a substation of the [REDACTED] Station, and they had one in [REDACTED] and they had one in [REDACTED]--and it may be six months or even a year after the initial allocation that the final accounting for those funds were submitted, and they would operate out of revolving funds or out of their own personal funds in many cases.

    Mr. Goldsmith. So, is your testimony then that even though Oswald was already dead at the time, the book might have contained a reference to either Oswald or the Oswald project and that that reference would have been to a period six months or even a year earlier, is that correct?

    Mr. Wilcott. That is correct.

    [As far as I can determine from this 54-page typed document, HSCA Counsel Michael Goldsmith never asks Wilcott the essential question, which would be: "Was the Oswald cryptonym you no longer recall in your "Request for Advance" book?" Strange. The most relevant testimony is found on pages 18-19, as follows. --jh]

    Mr. Goldsmith. But as a matter of routine, would the CIA cash disbursement files refer to the cryptonym of either the person or the project that is receiving funds?

    Mr. Wilcott. Yes, I am sure somewhere.

    Mr. Goldsmith. As a matter of routine, there would be that reference? Do you believe that there was such a reference to Oswald?

    [Mr. Wilcott.] Yes, I do, and I believe there was such a reference.

The excerpts above present just a small part of Wilcott's sworn testimony at the HSCA Executive Session of 3/22/78. He makes a number of other interesting statements, including how the agency routinely destroyed or altered internal documents when there was public disclosure of an operation (called a "flap"). The transcription of Wilcott's testimony was kept secret for more than three decades, but was referred to briefly in the published HSCA volumes. The HSCA claimed that other CIA employees discounted Wilcott's version, but transcripts of those testimonies were also withheld.  Over the years, many others have spoken out:


        * Richard Sprague, chief counsel to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations said, "If he had it to do over again, he would begin his investigation of the Kennedy assassination by probing 'Oswald's ties to the Central Intelligence Agency."

        * Sen. Richard Schweiker said, "We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there're fingerprints of intelligence."

        * Victor Marchetti was the former Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA. Marchetti said, "The more I have learned, the more concerned I have become that the government was involved in the assassination of President John F.  Kennedy."

        * CIA Agent Donald Norton said, "Oswald was with the CIA, and if he did it then you better believe the whole CIA was involved."

        * Former CIA agent Joseph Newbrough said, "Oswald was an agent for the CIA and acting under orders."

        * CIA Agent John Garrett Underhill told friends, just before he died, "Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. They've killed the President. I've been listening and hearing things. I couldn't believe they'd get away with it, but they did."

        * CIA Agent William Gaudet said, "The man who probably knows as much as anybody alive on all of this... is... I still think is Howard Hunt"----CIA Agent and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.

        * CIA employee Donald Deneslya read reports of a CIA agent who had worked at a radio factory in Minsk and returned to the US with a Russian wife and child--that agent could only have been Oswald.

        * CIA officer David Phillips provided the Warren Commission with information that Oswald was at the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, then later admitted that the information he had provided was false.

        * Marvin Watson, an adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, said that Johnson had told him that he was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson said the President felt the CIA had something to do with this plot.

When researchers began to uncover indications of CIA involvement in the assassination, the CIA sent out memos to media assets offering suggestions as to how to effectively block and impede investigation of the Kennedy assassination by researchers.

Read the full text of the secret HSCA testimony of James Wilcott in the following link

http://harveyandlee.net/Wilcott/Wil_pix.htm

https://archive.org/stream/nsia-CIAWilcottJamesTestimony/nsia-CIAWilcottJamesTestimony/CIA%20Wilcott%20James%2002_djvu.txt

Like many of the events since the assassination of JFK and maybe as far back as Pearl Harbour, too many things just dont add up. People keep making a lot of money out of American tragedies.

The Bush family is very sinister but then I find the lives of many country's leaders are very nefarious. I would be amazed if it was a genuine terrorist plot and that none of the myriad of intelligence agencies knew nothing about it. How do they justify their humongous budgets if they seem powerless to prevent these things constantly happening?

Personally, I think that after the fall of the iron curtain and the end of the Cold War, the US needed an enemy so they could justify spending so much on defence. Exit the Communists and enter stage right, the Muslims. They need to keep the US populace frightened so they dont question the billions of tax dollars that get spent on the armaments and the military every year. First it was Saddam and then Bin Laden and now its just IS and a bunch of other fringe radical Muslim groups.

I know many Muslim people and they are as peaceful as I am but you get bad apples in every religion, race and nation. The US call them terrorists but they call themselves Generals, Secretary of Defence and President

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc7chNNfOww

the above video is not necessarily my view on the death of marilyn monroe .

i know from research that things just do not add up . it was long denied that bobby kennedy was anywhere near marilyn that day/night and its horse sh-t . a he had been at her house that day according to marilyns house staff . he certainly was in california and in that area that night because a cop pulled over a speeding car that night , actor peter lawford (brother in law to the kennedys ) was driving . marilyns psychiatrist (melanson) was in the passenger seat all be it the cop didnt recognize him that night as he didnt know him , but he recognized him afterwards in the wake of marilyns death as he was of course in the media .

in the rear seat according to the cop was bobby kennedy .

marilyns gardener now dead was spoken to just some months prior to his death from cancer , this was many years after marilyns death . he had nothing to gain and nothing to lose , he said ILL BE DEAD SOON ANYWAY , WHY AM I KEEPING THIS SECRET ? . he said lawford and kennedy had visited marilyn that day . bobby and marilyn argued . this is the second person to see both men in california and near marilyn that tragic day .

marilyn had an affair with jfk , its one of those open secrets . she had an affair with bobby also . she was calling jfk and he decided the affair was over and tried to give her the hint i guess by ignoring her calls . but she had the white house number and all those calls are monitored , so he had bobby go to see her and talk to her . bobby then started an affair with her . but the problem was nether man was ever going to leave their wife and family , and both had a lot to lose . they knew that j edgar hoover hated them , as did the mob and the cia , so any scandal could cost them dearly . hoover was known to use the fbi to illegally tap phones of people that he sought info on which he could then blackmail or control them . hoover also was in the pockets of the mob , he spent all his free time gambling for free at a mob race track , all the while telling the people THE MOD DOES NOT EXIST lol lol .

the OSS the forerunner for the cia had worked with the mob as early as ww2 and it seems certain they worked again with them in the 50s and 60s in regards cuba . mutual interests . and hoover was telling the people THEY DIDNT EXIST ? lol lol , there is little that went on in america that he didnt know about . the mob controlled a lot of hollywood for a start , that is they owned many stars , one example frank sinatra . no intelligent person could argue that hoover didnt know that .

marlyns housekeeper said an ambulance was called , marilyn was according to her still alive . they took her away , and later that night / morning they returned and placed her dead body back in her bed face .

another witness a man whos name eludes me now said he was there , that he found marilyn and that he thought she was gone but that he found her alive . he recusitated her , her face had been very pale and the color came back and she began breathing better . he said melanson and lawford along with newcomb (marilyns publicist) arrived , he said that melanson nothing more than a psychiatrist took out a massive syringe and stuck it in marilyns heart , it hit her rib , he didnt retract it and insert it again he just rammed it untill her rib broke . marilyn was never seen alive again after that . the above man whos name i cant remember took no less than 14 polygraph test and passed them all .

the first cop on the scene at the house said the scene IN HIS OPINION was weird , it didnt look right , it looked staged . he was told by melanson SHE TOOK AN OVERDOSE . he saw pill bottles but no water anywhere with which to swallow them . these were capules now not easy to swallow . this cop had suspicions and was going to do his job and investigate , within about an hour HE IS REPLACED .

the corner very quickly announces that marilyn committed suicide . we all know how many tests have to be performed and how long that takes and to get all the results back . a young pathologist then but still very experienced man , thomas noguchi (he can be seen in the video above ) like the cop above would have done his job and investigated properly , HE WAS STOPPED .

we were told MARILYN WAS DEPRESSED suicidal , letters from the days before her death , phone calls she made even that day to friends show that to be a giant load of horse sh-t . was she upset ? p-ssed at the kennedys using her ? im sure that she was , suicidal ? NO .

this of course is not to say that the kennedys killed her . i dont believe they did . but i have no doubt that her death is highly suspicious and that those with power ensured that it was never properly investigated . melanson who should never have touched marilyn and may well have tried to save her but ended up actually killing her . lawford was there according to the witness above and bobby was clearly close by , they probably thought SH-T we are fooked  . bobby and lawford needed to get out of town and establish alibis . so marilyn was taken away probably under the guise that she was alive and being taken to hospital but really she was now dead . several hours later bobby and lawford are well and truly out of town and her body is brought back and her death staged to like like it occurred at that time , giving bobby and lawford an alibi .

who took the body away and brought it back ? well they were not real ambulance men that is for sure . this case stinks to high hell . jfk would follow marilyn the next year . bobby was then a broken man with no power and of no concern to the cia or fbi . he then runs for president . martin luther king is recorded on wire taps saying he will endorse bobby kennedys bid for presidency which bobby was well on the way to winning . that meant that bobby was assured of the black vote , within weeks of that call king would join jfk and marilyn and withing a short time with bobby clearly going to be the new president he too is gunned down . teddy kennedy stupidly decides to run for presidency , they cant murder another kennedy , the people dont believe the first two killings were acts of loners , so a third would be laughed at . next thing teddy knows is that he is in a car at the bottom of a river (chappaquiddick) . a young girl tragically dies along with any hopes of teddy becoming president . its the old old scenario , when you cant kill them you destroy their credibility .

we know jfks murder was whitewashed over as was dr kings and rfk . the truth lost forever and the lie forced down our truths year after year despite the fact that few believe it .

All of this stuff came out including, and I have to mention this as the final summary of the trial, a guy named Walter Fauntroy was a very good friend of King’s. He had worked for the House Select Committee [on Assassinations] in the 1970s. The House Select Committee did an inquiry into both the King case and the JFK case. Fauntroy said that when he left Congress he had the opportunity to read through voluminous files on the King assassination, including stuff he had never seen before. He said among this material that he saw were reports from J. Edgar Hoover. He learned that in the three weeks before King’s murder, Hoover had a series of meetings with people in the CIA and military intelligence about the Phoenix Operation.

So Fauntroy, of course, asked himself: What would J. Edgar Hoover be doing having meetings about The Phoenix Operation if he’s running the FBI in the United States? Kind of puzzling, isn’t it? He also discovered that there had been, like the other witnesses said, that there had been special agents and military intelligence officers in Memphis when King was killed.

So Fauntroy decided that he was going to write a book on the subject. When the word got out that he was going to write a book, he was investigated and charged by the Justice Department about violating financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer couldn’t believe this because this was a technicality on a misdated check from years before. But he got the message. We’ll get you for something if you go ahead and write this book.

So Fauntroy didn’t write the book. So that’s how big the cover-up is in Washington on this particular case. As I said, what happened is that Pepper ended up winning the case. And, in fact, the jury came in within two hours after the presentation was over and they said that there was a conspiracy in the King case. Now, I should add, to Pepper’s credit, that’s the second time he did this. Because back in 1993, he had done, and I have to say this, a very well done mock trial, for I believe it was HBO. That mock trial on the King case back then I thought was much better than the one done later with Vincent Bugliosi and Jerry Spence for Thames Television on the JFK case. It was much more realistic.

For example, in that particular case, you actually had James Earl Ray able to take the stand. It was much more of what you would actually have seen if there had been a real trial. So Pepper won that particular case and now he won this particular case in 1999. And he was robbed of his opportunity to actually do the criminal case by the removal of Judge Joe Brown. So in other words, the guy had a pretty sparkling record.

After he won this civil trial, the media had to find a way to go ahead and discount that because of course if it’s allowed to stand, it shows the public is right about this stuff. That James Earl Ray did not shoot King, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot JFK, that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy. So this would have been another indication that all those, as they call them “wacky conspiracy theories”, are actually correct.

So what did they do? Number one, they did not send any one single reporter to the trial to stay there day in and day out. Not one. But then they went ahead and ... Let me add to that. Not even the local newspaper.

OHH:

Right. Not even the Memphis paper.

JD:

Right, the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Not even the local newspaper had their guy there every day. A guy named Mark Perrusquia. What Jim told me after I go, “Jim, how did he file these reports then?” He goes, “Jim, Marc Perrusquia was very, very seldom in the courtroom. What Marc would do is he would wait all day outside and wait for me to come out, and then I would have to brief him on what happened that day in court.”

So Jim Douglass was giving the Memphis Commercial Appeal their information to print on the King trial. That’s how bad... to me, nothing illustrates just how bad the mainstream media is on these cases.

But without having somebody there, they still had to find a way to go ahead and discount what had happened without reporting on it. Well, The New York Times decided to bury their story on page 25 and they reported well: What does this mean? There was a vast conspiracy that it was alleged but not proved. I have to tell you David, I think what I just summarized is pretty good proof that there was a pretty big conspiracy in the King case. But if you don’t report on it, then you can say that it was a vast conspiracy that was alleged but not proved.

OHH:

Well, when the jury accepts it, does not that mean it’s proved? Don’t know.

JD:

Same thing in the L.A. Times, they placed a story on page 24 and they also tried to go ahead and discount the verdict. They even put their resident black scholar, a guy named Earl Ofari Hutchison, they assigned him to write an editorial and his column said that Bill Pepper was one of those who has “worked up to victim hit angle especially hard.” He said that “James Earl Ray himself had stoked conspiracy flames by saying that he was framed and recanting his guilty plea.” Here it is, here’s the final summary by Earl Ofari Hutchison. “But despite the Memphis verdict, the evidence is irrefutable that Ray was a triggerman.”

Now, how you can come to that conclusion without mentioning what went on in the courtroom is really, really hard to believe. But that’s how extreme and that’s how uninformed and that is how stubborn these people will be in order to stay with the MSM.

Then there was the US News & World Report which said that “William Pepper was a man prone to bizarre conspiracy theories.” It said the Shelby County DA’s office was not at the trial. Well, of course not because it was a civil trial. It was not a criminal trial. So you’re not going to have the office there. Then they got another mainstream media guy David Garrow who wrote an article and said, “We don’t know who precisely aided and abetted Ray, but anybody who doesn’t accept Ray as the gunman is from Roswell, New Mexico.” Well. That’s an old one. That somehow if you believe in conspiracies, then you also believe in aliens coming here from other planets, abductions and all this other stuff.

OHH:

If you can believe someone was shot you also believe in Martians.

JD:

Then if you can believe it, to knock it all off, what happened? They got Jerry Posner, who was not at the trial, to go ahead and visit all of the major shows and to write a column that was distributed throughout the country, going ahead and criticizing the trial. I really couldn’t believe that but it really did happen. This is what he says, “The Memphis trial wasn’t a search for the truth but a ploy to obtain a judicial sanction for a convoluted conspiracy theory embraced by the King family.” I won’t even comment on that. “Lloyd Jowers is a man considered to lack credibility by every local, state and federal prosecutor who looked at the matter.” That’s what he says next. Then he says that “only the state prosecutors and their report in the case are credible because they said there was no conspiracy.”

As I just mentioned earlier in the show, it was very obvious that the local DA’s office was an extension of the state DA’s office, and did not want to do the case at all. Because they, I think, sensed that if Brown had been allowed to go ahead and finish up the rifle test, that would have proven that that particular weapon was not the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Martin Luther King. Then he has to get personal, Posner says, “The pursuit of Jowers by the Kings will only diminish their standing as the first family of civil rights and permanently damage their credibility.” Then of course, they actually put him on a couple TV shows to go ahead and do the same thing.

I don’t remember anybody saying, “Were you at the trial, Jerry?” I don’t remember anybody saying that. They never challenged his credentials to go ahead and write about an event that he had never seen. So that’s how crazy this thing got. By the way, let me add another point. The fact that the Commercial Appeal was not there, that meant that nobody was getting any day-to-day updates while the trial was going on. Because also, as Jim Douglass discovered, CourtTV�"it was called CourtTV back then, it’s called TruTV now�"they pulled out of the King case three days before the trial began. They were going to be set up and cover the case. So you would have had a video and audio record of the case. But Jim told me, “Jim, I couldn’t believe it, three days before the guy said we’re pulling out.” I asked him why, he said he didn’t know why. I mean, isn’t that really bizarre?

So if anybody ever tells you that the media in this country is not rigged, that the media in this country is not controlled, that the media in this country is not one-sided, this is a great, great example that, that is all a bunch of BS and it’s all true. This coverage of the King case is wonderful evidence to prove everything that we’ve been saying all along about how bad the media is in this country. It was just ... By the way, I have to add. When Jim Garrison conducted his trial of Clay Shaw back in 1969, both the local papers the States-Item and the Times-Picayune covered that trial. In other words�"and what I mean is this�"they had a reporter right down there in the courtroom every single day and they would rotate the reporters.

Then when the breaks came, they would go ahead and transfer their notes over the phone to the main office of the newspaper and then that is how the day-to-day reports got in ... I know this because I talked to somebody who actually was there, Jack Dempsey who covered the trial. So day by day, you would get daily reports if you wanted to watch that trial. Of course, if you want to subscribe from out of town, you could have followed the trial by their mail subscriptions. They’re mailing the paper to you. You couldn’t do that in this trial. That was such a disgrace. Thank God that, I think the King family, went ahead and I think they put up the transcript on the King website. Or the other way you can get it is from that book The 13th Juror.

But Jim Douglass for Probe had the only contemporaneous report on all that terrific evidence that Pepper was producing at that trial, and that is just an utter disgrace. That our little magazine that we did on a five and dime budget was the only place you could read a summary of the King juror’s case because everything else was this BS that I’m telling you about or the Gerald Posner twisted stuff, from a guy who wasn’t even at the trial. This is what I mean about the media in this country. So excuse me if I get a little angry about it but I think I’m pretty justified in getting angry about it. This is a perfect example of why people don’t believe the mainstream media anymore and they deserve it.

OHH:

And this is the era of or that was in 1999. I mean, that wasn’t long after the OJ Simpson trial where that was on day in and day out on the news 24/7. So it wasn’t like courtroom drama was out of fashion.

JD:

Well, let’s put it this way. The King trial, I believe, was so important because the unearthed evidence that Pepper got, pretty much confirmed everything everybody who really studied that case believed. That King towards the end of his career ... Let’s not forget this. King was killed something like about three weeks before the Poor People’s Campaign was supposed to begin. That was supposed to be his, remember 1963 in the March on Washington, this was supposed to be ... That was for civil rights. This was supposed to be for economic rights. And I don’t think there’s any coincidence that the Poor People’s Campaign failed whereas The March on Washington succeeded.

If you take out King as Vernon Young said in that HBO special, King in the Wilderness, he says, “After King was killed, things kind of fell apart.” No surprise. That’s another thing to remember about that, and also the fact that is what Pepper was saying, if Valentine is accurate, then the war in Vietnam with the Phoenix Program kind of directly impacted King’s murder. They transferred the operation to the United States, stateside.

Now, I advise everybody, if you really want to try and understand this, I’ve kind of just skimmed it. But if you get the Probe CD, I think that has ... I’m positive. It has Jim’s article in it. Or if you want to get the book, The Assassinations, that has Jim’s article in it.

If you had to boil it down, its like a three-sided conspiracy between the CIA�"I believe Raoul was a CIA operator�"military intelligence as the hitmen, and the mob�"a guy named Frank Liberto supposedly paid Jowers $100,000 to go along with the conspiracy. Now, today $100,000 doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it’d be the equivalent back in 1968 of about 850 grand. So he got paid off really to just give somebody a rifle and give back somebody a rifle and that’s essentially how it worked. So I give Jim Douglass all the credit in the world for being the only guy in that trial day after day and he assembled a marvelous report on it.

[The reader may also refer to this special we ran in 2017 which features Jim Douglass’s Probe article as well as links to David Ratcliffe’s annotated version of the trial transcript:

https://kennedysandking.com/martin-luther-king-articles/martin-luther-king-jr-day-2017

see in particular:

https://kennedysandking.com/martin-luther-king-articles/the-martin-luther-king-conspiracy-exposed-in-memphis

Jim DiEugenio on the King Trial and Media Coverage

Transcript, courtesy of David Giglio, of an interview with Jim DiEugenio on the media and the 1999 Martin Luther King assassination trial in Memphis.

(Listen to the interview on YouTube courtesy of Our Hidden History)

OHH:

James DiEugenio is the editor and publisher of kennedysandking.com and he’s the author of The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. He’s also a noted researcher of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. People are aware there was a civil trial in 1999 led by the King family in which the jury found that the assassination was a result of a conspiracy.

I’ve been wanting to talk about this case for a long time so I found an article that Jim wrote at the time about the media’s reaction to the trial’s outcome.

It’s sort of a timeless subject to see how the press deals with events that run counter to their narratives, and Jim is always brilliant at dissecting the tropes that the media uses to kind of get around things that run counter to what they want to say. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today but it’s a wider subject and I think we’re going to go a lot of places with it. But thank you Jim for talking today.

JD:

David, the article that you wanted to base this interview around was in Probe Magazine in the January/February issue of 2000.

[see

The Media Buries the Conspiracy Verdict in the King Case

~kennedysandking]

I wrote the article and it’s about the media’s treatment of the conspiracy verdict in the civil trial in Memphis conducted by William Pepper in December of 1999.

OHH:

So William Pepper, who was James Earl Ray’s lawyer, and who was an acquaintance of Dr. King.

JD:

Now, the remarkable thing about the treatment of the verdict is this: the mainstream media did not have any reporter there for anywhere near close to the whole expanse of the trial. I know this for a fact because James Douglass, who was reporting on the trial for Probe Magazine and he filed his report with us a few months earlier. In fact, I think the prior issue. He was there every day.

OHH:

James Douglass, he’s the author of JFK and the Unspeakable.

JD:

Him and a local friend he knew from Memphis were the only people there for the majority of the days of the trial. He said nobody was there. Not one other single person was there every single day and most of the reporters were there for two or three days and then left. So here’s my question: How on earth do you discuss a trial where you didn’t have a reporter there? Well, this is something that was really kind of startling even for the MSM. So we decided to go ahead and round up these views of the trial and prepare an article for them, about them rather, for Probe, which is what we did. The New York Times�"

OHH:

Before you ... Can you just kind of briefly tell what the facts of the trial and just briefly what they found just for people who aren’t familiar with it.

JD:

The trial itself was what is termed the civil trial, which means one private party is suing another private party over what’s called damages. So in this particular case, it was the King family bringing the charges against a man named Loyd Jowers who owned a tavern in Memphis at the time. Now, in 1993 Loyd Jowers had gone on national television with Sam Donaldson on ABC and talked about his part in a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King. He said that his role was to receive the murder weapon from the guy running the show and then give it to an assassin and then have the assassin give the rifle back to him and then he would go ahead and give it back to his aider and abettor, who had given it to him in the first place.

JD:

Now, as time went on, William Pepper worked more and more on this angle and by around 1996-1997, he was ready to go ahead and reopen the King case as a criminal trial. In other words, the state versus defendant on a murder charge. So he actually did try and get the case reopened upon two sets of new evidence. One was the Jowers presentation, the other one was forensically to try and show that the murder weapon in evidence was not the weapon that was used to kill King.

What happened was what the people in Memphis did not want it to happen. In other words, the power brokers in Memphis did not want this to happen. The judge who the case was assigned to, Judge Joe Brown, actually was in sympathy with Pepper trying to reopen the case.

OHH:

Judge Joe Brown, he later became the famous TV judge but he’s a very interesting character. I think if you have a chance, Len Osanic of Black Op Radio at blackopradio.com has several good interviews of him in his back catalog. If you go to his website you can find those interviews and get your hands on those. They’re really excellent. I suggest people listen to those.

JD:

So he actually was going to go ahead and sanction rifle tests to see if the rifle in evidence was actually the rifle used to kill King. They did a round of tests and they came back inconclusive. There was a scar in the track of the rifle on these tests that was not reported in the first round of tests done by the FBI. It was hard to explain how that got there. So Judge Brown was going to sanction a second round of tests. Did the scar come from a buildup of residue in the rifle in the intervening years? Because if it didn’t, then it’s not the rifle that killed King because that wasn’t there.

So Brown said, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go ahead and have a solution, a chemical solution, which will not damage the rifle barrel at all and we’re going to use that to clean the rifle barrel and then we’re going to retest. If the scar is still there, then I don’t think we have a match.” When Judge Brown said he was going to do that, the city of Memphis rose up in rebellion against him. The local DA’s office, the state attorney general, the major media, theMemphis Commercial Appeal. To make a long story short, what ended up happening was that the same thing that happened to Jim Garrison back in 1967 on the Kennedy case, the same thing that happened to Richard Sprague in 1976 on the JFK case, and the same thing that happened with Gary Webb in the late 1990s on the CIA and crack cocaine.

So what happened was that when Brown was on vacation, there was a kind of unauthorized invasion of his office by a guy named Mike Roberts in cahoots with a Judge named John Colton. Colton was the guy whose court the original case was assigned to way back there in 1969. But during a routine rotation, it had been assigned to Brown in the ’90s. Colton and Roberts went ahead and hijacked the files out of Judge Brown’s chambers while he was on vacation. Judge Brown was very angry about this; he blamed in it on local Republican politics but this was more or less the beginning of the end for Brown’s reinvestigation of the Kennedy case. Excuse me, of the Martin Luther King murder case.

Once he got back, he was removed from the case by the appeals court. The local prosecutor, John Campbell, was overjoyed at this because now the case would not have to be reopened and he wouldn’t have to go ahead and retry the case on a criminal ground. Now, I should add here that when this happened, when the criminal case was finished in Memphis, it more or less coincided with the death of James Earl Ray. He passed away around this same time period. Now, all the great work that Bill Pepper had done on this case ... He wrote that good book, Orders to Kill. He had done all this wonderful research in Memphis, found these new witnesses.

It seemed that it was now essentially going to go down the drain. Because now of course there was no defendant and the case, as far as being a conspiracy, was pretty much wrapped up in Memphis.

So, the people you have to give the credit to for keeping the thing going and getting it into a civil court is the family of Martin Luther King. I don’t think there’s any question about that. They decided to go ahead with the case and they decided to file a civil suit in Memphis against Jowers. This trial took place in the latter part of 1999, I believe in November and December of 1999. I think the verdict came in on December the 8th of 1999.

There’s actually a book that contains the entire transcript of the trial, it’s called The 13th Juror. A literal cascade of information came out at this trial. I mean, it’s really kind of incredible when you go ahead and look at all the great stuff that Pepper was able to introduce into the court record. Just to give you some highlights. There’s a fascinating couple of witnesses by the name of Floyd Newsum and Ed Redditt and a third one Jerry Williams who testified how somebody called off the private body guards that King usually had when he came to that city. They all said they really don’t know how the heck it happened.

But whenever King had come to Memphis, and he had been there before a few weeks earlier of course, for the sanitation workers strike, he had his own private security detail. He also had a surveillance detail that his people would just watch out from across the street to see if anything was coming up. That whole detail was called off on this particular visit.

Now, what Pepper did at the trial is he coupled that evidence with the testimony of a man named Leon Cohen who was a friend of the manager of the Lorraine Motel, Walter Bailey. Cohen testified that Bailey received a call from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta the night before he arrived in Memphis, and the request was to change King’s room. Bailey was not interested in doing that. In fact, he didn’t want to do it, but the guy insisted that they wanted to change the room from an inner courtyard room to an outside balcony room.

Now, I don’t have to tell you how important that is. I think anybody who knows anything about the King case understands how important that is. Because if the room had not been changed, then the assassination could not have taken place. At least not the way that it actually did, from allegedly a rifleman across the street hitting King as he comes out to the balcony of his room.

When you couple the stripping of the security with the changing of the room, things start getting really kind of fishy, don’t they? So, in other words, now what Pepper did is he went ahead and he began to bring witnesses in who questioned the official story of where the fatal shot came from.

See, if you believe the Memphis authorities, the shot came from a place called Bessie’s Boarding House, which is right above Jim’s Grill which was Jowers’ place. It came from a communal bathroom about something like about 210 feet away. First of all, who the heck would ever want to use a communal bathroom if you’re an assassin? Because what that means of course is that anybody could knock on the door or come in and want to use the bathroom or be waiting for you when you ran out. That’s got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.

What Pepper did is he brought in about three witnesses who disagreed with the location of the shot coming from Bessie’s Boarding House. These were Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter was one of them. Solomon Jones who was King’s chauffeur driver and Maynard Stiles who his testimony was really interesting. First of all Caldwell and Jones both said they thought the shot came from below the balcony, these bushes below the balcony. Now, Maynard Stiles received a phone call the next morning saying that the bushes had to all be trimmed and cut down. Get this, the next morning, he gets an order from the parks department saying, we want all the bushes trimmed and cut down.

In other words, the next morning, they weren’t there. In other words, the idea of trying to say that the shot came from the bushes below was now really hard to make stick because there weren’t any bushes.

OHH:

This is a crime scene. They’re uprooting a crime scene...

JD:

Isn’t this really something? The next step in the trial was ... By the way, I think you’re beginning to understand why the media didn’t want to talk about this trial. Was the testimony of a guy named Arthur Hanes. Arthur Hanes was going to be James Earl Ray’s original attorney. He was going to defend him back in 1968. Eventually what happened is that James Earl Ray made a terrible mistake and he got rid of Hanes and replaced him with Percy Foreman which, as Ray later said, was probably “the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

But Hanes was prepared to go to trial, which Foreman was not going to do. So Hanes decided to do some investigation, which Foreman also did not do. And he found a witness by the name of Guy Canipe who owned a five & dime store underneath Bessie’s Boarding House. Because the strongest evidence against Ray was that he supposedly dropped a bundle of his belongings as he was running from the scene and this included the rifle. Canipe said to Haynes, “That bundle was on my foyer, my exterior foyer 10 minutes before the shot went off.” Now, you don’t get very much better evidence than that. In other words, somebody was trying to frame James Earl Ray by depositing his items there.

Now, another very interesting witness that they produced was a man named William Hamblin who knew a cab driver named James McGraw. James McGraw was called to Bessie’s Boarding House to pick up a guy named Charlie Stephens. This was around the time of King’s assassination. He is supposed to drive him home because the guy was stone drunk. He said that when he went into the room to try and pick up Charlie Stephens that he looked into the communal bathroom across the way. He said the door was wide open. There was nobody there at that particular time. And he said Charlie Stephens was dead drunk. Of course, Charlie Stephens is a guy who was going to identify Ray as the assassin coming out of that bathroom for the authorities in order to get him sent back from London to the United States. How could he identify him, if the guy was dead drunk?

Now, there was also evidence at the trial produced about the mysterious guy named Raoul. Raoul is the guy who James Earl Ray said that he met up in Canada in 1967. Raoul hired him in Montreal rather, in Montreal, Canada in the summer of 1967. Ray said he hired him to do odd jobs for him like delivering things, picking things up and he would do this all throughout the country from the east coast to the west coast. The whole idea was to try and locate Raoul because Jowers said that the guy who dropped off the rifle to him on the day of the assassination was Raoul, this same guy.

So what happened is that Pepper decided to go ahead and try and find other witnesses who knew of this guy named Raoul and had seen him before, and to see if the witnesses all matched up�"and they ended up doing that. In fact, Pepper went ahead and he found at least three witnesses who identified the very same picture of this guy named Raoul to the point that Pepper actually thought that he found Raoul. Who was living ... It was either New York or Philadelphia in 1997. But he would never answer the door, he would always send his daughter or his wife to answer the door, he would never answer the door to be interviewed.

If that’s not good enough for you, there was also some very interesting evidence introduced about the role of the military intelligence in the stalking and perhaps the shooting of King. Dougl Valentine is a pretty prominent author about CIA operations who wrote a book called The Phoenix Program in 1990. That of course was about the notorious program in Vietnam to snuff out and torture and kill sympathizers of the Viet Cong. When he was doing that book, Doug talked with some veterans who had been redeployed from Indochina to do surveillance on the ‘60s anti-war movement in the United States. He found out that the army’s 111th military intelligence group kept King under 24-hour a day surveillance. Its agents were actually there in Memphis in April of that year when King was killed.

From this information, they reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, fired and walked away.

OHH:

There are a couple things. There’s the Doug Valentine interview on Porkins Policy Radio which I will put a link to in the comments.

JD:

Now, what’s so interesting about that is that, also produced at the trial was a guy named Carthel Weeden who was a captain of the fire station across the street from the Lorraine Motel, the place where King was gunned down. He testified that he was on duty the morning of the 4th, April 4th and two US army officers approached him and they wanted to look out for the motel. They carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. So Carthel Weeden showed them the roof at the fire station. He left them at the edge of the northeast corner behind the parapet wall. And from there of course you had a bird’s-eye view of the motel. In other words, the on the scene evidence matches with the information that Doug Valentine had dug up.

So that’s very interesting, and a lot of people would consider it quite powerful. He also got a guy named Jack Terrell who had worked for the CIA during the illegal war against Nicaragua. Who knew a friend of his, a guy named J.D. Hill and J.D. Hill had actually been a member of the army sniper team that was supposed to shoot a so-called unknown target on April 4th. They were supposed to take up positions in Memphis but that mission was suddenly canceled. When he heard what happened to King the next day, he realized what he was going to be there for.

Jim Garrison was probably the first critic of the Warren Commission who understood this matter. And it is probably one of the reasons the MSM decided to smear him beyond recognition. This goes on to the present day. In a recent article in a regional journal called 64 Parishes, a writer named Alecia Long decided to pick up the infernal and eternal anti-Garrison cudgel. The New Orleans Times Picayune has always liked to go after Garrison and so they are now carrying it on their web site.

To anyone who is familiar with the territory, the first reaction is, “Oh my aching back!” The ten-page article is simply a compendium of every MSM caricature of Garrison and his Kennedy case that one can imagine�"except Long does not even mention the ARRB. She only alludes to what they did in about a half a sentence. As we shall see, this was a wise choice on her part.

The preposterous thesis of her essay is that somehow, by his clever use of the media, Garrison was able to advance his case, his cause and his reputation. She uses Garrison’s 30-minute talk on NBC as proof of this. She even opens her article by asking why NBC agreed to give the DA this platform. She does not answer her rhetorical question until several pages later. There, she finally says that in June of 1967, “NBC ran an hour-long special sharply critical of Garrison’s claims and the methods used by his investigators.” This is an understatement. Most objective observers considered the Walter Sheridan production a straight-out hatchet job. But she tries to bolster the program’s credibility by adding, “The special featured several witnesses who claimed to have been offered bribes in exchange for providing testimony damaging to Shaw.”

What she does not note is that these so-called “witnesses” were later exposed, either in court, or by their own confessions, as being bogus. (DiEugenio, pp. 239-43) And more than one witness�"for instance, Fred Leemans and Marlene Mancuso�"testified as to the unethical and threatening tactics used by Sheridan for the program. It was Sheridan who fabricated these phony on-air statements by threatening and intimidating Garrison’s witnesses. Mancuso did not succumb to his bullying, so she was not on the show. Leemans did and went on the program. But both of them signed affidavits revealing the extent to which Sheridan and his cohorts would go to in order to flip Garrison’s witnesses. For example, Leemans was told, “… if I did not change my statement and state that I had been bribed by Jim Garrison’s office, I and my family would be in physical danger.” (DiEugenio, p. 240) Somehow, Long missed those statements, which gravely undermine her thesis because logically, they explain why the Federal Communications Commission decided to grant Garrison the time to counter Sheridan’s handiwork. But even at that, the FCC only gave Garrison a half hour, compared to Sheridan’s full hour, which contradicts the idea of equal time embedded in the now defunct Fairness Doctrine.

She also questions why, when granted the time, Garrison did not answer Sheridan’s charges in more specific terms. As the DA stated throughout his Playboy interview, if he had done that, it would have given Shaw’s lawyers a pretext to move to get his case thrown out of court, since it would prejudice prospective jurors.

With the release of Garrison’s files by the ARRB, the idea that Garrison did not have a factual basis for his case against Shaw is revealed to be utterly false. There is no doubt today that Shaw used the pseudonym of Clay Bertrand. The declassified files contain over ten witnesses who stated this was the case. It is further revealed that the FBI knew this as well. And finally, attorney Dean Andrews knew it�"and lied about it.   As a consequence, Garrison never got to ask Shaw the key question: “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88)

It is also now shown that Shaw lied about his association with the CIA. That association has turned out to be a long service and a lucrative one. Not only did Shaw lie about it at his own trial, the CIA continually lied about it, and Robert Blakey fell for it. In the HSCA volumes, Shaw is referred to as part of a large businessman’s contact program in the Agency. Not true. Shaw was a well-compensated contract agent from at least the fifties. (Joan Mellen, Our Man In Haiti, pp. 54-55) In the sixties, he had a covert security clearance code name that was the same as Howard Hunt’s. (DiEugenio, pp. 383-87) The CIA tried desperately to cover up these facts, even going as far as altering Shaw’s files. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 200) The ARRB later discovered the CIA had gone even further and destroyed Shaw’s 201 file.




As the late Yale educated attorney Allard Lowenstein once said regarding the Robert Kennedy assassination: in his experience as a lawyer, people who have nothing to hide don’t hide things. Somehow, Long does not think any of this new material is relevant to any discussion of Jim Garrison today.

In addition to this secrecy about Shaw, which hurt Garrison’s case, Long does not detail any of the other methods of obstruction that the CIA and the FBI used against Garrison. Nor does she elucidate any of the meetings that Shaw’s lawyers had in Washington soliciting this kind of aid, which ended up being bountiful. The declassified files of the ARRB contain literally scores of pages on this subject. This features interference with the serving of Garrison’s subpoenas. And further, the setting up of a special committee within the CIA to survey actions to take against Garrison before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. At the first meeting of this super-secret group, James Angleton’s assistant, Ray Rocca, said that he felt that Garrison would convict Shaw in the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, pp. 269-74) Perhaps in their quest to stop that from happening, on the eve of the trial, at least three prospective witness for the prosecution were physically attacked before they testified: Richard Case Nagell, Clyde Johnson and Aloysius Habighorst. None of these men ended up testifying. (p. 294)

As mentioned previously, one of the most bizarre statements that the author makes is that Garrison was proficient at using the media and manipulating them for his own benefit. How anyone can make such a statement today is simply inexplicable. As authors like William Davy and myself have shown, the media utterly destroyed Jim Garrison. Before Garrison took on the Kennedy assassination, he had a promising career ahead of him as a Louisiana politician. Many thought he could have been governor or senator from the state. (DiEugenio, pp. 172-74) That career was utterly wrecked by the two-year roasting he took in the press from almost every outlet imaginable: CBS, NBC, NY Times, Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, to name just a few. Garrison was eventually defeated in his District Attorney re-election bid due to two sets of phony pinball kickback charges, which he defeated at trial. But the publicity weakened his position and strengthened his opponent Harry Connick, who defeated him in a close election in 1973. (See chapter 19 of Garrison’s book.) To most legal observers, Connick turned out to be a very poor DA compared to Jim Garrison.

After Garrison was retired from the DA’s office, it took him years to recover from the ordeal he went through. At that time, people who visited him in New Orleans said he had a small office that he rented from a larger firm. This is the man who likely would have been residing in the governor’s mansion if not for the JFK case. That media manipulation Long describes did the DA a lot of good, didn’t it?

Long is so utterly biased that she actually credits Judge Herbert Christenberry. This is the judge who threw out Garrison’s attempt to try Shaw on perjury charges after his acquittal. Today, there is little or no doubt that Shaw lied numerous times at his conspiracy trial. For instance, about his employment by the CIA, about his friendship with David Ferrie, about his use of an alias. And according to Garrison assistant Steve Jaffe, this time Garrison was not going to make the same mistake he did at the conspiracy trial. He was going to use every witness he had against Shaw.

Judge Herbert Christenberry should never have presided over this hearing. Moreover, there should have never been a hearing in the first place. As Garrison notes in his book, the idea of a federal judge inserting himself into a state case was quite unusual, since there was a law against it. But that is what happened. Shaw’s lawyers moved to have a state case considered in federal court. (Garrison, p. 253)

Why did they do this?

Because Christenberry’s wife had written a letter to Shaw after his acquittal. This was also after Garrison filed the perjury charges. The letter uses the plural pronoun “we”, so it clearly describes both husband and wife’s sentiments. The Christenberrys congratulated Shaw on the outcome of the trial. They sympathized with him over what the DA had done to the poor man. They continued by saying how much better the proceedings would have been if the case had been allotted to federal court and Judge Christenberry. But unfortunately, Caroline Christenberry could not voice these sentiments during the trial for risk of being labeled prejudiced in advance. (Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p.315)

If there was ever an attempt to solicit a case, this was it. That letter is in the National Archives today. It appears Long has never heard of it.

This article proves the very worst about the JFK case. Everyone hoped that the declassification of the files would aid in the public’s understanding of what that case was really all about, what impact it had on the personages involved and also on American history. That will not happen with people like Long. At the end of her original essay as published in the periodical 64 Parishes, it is revealed that her piece is part of something called the “Democracy and the Informed Citizen Initiative”, which is sponsored by the Federation of State Humanities councils. The Andrew Mellon Foundation was part of the support for that initiative. In other words, the Power Elite Kennedy opposed is still thriving.

But further, as Anthony Thorne discovered, Long made up her mind about this matter without looking at any documents. She said, “I don’t want to dig through CIA and FBI documents for the rest of my life.” She then gave the back of her hand to the myriad books on the JFK case: “I find the basic premise of many these books to be problematic and would then note [sic] take those as seriously as historical studies.”

The books don’t matter. The documents don’t matter. Typical MSM historian on the JFK case.   Which is why her article is worthless. It is the vacuity and speciousness of work like this that helps drive readers to the likes of Alex Jones. Perhaps unbeknownst to her, Long is adding to his minions.

Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On
Written by James DiEugenio

In response to a recent article which he characterizes as “a compendium of every MSM caricature of Garrison and his Kennedy case that one can imagine”, Jim DiEugenio revisits the New Orleans DA's career and his JFK case, and what the ARRB and subsequent research has revealed about it.

Would Jim Garrison have been forgotten if Oliver Stone had never met the late Ellen Ray? If the reader is unaware of who Ellen Ray was let me inform you of her importance in history. (her obituary)

Ellen Ray was the wife of Bill Schaap. They ran a publishing company called Sheridan Square Press. Sheridan Square did not just release books. They also published magazines like the illustrious Covert Action Information Bulletin and Lies of our Times. If our readers do not know about those two periodicals, it is their loss. The first dealt with the Central Intelligence Agency and its allies; the second was concerned with media analysis. They were well done and important journals.

Ellen Ray had known Jim Garrison a long time�"going all the way back to his original investigation of the John Kennedy murder in the late sixties. She always thought highly of him and his work. So when Garrison thought of writing a book on his inquiry in the eighties, Sheridan Square was one of the houses he thought of releasing it through. But before that, Garrison had had an offer from a much bigger publishing house. That deal did not go through since the proofreader the house assigned to the book was Sylvia Meagher. Now as everyone knows, this site is a sincere admirer of Meagher and her fine book, Accessories After the Fact. But as most insiders also realize, Meagher was one of the early critics who developed a phobia�"some would call it a mania�"about Jim Garrison and his inquiry. (The others would include Josiah Thompson and Paul Hoch.) Even someone like Jerry Policoff, who was a close friend of Meagher, once said that Sylvia should not have been assigned to review Garrison’s book: “My God, she contributed money to Clay Shaw’s defense!”

Well, predictably, Meagher’s analysis contributed to Garrison returning his advance. But that may have been fortunate, because now he turned to Ellen Ray and Sheridan Square Press. They assigned him Zachary Sklar as his editor. Zach was a distinguished journalism professor and contributor to Sheridan’s two publications. It was a fortunate pairing. Originally, Garrison had written his book from a third person point of view. But when he met Zach, the editor convinced him that since the DA was an actual participant in the story he was telling, it would be more effective if he wrote the book as a first person narrative. I think most people today would say that was a good choice.

On the Trail of the Assassins sold about forty thousand copies when it was originally released in hard cover. The thoroughly annotated book revealed many new things about Garrison’s investigation that most outsiders did not know about. It also exhibited Garrison’s firm grasp on the entire evidentiary record of the JFK case and also Kennedy’s place in history. Overall, it was a real contribution to the library of books on the assassination of President Kennedy.

But what happened later was probably even more significant. At a film festival in Havana, Ellen Ray met up with Oliver Stone. She told him words to the effect: “Have I got a book for you!” Stone read Garrison’s book and decided to bring it to the big screen. He did so in December of 1991.

But this was the JFK assassination. And it was Jim Garrison. As the DA noted in his book, there were many media critics of his inquiry. And they struck at him in what can only be called a vicious and personal manner. Some of them hid their relationships with the intelligence community, e.g., James Phelan, Walter Sheridan, and Hugh Aynesworth. Even more buried was the cooperation between these men and Clay Shaw’s lawyers. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, chapter 11 for an analysis of this nexus.) That sixties wave of media critics was not going to let Oliver Stone bring back Jim Garrison and the JFK case in any kind of fair or salutary manner. So they decided to do a preemptive strike on Stone’s film.

In what was probably an unprecedented campaign in the history of American cinema, the MSM attacked the film JFK seven months in advance of its release. In fact, Ben Bradlee and the The Washington Post sent George Lardner to Dallas to write a story as the film was being shot in Dealey Plaza.

Lardner’s article began with one of the truly snarky remarks in recent journalistic history. In watching a rehearsal of the Dealey Plaza sequence, Lardner noted that Stone had ordered up five shots in the assassination sequence. The reporter then wrote: “Five shots? Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?” Through their acoustical testing, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded that there were four shots fired. But as researcher Donald Thomas revealed at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference in 2003, those same sound technicians told Chief Counsel Robert Blakey that they detected five shots. Blakey told Thomas that he did not think it was possible to sell that many shots to the committee, so their report only analyzed and accepted four. In other words, this was a political decision, not a scientific one. There is real evidence that there were five shots, but somehow that did not matter to Lardner. After all, it’s the JFK case.

Lardner’s article was the first volley in a seven-month MSM campaign that was intended to make sure that the reception of JFK was jaundiced in advance. Many of the same people who attacked Garrison back in the sixties were brought back to do so again, like Aynesworth and Edward Epstein. The fact that neither of these men was at all credible or objective on the subjects of the Kennedy assassination or Jim Garrison was irrelevant. The goal was to savage the film before it had a fair hearing. That is how radioactive this subject was, even thirty years later.

In spite of this assault, JFK did well at the box office, both at home and abroad. It was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But to show the reader just how nutty the anti-JFK crusade was, consider the following. On the eve of the Oscars, an anonymous author bought an ad in the trade journal Variety. The ad asked that no voters cast their ballot for the film as Best Picture. Researcher Rich Goad did some detective work and found out that the ad was paid for by the late Warren Commission counsel David Belin.

Besides bringing the Kennedy assassination back into the limelight, JFK was the main cause for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). For at the end of the film, Stone added a subtitle revealing that the files of the House Select Committee were being kept secret until the year 2027. This created a sensation in Washington. Tens of thousands of citizens now called their representatives, sent them letters or faxed them in order to do something about this travesty. It worked. The Board was created. It was a unique agency that was made up of private citizens appointed by the president. That agency had a staff that read and researched documents that were now to be declassified. If an intelligence agency objected, that agency had to show why the document should be kept secret. This reversed the previous Freedom of Information Law, which put the burden of proof on the requester, who had to show why it should be declassified. But even today, twenty years after the ARRB closed its doors, the government is still maintaining secrecy over thousands of documents.

That Board has a decidedly mixed record of achievement. But it did do some good work on the Garrison angle of the JFK case.   In fact, the Board even went to court with then New Orleans DA Harry Connick to salvage a file cabinet full of documents remaining from the Garrison investigation. After being shown up in the press, Connick resisted turning over the materials. But the Justice Department eventually secured the documents. The Garrison family also turned over thousands of pages that the late DA had in his personal effects.

Garrison had always insisted that, for various reasons, he was never able to reveal most of the evidence he had secured from 1967-69. After authors like William Davy, Joan Mellen and myself went through what the ARRB attained, we had to agree. The Garrison files in the Archives today hold an abundance of utterly fascinating material on a wide array of subjects dealing with many aspects of the JFK case. Does the MSM reveal any of this to the public? Nope. One of the most embarrassing aspects of the three-week binge that the media went on last year in anticipation that the JFK files were finally going to be completely declassified was this: No one chronicled what the ARRB had already released. Which was significant. It was about 2 million pages of material that opened up new vistas on subjects like Rose Cheramie, Kennedy and Vietnam, and the medical evidence in the JFK case. Guests like Larry Sabato, Phil Shenon and Gerald Posner did not want to discuss those topics. Nether did their hosts like NBC stooge on JFK, Rachel Maddow.

It is easy to understand why this would occur. As Upton Sinclair once said: It is hard to make journalists understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. Contrary to popular belief there is no such thing as a liberal media. In the twentieth century, and up until today, the American media has been controlled by an oligarchical class. Some authors call this class the Eastern Establishment. Some call it the Power Elite.   As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy was not a part of that group. He never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 21-33) After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely halted, and then reversed. (pp. 367-77) Due in part to the ARRB, we know much more about these changes, especially regarding Indochina.

Apple kicks Infowars app from App Store


Apple kicks Infowars app from App Store Apple has confirmed that it has also removed Alex Jones' InfoWars app from its app store, citing community guidelines.
Last month, several outlets including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube, removed Alex Jones' podcast content and associated accounts. The actions were clearly coordinated and the firms cited community guidelines and violations of rules as reasons for the actions.

At the time, InfoWars fans could still access the content by downloading the Infowars app from the App Store. Apple has now confirmed that it also removed the Infowars app permanently, citing community guidelines violations related to the content accessible in the app.

The Infowars Official app is still available to download from the Play Store for Android for the time being.

Last week, Twitter had also banned Infowars and Alex Jones from its platform. Initially, Twitter had not taken part in the coordinated actions, with CEO Jack Dorsey explaining that the accounts had not violated Twitter's rules. Some more recent tweets were seen to fall foul of the rules and Twitter reacted.