01-12-2011, 08:02 PM
Was George H.W. Bush Involved in Assassination of JFK?
by Jim Fetzer and John Hankey
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George Herbert Walker Bush was there
Perhaps the strongest case implicating George H.W. Bush (#41) in the assassination of JFK (#35) has been presented by John Hankey, an independent student of the crime, who has produced several documentaries laying out the case against him, the latest of which is "The Dark Legacy". John has become very controversial, especially on the basis of attacks launched against him by an organization called "CTKA", which has published a severe critique authored by one Seamus Coogan.
While I do not believe that Hankey has everything rightin particular, his skepticism about the identity of a man seen standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository does not appear to be justified nor do his doubts about Fletcher Prouty's identification of USAF Gen. Edward Lansdale in a photograph of "the three tramps", which was confirmed by no less a personage than Gen. Victor Krulak, former Commandant of the Marine Corps, where other photos show the same man having walked up to George H.W. Bush, which, ironically, is about the strongest possible confirmation of Hankey's thesis that anyone could wanthe has been on the right track. Lansdale was famous in the CIA for his skill at arranging assassinations, where many of us believe that he organized the actual execution that took place in Dealey Plaza.
In CTKA's critique, "The Dark Legacy of John Hankey", however, Seamus Coogan commits so many serious blunders in his discussion of the assassination that anyone less familiar with the eddies and currents of JFK research might suspect it was a work of disinformation. Since the CTKA site is supervised by Jim DiEugenio, I should observe that I have not been uniformly impressed by his own research on JFK. He published a well-regarded book on Jim Garrison, Destiny Betrayed (1992), and co-edited Assassinations (2003) with Lisa Pease, which reprinted many excellent essays that had previously been published in PROBE, the journal of CTKA.
But I have found his work on other matters highly uneven, including, in particular, his defense of the research by Jefferson Morley and David Talbot into the revelations by Shane O'Sullivan, which substantiated the identification of three persons at the Ambassador Hotel the evening that Bobby was shot, which I have discussed in detail in "RFK: Outing the CIA at the Ambassador". Even on the basis of my mixed experience with them in the past, I have been surprised by the blunders that are committed in the course of their critique of Hankey's work. Here I will illustrate with three.
(1) Coogan faults him for reporting 6 or 7 wounds
That there be no doubt of what Coogan is claiming, I will cite the specific passages vertatim:
18:43 Hankey tries to sell the idea that, in all, there were 6 wounds in Kennedy and Connally. Yet you may recall that at the time of 14:23 Hankey had already utilised the iconic courtroom clip from "JFK" in which Garrison (Kevin Costner) utilises Alven Oser (Gary Grubbs) and Numa Bertel (Wayne Knight) to demonstrate the trajectory of the 7 wounds in both Kennedy and Connally. Hankey somehow missed the fact that, most of the time, entrance wounds leave exits.
But JFK had an entry wound to his throat (#1), an entry wound to his back 5.5″ below his collar just to the right of the spinal column (#2), an entry at the back of his head in the vicinity of the external occipital protuberance (#3), and another entry in the vicinity of his right temple (#4), while Gov. John Connally was hit at least once in the back (#5) and perhaps as many as twice more, once in the right wrist (#6) and once in his left thigh (#7). While there is room to argue that (#7) may have resulted from (#6), even then there are 6 or 7 hitsplus we know that 3 other shots missed! The evidence can be found in Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), but more effortlessly in "Dealey Plaza Revisited: What happened to JFK?", for example, which is easily accessible on-line.
For Coogan to imply that Hankey is wrong strikes me as a rather important blunder. These shots were fired from in front, from the side, and from behind.
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Lansdale walking past "the three tramps"
(2) Coogan assumes that the Zapruder film is authentic
In another passage, Coogan takes for granted that the Zapruder film is authentic as a resource:
You may be asking: "So what if Connally had used the incorrect term, and anyhow Hankey did eventually admit Kennedy slumped." Well actually it's quite an issue. Because Hankey uses the slump to launch into a diatribe about Connally seeing Kennedy 'choking on a bullet and being shot in the head' when there is no evidence for this on the Zapruder film. As adjudged by the Z film, everybody in the world except Hankey can clearly determine that Connally only gives Kennedy a brief glance. And he is clearly turning back around at the time of the fatal headshot.
But the proofs that the film has been reconstructed to remove the limo stop and conceal the blow-out to the back of JFK's head is abundant and compelling. I organized the first symposium on Zapruder film alteration at the Lancer Conference in Dallas in 1996 and have published a book and many articles about it, including "JFK: Who's telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?" and "US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication" on Veterans Today. The Zapruder camera used a 16mm strip of celluloid by shooting the "A" side and then flipping over to shoot the "B" side.
To be projected in an 8mm projector, it had to be split and spliced together. But an 8mm split film developed in Dallas was brought to NPIC in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, 23 November, while a 16mm unsplit film developed in Rochester was brought there the following day. There are five physical differences between the original and the extant version.
As though that were not enough, Clint Hill has been describing his actions that day the same way for 47 years, including rushing forward, climbing on the limo, pushing Jackie down and lying across their bodies while peering down into a massive, fist-sized hole in the back of JFK's head, then turning to his colleagues and giving them a "thumb's down" before the vehicle reaches the Triple Underpassyet none of this is in the extant film. Anyone who compares frame 374, in which that blow-out can be seen, with frames following 313 can determine for themselves that it has been blackened out in earlier frames.
And Connally also reported in his early testimony that he looked over his right shoulder to see what was going on, but then turned back to his left to get a better view when he felt a doubling-up in his chest from a shot fired from the side. Which means that Connally's own testimony provides another proof of Zapruder fakery. Those who write without understanding this much about these things appear to be either incompetent or dissembling.
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Lansdale waiting to speak with Bush
(3) Coogan denies the body was secretly removed from the plane
The occurrence of body alteration has been established by the meticulous research of David S. Lifton, Best Evidence (1980), which has now been corroboratedin spades!by the ARRB, as Douglas Horne, who served as its Chief Analyst for Military Records, has demonstrated in his five-volume study, Inside the ARRB (2009). That, however, does not inhibit Coogan from taking Hankey to task over the prospect that JFK's body was secretly removed from Air Force One while the official, ceremonial bronze casket was being off-loaded under the glare of the bright lights of the national new media. He is thus moved to make observations such as the following:
I have to wonder how many people have ever watched the arrival of Kennedy's coffin? It's virtually impossible for anything to have gone on. Now while the runway suddenly goes black and there is mention of a power cut as the plane comes in, the plane is still very much in motion when the lights are restored making it pretty hard to disembark a ton worth of casket. What most authorities believe today is that there was post-autopsy fakery in the x-rays, and perhaps the photos. And clearly, some of the photos are missing. (See for example, Gary Aguilar's excellent essay in Murder In Dealey Plaza, pgs. 175-218)
But the throat wound, which was described as a small, round wound of entry by Malcolm Perry, M.D., three times during the Parkland Press Conference at Parkland Hospital, which I published as Appendix C in Assassination Science (1998) but was not provided to the Warren Commission, is very different than the large, ragged wound photographed during the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, as I display in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), page 14 (but also in my public presentations).
Perhaps the most stunning indication of the incompetence of Coogan, however, is his favorable citation of the chapter by Gary Aguilar in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000). Aguilar's study is devoted to demonstrating consistency between the observations of the massive blow-out at the back of the head as it was observed at Parkland and the descriptions of the wound as they were reported from Bethesda. We know from Horne's work that Aguilar has exaggerated their consistency, since James Humes, USN-MC, who was in charge of the autopsy, actually took a cranial saw to the head to enlarge the wound.
More importantly, however, is that, if Aguilar were right, then the film has to have been altered, since the blow-out he documents is not visible in most of the film. As I have explained to others who have wanted to endorse Aguilar's work while denying that the film has been altered, you can't consistently do both. If Aguilar is right, then the film is fake; and if the film is authentic, then Aguilar is wrong.
There are other blunders in Coogan's critique, including his taking at face value Richard Nixon's contentions that he only learned of the assassination when he arrived in New Yorkof which he gave several versions, one of which was that "Nixon says he heard a screaming woman, stopped the cab, and wound down the window". But if the window was up, how could Nixon have heard the woman scream? And surely screaming is not so uncommon in New York that it would have attracted the attention of this very self-centered and devious man. Like Bush and LBJ, Nixon was also complicit in the assassination of JFK.
I am not saying that Seamus Coogan got everything wrong or that John Hankey got everything right. But I do believe that the role of George Herbert Walker Bush in the assassination of JFK is a subject that deserves a great deal more attention than it has received in the past and which, I must infer, it most certainly is not going to receive from Jim DiEugenio and Seamus Coogan. And this, in turn, makes me think that, when CTKA was being formed, my decision not to join was wiser than I could have known at the time.
I am increasingly disturbed by the role it has taken in suppressing what we know about the medical evidence, including the alteration of the body, and the Zapruder film, which has been massively revised. If those who run CTKA can't get even the most basic of our important scientific findings about the assassination right, then it is hardly surprising that they are going to trash those who are doing decidedly better than they are at pursuing the truth about JFK.
It Never Ends MORE Startling Evidence of Bush in Dallas
by John Hankey
I don't think we are much encouraged to see History as science. Quite the opposite, actually. And of course, that's all politics. The winners write history, and the truth be damned. Even science can have trouble trying to act like science when political issues are involved, as we see with evolution, tobacco-and-cancer, and global warming. But I think History does have a lot in common with physical science.
For example, I can remember when "Continental Drift", the idea that Africa and America were once stuck together, was very much considered "just a theory"; ridiculed by some, and regarded with amusement by many, and promulgated as likely by a tiny minority. But as time goes by, the evidence accumulates; and the meaning of old evidence begins to settle in; and ideas that were once considered outrageous gradually get worn in and start to be regarded as obvious common sense. Part of this process is the continual accumulation of new evidence. New pieces are added to the puzzle and the picture becomes more clear. And sometimes the hidden meaning of old evidence, that has been lying around for years, suddenly jumps out. Evidence of the fossils and minerals that can be found on the east coast of Africa, and on the west coast of Brazil, may have been lying around for years, before someone decided to look and see if they matched, and found that they did; and proved conclusively that west Africa and Brazil were once attached.
With regard to George HW Bush and the murder of John Kennedy, Joseph McBride found this memo in 1988:
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Memo about "George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency"
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote this memo 5 days after the assassination, naming George Bush as a CIA officer. The last, and most crucial paragraph, is very hard to read. The following is a transcription:
"The substance of the forgoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. V.T. Forsyth of this Bureau."
When it was first released in 1978, George Bush was an obscure bureaucrat, a virtual unknown. So when the best researchers on the planet saw this memo in 1978, they didn't pay much attention to it. When Bush became vice president two years later, no one was able to connect his now well-known name to this obscure memo. But when Joseph McBride was messing around in 1988, Bush was running for president; and when McBride saw the memo, he jumped up and shouted "Hey, this memo is about Bush! It says he was in the CIA, way back in 1963!"
And for the longest time, the focus was on this simple isolated fact: that Hoover said Bush was in the CIA in '63. Bush said the memo must be referring to another "George Bush," because he wasn't in the CIA at that time. But over the years, people were able to assemble the facts from Bush's personal life, showing his deep involvement with the CIA at that time, and with the CIA's anti-Castro Cubans (in the memo, Hoover calls them "misguided anti-Castro Cubans"). And over time, it has become undeniable; that Hoover was referring, in his memo, to none other than George Herbert Walker Bush. And for a while, that was it. End of story.
But the title of this Hoover memo is, "Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy". Isn't that important? Well, you'd think so. But for the longest time, no one made much out it. Besides, Hoover scarcely mentions the assassination in the memo, instead focusing on these "misguided anti-Castro Cubans." The body of the memo does not appear, at first, to be in any way related to the title of the memo "the assassination of President John F Kennedy". But then Mark Lane, in Rush to Judgment , did the fabulous work of demonstrating, and in fact persuading a jury, that E. Howard Hunt, a major lieutenant in the CIA's "misguided anti-Castro Cuban" program, was in Dallas and involved in the assassination. With this backgroundwith this framework to guide the researcherit was then possible to assemble the evidence linking Bush to Hunt.
People might have taken some notice before that Bush made the unusual request, as Nixon's ambassador to the UN, to be given an office in the White House. They may have noticed that Hunt, although he was not being paid by anyone in the White House, or answering to anyone that we know of in the White House, also had a White House office. But with the Hoover memo in hand, establishing Bush as a supervisor of the CIA's "misguided anti-Castro Cuban" operation, it is possible to connect Bush to Hunt at the Bay of Pigs.
With this memo in hand, it is possible to connect Bush and Hunt as two CIA operatives with offices inside the White House. With this memo in hand, it is possible to answer who it was that Hunt answered to inside the White House; and how he got the office in the first place. And with all that, it is possible to connect Bush to Hunt, and therefore to Dallas, to Hunt in Dallas, and to the "misguided anti-Castro Cuban" assassins of John Kennedy. Which is what Hoover did for us when he wrote the title of the memo. Little by little, the pieces start to fall into place. And pieces that in isolation meant nothing, become key parts of a whole picture.
But even so, this is not a rock-solid connection: Hunt was directly involved in the murder of JFK. And Bush supervised Hunt. But Bush probably supervised a lot of CIA people, not all of whom were directly involved in the assassination. A high-ranking officer may be connected to all of the acts of all of his troops, by reason of his being their commander. But it's not a direct connection. It doesn't establish that the officer knew about, or approved of, or was involved in, all the actions of those troops.
Enter FBI memo # 2:
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Memo about the "President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company"
It will come up again in a minute, so please read the first line carefully. Bush identifies himself to the FBI as an independent oil man from Houston.
This memo establishes that sort of direct connection between Bush and Hunt, in Dallas, on the day of the assassination. This memo records Bush's phone call to the FBI, precisely an hour and fifteen minutes after the assassination. When I first encountered this memo, and when I first put it into my movie, JFK II, I simply called it "weird". I saw it only in isolation, a weird, isolated connection between Bush and the assassination. It took me years to see it in context. That is, to see that this phone call demonstrates, clearly, that George Bush, was on duty that day.
He was staying at the Dallas Sheraton because his duty assignment was in Dallas. His phone call to the FBI cannot have been random. This James Parrott worked for Bush as a sign-painter; he was not an assassin; this phone call is not what it purports to be; Bush was fulfilling some obscure under-cover function in making this call. So the phone call has to be seen as part of his CIA assignment; which was clearly connected to the assassination. This memo then establishes that Bush was in the Dallas area, and on duty; and that his duty assignment was connected to the assassination. And if his men were in Dallas shooting the President, as they were, he was certainly on duty supervising them. If he were not supposed to be supervising them, his bosses would have assigned him to be at his home office in Houston, Texas; or on his oil rigs in the Caribbean.
But, even in context, this memo and the phone call it describes is still weird, no? I mean, how could Bush have been so stupid as to make this insanely incriminating phone call? Without this FBI memo, recording this phone call, we don't know, or even have a good clue as to where Bush was, or what he was doing the day of the assassination. Do we? Bush has, until recently, simply said that he did not remember what he was doing the day of the assassination. But with this memo, Bush tells us where he was and what he was doing he hands us his head on a silver platter. What could possibly have motivated him to make such a stupid error as making this phone call to the FBI? It's a valid question. It's not an essential question. We can still value this memo, and extract a great deal of important content from it without answering the question of why, but the question remains.
Why the phony phone call?
And we can make a stab at answering it. Russ Baker in his fine book, Family of Secrets, suggests that Bush was attempting to establish an alibi. Now, by making this phone call, he, in fact, establishes that he was in the Dallas area, and that he was on duty, related to the assassination. So if he's trying to establish an alibi to cover-up where he actually was and what he was actually doing, what he is trying to cover up must be some pretty bad stuff, some pretty incriminating stuff, if it's worse than what he gives us with this alibi.
And what could be worse than what he gives us? Well, obviously, he must have actually been in Dallas. In fact, I think, this situation suggests he must have actually been in Dealey Plaza. I mean seriously. Think about it. He's so panicked about the truth coming out, that he puts his head in a noose and hands it to us. It makes me think he must have been in Dealey Plaza, he must have been in the company of the shooters, and he must have felt that there would be evidence to prove that.
We're just speculating at the moment. We'll get to the evidence right now, but I'm trying to set the scene. If a guilty party is in a panic, trying to cover evidence connecting them to a crime, they may invent an explanation, or an alibi, that seems like a good idea at the time; but that in fact constitutes a very damaging admission. Anyway, stew on that while you consider this photo:
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A familiar figure on 22 November 1963
You see this tall thin man in a suit, with a receding hair line. Many people claim this is Bush, standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository. And it might be. It might be a lot of people. And perhaps, when he called the FBI and incriminated himself, Bush was concerned that he might show up in a better picture than this, where he was positively recognizable, looking towards the camera.
Personally, I don't think this photo looks much like Bush; and in fact, I didn't think he'd be stupid enough to just be hanging around the murder scene. I thought he was sufficiently high ranking that he'd leave such on-scene stuff to his underlings. Right? At least in my mind, if you're an officer like Bush, you're the coach. You plan, you train and prepare your people, and then you stand back and watch it happen. Or so I thought.
Fletcher Prouty was certain that he saw pictures of Ed Lansdale, a military operative of the highest rank, signaling to the "tramps" arrested behind the grassy knoll to "be cool," that everything was alright. Hunt was a high-ranking CIA officer, chief of the CIA's Mexico station; and his son says he is one of the "tramps" who show up in several photos of men who were arrested behind the grassy knoll. So, some of the highest ranking members of the killers' operation were apparently there, on the front line, to make sure that when things went wrong, as they inevitably do, these high ranking officers could be there to fix whatever the problem was. So, given that high- and low- ranking CIA officers were present, this photo of this thin man in a suit might, indeed, be Bush. It's possible.
Shooters at the Dal-Tex
And now, look at this picture of the Dal-Tex building. The Dal-Tex building is across the street from the Book Depository, and many leading researchers into the assassination, including Jim Garrison, say there was certainly a team of shooters in this building:
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Altgens photo with close-up of Dal-Tex window
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Colorized version of blow-up of the Dal-Tex window
And as you can see, some imaginative individual has added some color to indicate three men in this window. Very creative, very imaginative; and at least plausible. Still, it takes way too much imagination and effort, to see Bush's face. But now observe this link about Roger Craig. Actually, you don't have to stop and read it, because I'll quote the relevant part. It's a statement from Roger Craig, winner of the deputy of the year award for Dallas in 1960, and one of the most honest men working that day in Dallas. He's an amazing and heroic fellow, worthy of all the time you could take looking into his background and character. And here, in the following passage, he is describing a conversation he had with Jim Garrison, and he says,
"Jim also asked me about the arrests made in Dealey Plaza that day. I told him I knew of twelve arrests, one in particular made by R. E. Vaughn of the Dallas Police Department. The man Vaughn arrested was coming from the Dal-Tex Building across from the Texas School Book Depository. The only thing which Vaughn knew about him was that he was an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas. The prisoner was taken from Vaughn by Dallas Police detectives and that was the last that he saw or heard of the suspect." (emphasis added)
Holy Moe Lee! Please notice that, in speaking to Jim Garrison, Craig says "in particular". Apparently he and Vaughn thought this was the most significant arrest made that day; pretty amazing given that E.Howard Hunt was arrested in the rail yard behind the grassy knoll. And the only thing Craig knew about this "particular" arrestee was that he had exactly the same singular CIA-cover, "an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas", that George Bush had used that same day in his contact with the FBI. Now, there are a very limited number of possible explanations for who this "independent oil operator" was. Let's look at them.
Who was the "independent oil operator"?
It is conceivable that the CIA had two men in Dallas area that day, supervising the shooters, who both had the designated cover of being an "independent oil operator from Houston." Bush was one, as the evidence above clearly shows; and perhaps there was another who was with the shooters in the Dal-Tex building, supervising them directly. But unless the CIA overlords were trying to set Bush up, they would not have told anyone else to use Bush's CIA cover to identify themselves to the police. If another man was involved in the crime, and was arrested for it, and he told the cops he was an "independent oil operator from Houston," this would tend to throw suspicion in Bush's direction. Bush's association with the CIA's Cubans was already widely known.
Fletcher Prouty knew and wrote of it. Fabian Escalante, the head of Cuban counter intelligence, knew and has written about it. James Files, who claims very credibly, to have been a driver for the Mafia shooters in Dallas, has spoken on-camera about it. And FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, knew about it and wrote about it in his memo. So Bush was already a suspect in Hoover's eyes. The CIA planners, then, would not have told anyone else, "in case you get arrested, tell the cops you're an independent oil man from Houston". Right? They would not have done this, since it would tend to incriminate Bush, who was already in a highly visible, highly suspicious position.
Another unlikely possibility is that this "independent oil operator from Houston" was just some innocent oil operator, who somehow managed to attract suspicion, and was arrested. Do you think it's possible that another oil man from Houston just happened to be in that corner of Dealey Plaza? I hope you think it's possible. Because, as unlikely as it seems, if you think it was possible, then certainly Bush would have been reasonable in thinking that, as he was being arrested, there were other independent oil operators in the crowd who witnessed his arrest.
You see, Bush spoke to a group of oil men in Dallas the night before the assassination (*2). If it were possible that some of them were in Dealey Plaza, he would need to be terrified of the possibility that some of them might actually have seen the arrest, and would have been able to identify him as the object of that arrest.
No wonder, then, that Bush freaked out and made this stupid incriminating phone call to the FBI. Even if it showed that he was not in Houston, or in the Caribbean, but in Dallas, at least it suggested that he was not in police custody for the murder of the President, in Dealey Plaza.
But now stop and think a minute: why was he arrested? What was he doing that drew this cop's attention at all? What could he possibly have been doing to make this cop think that he needed to arrest Bush? Perhaps walking out of a building without attracting attention is harder than it sounds; and it reasonable to suppose that the crowd outside the Dal-Tex building had heard the shots, had heard that the President had been wounded, and they were carefully scrutinizing anyone who came out of the building.
But this story shows clearly that Bush was not the sort of cold-blooded killer who could take part in the murder of a man, and then act and look like nothing was going on as he tried to leave the scene of the crime. And it turns out that as an old man, Bush continues to suffer from this character trait, of being unable to hide feelings that need to be kept secret. As you can see in this link, at Gerry Ford's funeral, Bush suddenly breaks into a wide grin while speaking of the Kennedy assassination. This is not a Mona Lisa smile. This is face-wrenching spasm of glee.
In a minute we'll take up the question of why Bush would grin at his recollection of watching John Kennedy's brains splatter; the point for us now is that he apparently had a similarly inappropriate, show-stopping expression on his face as he attempted to exit the Dal-Tex building; he had the look of a murderer in his eye, so clearly that it could not be missed; as this funereal-grin could not be missed. And the guilt plastered all over Bush's face drew people's attention. And this cop, Vaughn, arrested him.
Now remember, Roger Craig tells this story in the context of his discussions with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison about the suspects who were arrested that day and who then evaporated without leaving a mugshot, interview, fingerprint, or name. Garrison spoke not only to Roger Craig, but he no-doubt spoke to Vaughn, who made the arrest. And Garrison adds the following:
"At least one man arrested immediately after the shooting had come running out of the Dal-Tex Building and offered no explanation for his presence there. Local authorities hardly could avoid arresting him because of the clamor of the onlookers. He was taken to the Sheriff's office, where he was held for questioning. However, the Sheriff's office made no record of the questions asked this suspect, if any were asked; nor did it have a record of his name. Later two uniformed police officers escorted him out of the building to the jeers of the waiting crowd. They put him in a police car, and he was driven away. Apparently this was his farewell to Dallas, for he simply disappeared forever." (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 238)
This vision of the panicked Bush being arrested, no-doubt terrified as he was taken to the police station, and possibly even booked (though the record of any such booking has been destroyed) provides a context that explains a number of Bush's otherwise-mysterious actions. Certainly Bush was freaked out and panic-stricken! An angry crowd clamored for his arrest, and jeered his release.
Being a newbie in these dark affairs, Bush didn't have confidence in the ability of the old devils at CIA to make water run uphill, to make time run backwards, to silence the witnesses, to destroy the records, and make it all go away. And so he panicked; he acted on his own, stupidly; he called the FBI, thinking that he was "cleverly" providing evidence that it wasn't him who was arrested in front of the Dal-Tex building that day. In his panic-stricken state, this seemed like a good idea. He was unable to see that he was actually creating a permanent absolutely-positive record of his involvement.
We can now also explain the grin. He grins ridiculously at Gerry Ford's funeral, at the mention of John Kennedy's murder, not because he is such a ghoul that he thinks splattering the contents of Kenney's head all over Jackie Kennedy was funny; but because mentioning the assassination causes him to recall the comedy of errors that produced his own ridiculous panic, arrest, more panic, and so on.
Garrison wrote his paragraph about Bush's arrest in 1988. Deputy Craig's article was written in 1971 and posted in 1992. But the significance of these paragraphs was discovered last week. There hardly was an internet in 1992 when Craig's article was posted. And for 19 years, no one noticed that this phrase, "independent oil man from Houston", is a very unique description of Bush. No one noticed until last month, when one of the moderators of JFKMurderSolved showed it to me. And I wrote about it to some friends, and one of them suggested I read what Jim Garrison had to say.
So the pieces continue to fall into place. Little by little, the picture is filled in, the questions get answered. And the conclusions become more incontrovertible. This is just the sort thing that happened with the theory of Evolution and the Big Bang theory; and the theory of continental drift. And someday they may start to teach history, as a science, based on evidence, in the universities. Really! It could happen! At which point, Bush's involvement in JFK's murder will be taught, like evolution, as the only plausible explanation of the available reliable evidence.
Final note: Until recently, Bush had nothing more to say about his whereabouts the day of the assassination than that he doesn't remember where he was. That in itself is extraordinarily incriminating. Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were on 9-11, and on the day Kennedy was murdered. But, saying that he doesn't remember, however improbable, is at least consistent with Bush's autobiography, which mentions nothing.
The Oil Man's Cover Story
Lately, however, perhaps at least partly in response to my work, Bush and Co. have concocted a story that he was speaking in Tyler, Texas to the Rotary Club. The vice-president of the Rotary Club, Aubrey Irby, says that Bush was speaking when the bellhop came over and told him, that Kennedy was dead (*1). Mr. Irby passed the information on to Mr. Wendell Cherry, who passed it on to Bush; who stopped his speech. Irby says that Bush explained that he thought a political speech, under the circumstances, was inappropriate; and then he sat down. As a would-be alibi proving Bush's innocence, there are at least three huge problems with this story.
PROBLEM 1: The first is that it is inconceivable that Bush would not have remembered such an event; or that he would have left it out of his autobiography, since it shows what a fine and respectful fellow he is. If he didn't remember it sooner, or include it in his autobiography, it's clearly because it never happened.
PROBLEM 2: The second huge problem with this story is that it couldn't possibly have happened; that is, it is made impossible by Bush's original alibi, his phone call to the FBI, as you'll see.
The witness who tells this story, Aubrey Irby, says that Bush excused himself and sat down. It doesn't say that he rushed out of the room in a frantic search for a phone. The problem is that Walter Cronkite's announcement to the world that Kennedy was dead came at 1:38. Certainly, no one was listening to Walter Cronkite in the same room in which Bush was speaking. Therefore we can be sure that this bellhop, who told Irby that Kennedy was dead, was in another room. The bellhop had to make the decision that he had heard enough of the news to leave off listening to the news. This is no small point. Texas governor Connally was severely wounded. Lyndon Johnson was reportedly wounded. There was much other news to be confirmed.
At some point, then, the bellhop decided to stop listening and go make an announcement. There's no reason to think Irby would be the first person he would tell. But at some point he went to the room where Bush was speaking and informed Mr. Irby that the president was dead. This walk to find Irby took time, of course. Mr. Irby had to receive the information, and then he had to decide to inform Mr. Wendell Cherry, the president of the Kiwanis. Mr. Cherry had to decide that he should interrupt Bush's speech; Mr. Cherry had to then walk over to Bush and tell him the news.
Bush had to decide what to say; and he had to say it. And, according to the only witness, Mr. Irby, Bush "then sat down". Somehow, when he was finished sitting, without attracting Mr. Irby's attention, Bush had to seek and find a phone.
This would have been a hotel phone, so he would likely have had to go through the hotel switchboard to get an outside line. Do you suppose the switchboard was busy after the announcement of the President's death? It's a good guess. In Washington D.C. so many people rushed to make a phone call that the phone system went down.
In any case, once he got through to the hotel operator and got an outside line, Bush then had to call information and get the number of the FBI. After getting through to information, and getting the number, he then had to call the FBI; and penetrate their switchboard, which was, no doubt, very busy; and he had to locate an agent, on what must have been the busiest day in the history of the Dallas bureau. How many minutes do you suppose that would take?
Twenty seems a fair guess, though it seems implausible that a civilian could even get through, given all the official police business going on at the time. We know that the Dallas FBI was all over the murder scene, confiscating camera film and intimidating witnesses; so it's hard to imagine how Bush, an hour after the shooting, was able to reach an agent at all. Given the "sitting" that Mr. Irby observed Bush doing, for all this to have transpired in 45 minutes would be tidy work. But Bush had to do all of this, as the FBI memo states, by 1:45, seven minutes after the news of Kennedy's death first went out; which is blatantly impossible.
PROBLEM 3: The third problem is this question of why Bush would feel that it was necessary to concoct such a story at all? Why does he have to tell us this lie? Why does he have to get others, like Irby, to lie for him? The irony is that the harder he tries to make himself appear innocent, by lying, the more evidence he gives us of his guilt.
(*1) Kitty Kelley, The Family: the Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, p.213; cited by Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 54
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(*2) There are some people who manage to point to this and say "Ahha! That's why Bush was in Dallas! Not to kill the President, but to speak to the other oilmen!" But as the Hoover memo shows, being an oilman was just a cover for Bush's real occupation as a CIA supervisor of trained killers. He needed an excuse for being in Dallas. This speaking engagement provided him with one.
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FROM THE DIRECTOR
"George Bush killed Kennedy. Or was it the Mafia? Maybe Castro did it. Who cares? It was 40 years ago. What difference does it make?"
It matters.
The day he died we lost an invaluable treasure. This video documents that we lost a man of peace, who tried to cool off the cold war, and to get the American people to see their Russian enemies, not as despicable inhuman monsters, but as people like us.
On November 22, 1963, you lost the man who saved your life on October 17, 1962. At the height of the missile crisis, Kennedy's generals and advisors were urging him to launch a first strike attack against Cuba. They assured Kennedy that the Russian missiles in Cuba were not nuclear and were not ready; but that he and they should quietly slip away to the safety of bomb shelters anyway, just to be safe; and then launch an attack, leaving the rest of us out to die. Kennedy thought about it. And then he told them that nobody was going anywhere.
If anyone died, they would be the first to go, sitting as they were in the Whitehouse, the prime target of those Russian missiles. Together they then figured out a safer plan. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense at the time, recently learned from the Russians that the missiles were armed, were ready, were nuclear, and that their commanders were authorized to use them in case of an attack. If you live in the northern hemisphere, the lives of your parents, and your future, were certainly saved by John Kennedy on that day. It matters that his killers be exposed.
In his farewell address, President Eisenhower had warned Kennedy, and the rest of us, of the threat posed to democracy by what Eisenhower called "the military industrial complex." And while Kennedy famously went after the CIA, and refused to commit troops to Vietnam, I always wondered why he didn't more openly attack this military industrial complex. And then I stumbled upon a speech he gave at the United Nations. As you will see in the video, he called upon the Russians, and United Nations, to help him to take on this military industrial complex, in order to "abolish all armies and all weapons."
But he was swept away. And in the years since, millions have died in needless wars, trillions of dollars have been wasted on "defense", and millions more people have lived and died needlessly in poverty. It matters that we lost him.
In 2007, Bruce Willis told Vanity Fair magazine, "They still haven't caught the guy that killed Kennedy. I'll get killed for saying this, but I'm pretty sure those guys are still in power, in some form. The entire government of the United States was co-opted."
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Bruce Willis speaks his mind about JFK
Now Willis probably would not mind my suggesting that he's no genius. At best, his observation is common sense. 80% of the American people agree with him. Indeed, this video, proving that Kennedy was brought down by the most powerful men in the world and their hired thugs, is not based on secret documents. It is all information that has merely been suppressed. Oswald allegedly shot Kennedy from behind. But the day he died, the NY Times carried the story, told by the doctors in Dallas, that Kennedy had an entrance wound in his throat, another in his right temple, and a large gaping exit wound in the back of his head.
After talking to the emergency room doctors, Kennedy's press secretary described, to the assembled press, a shot to the right temple from the right front that went "right through the head." All of the witnesses near the right front, the grassy knoll, described hearing shots from that direction, and dozens of witnesses raced up the knoll in pursuit of the shooters. These witnesses talked to the press. But all of this information has been suppressed for the last 50 years. By whom? Who could?
You will also see in this video the overwhelming best evidence, from the best witnesses, proving beyond a reasonable dispute, that Kennedy's body was stolen from Air Force One, and the wound to his throat was mutilated, before the autopsy. Jackie Kennedy kept watch over an empty casket on the flight from Dallas to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Then the body was quietly taken to Bethesda for the autopsy, arriving 20 minutes before Jackie and the empty casket. Who had the power to arrange this?
Who HAS the power today to suppress all this evidence and to continue to bombard us with ridiculous lies about a lone gunman? It's a short list, isn't it? It doesn't include the mafia, or the Russians, or Castro. It does include the Bush family or rather their masters in Big Oil; the banking elite; the backbone of the military industrial complex. These men, and their successors, carried out the attacks of 9/11. It matters.
Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
John Hankey has been teaching history and English in the LA City Schools for nearly three decades, including alternative approaches that suggest revisions to what passes for "history".
by Jim Fetzer and John Hankey
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George Herbert Walker Bush was there
Perhaps the strongest case implicating George H.W. Bush (#41) in the assassination of JFK (#35) has been presented by John Hankey, an independent student of the crime, who has produced several documentaries laying out the case against him, the latest of which is "The Dark Legacy". John has become very controversial, especially on the basis of attacks launched against him by an organization called "CTKA", which has published a severe critique authored by one Seamus Coogan.
While I do not believe that Hankey has everything rightin particular, his skepticism about the identity of a man seen standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository does not appear to be justified nor do his doubts about Fletcher Prouty's identification of USAF Gen. Edward Lansdale in a photograph of "the three tramps", which was confirmed by no less a personage than Gen. Victor Krulak, former Commandant of the Marine Corps, where other photos show the same man having walked up to George H.W. Bush, which, ironically, is about the strongest possible confirmation of Hankey's thesis that anyone could wanthe has been on the right track. Lansdale was famous in the CIA for his skill at arranging assassinations, where many of us believe that he organized the actual execution that took place in Dealey Plaza.
In CTKA's critique, "The Dark Legacy of John Hankey", however, Seamus Coogan commits so many serious blunders in his discussion of the assassination that anyone less familiar with the eddies and currents of JFK research might suspect it was a work of disinformation. Since the CTKA site is supervised by Jim DiEugenio, I should observe that I have not been uniformly impressed by his own research on JFK. He published a well-regarded book on Jim Garrison, Destiny Betrayed (1992), and co-edited Assassinations (2003) with Lisa Pease, which reprinted many excellent essays that had previously been published in PROBE, the journal of CTKA.
But I have found his work on other matters highly uneven, including, in particular, his defense of the research by Jefferson Morley and David Talbot into the revelations by Shane O'Sullivan, which substantiated the identification of three persons at the Ambassador Hotel the evening that Bobby was shot, which I have discussed in detail in "RFK: Outing the CIA at the Ambassador". Even on the basis of my mixed experience with them in the past, I have been surprised by the blunders that are committed in the course of their critique of Hankey's work. Here I will illustrate with three.
(1) Coogan faults him for reporting 6 or 7 wounds
That there be no doubt of what Coogan is claiming, I will cite the specific passages vertatim:
18:43 Hankey tries to sell the idea that, in all, there were 6 wounds in Kennedy and Connally. Yet you may recall that at the time of 14:23 Hankey had already utilised the iconic courtroom clip from "JFK" in which Garrison (Kevin Costner) utilises Alven Oser (Gary Grubbs) and Numa Bertel (Wayne Knight) to demonstrate the trajectory of the 7 wounds in both Kennedy and Connally. Hankey somehow missed the fact that, most of the time, entrance wounds leave exits.
But JFK had an entry wound to his throat (#1), an entry wound to his back 5.5″ below his collar just to the right of the spinal column (#2), an entry at the back of his head in the vicinity of the external occipital protuberance (#3), and another entry in the vicinity of his right temple (#4), while Gov. John Connally was hit at least once in the back (#5) and perhaps as many as twice more, once in the right wrist (#6) and once in his left thigh (#7). While there is room to argue that (#7) may have resulted from (#6), even then there are 6 or 7 hitsplus we know that 3 other shots missed! The evidence can be found in Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), but more effortlessly in "Dealey Plaza Revisited: What happened to JFK?", for example, which is easily accessible on-line.
For Coogan to imply that Hankey is wrong strikes me as a rather important blunder. These shots were fired from in front, from the side, and from behind.
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Lansdale walking past "the three tramps"
(2) Coogan assumes that the Zapruder film is authentic
In another passage, Coogan takes for granted that the Zapruder film is authentic as a resource:
You may be asking: "So what if Connally had used the incorrect term, and anyhow Hankey did eventually admit Kennedy slumped." Well actually it's quite an issue. Because Hankey uses the slump to launch into a diatribe about Connally seeing Kennedy 'choking on a bullet and being shot in the head' when there is no evidence for this on the Zapruder film. As adjudged by the Z film, everybody in the world except Hankey can clearly determine that Connally only gives Kennedy a brief glance. And he is clearly turning back around at the time of the fatal headshot.
But the proofs that the film has been reconstructed to remove the limo stop and conceal the blow-out to the back of JFK's head is abundant and compelling. I organized the first symposium on Zapruder film alteration at the Lancer Conference in Dallas in 1996 and have published a book and many articles about it, including "JFK: Who's telling the truth: Clint Hill or the Zapruder film?" and "US Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication" on Veterans Today. The Zapruder camera used a 16mm strip of celluloid by shooting the "A" side and then flipping over to shoot the "B" side.
To be projected in an 8mm projector, it had to be split and spliced together. But an 8mm split film developed in Dallas was brought to NPIC in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, 23 November, while a 16mm unsplit film developed in Rochester was brought there the following day. There are five physical differences between the original and the extant version.
As though that were not enough, Clint Hill has been describing his actions that day the same way for 47 years, including rushing forward, climbing on the limo, pushing Jackie down and lying across their bodies while peering down into a massive, fist-sized hole in the back of JFK's head, then turning to his colleagues and giving them a "thumb's down" before the vehicle reaches the Triple Underpassyet none of this is in the extant film. Anyone who compares frame 374, in which that blow-out can be seen, with frames following 313 can determine for themselves that it has been blackened out in earlier frames.
And Connally also reported in his early testimony that he looked over his right shoulder to see what was going on, but then turned back to his left to get a better view when he felt a doubling-up in his chest from a shot fired from the side. Which means that Connally's own testimony provides another proof of Zapruder fakery. Those who write without understanding this much about these things appear to be either incompetent or dissembling.
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Lansdale waiting to speak with Bush
(3) Coogan denies the body was secretly removed from the plane
The occurrence of body alteration has been established by the meticulous research of David S. Lifton, Best Evidence (1980), which has now been corroboratedin spades!by the ARRB, as Douglas Horne, who served as its Chief Analyst for Military Records, has demonstrated in his five-volume study, Inside the ARRB (2009). That, however, does not inhibit Coogan from taking Hankey to task over the prospect that JFK's body was secretly removed from Air Force One while the official, ceremonial bronze casket was being off-loaded under the glare of the bright lights of the national new media. He is thus moved to make observations such as the following:
I have to wonder how many people have ever watched the arrival of Kennedy's coffin? It's virtually impossible for anything to have gone on. Now while the runway suddenly goes black and there is mention of a power cut as the plane comes in, the plane is still very much in motion when the lights are restored making it pretty hard to disembark a ton worth of casket. What most authorities believe today is that there was post-autopsy fakery in the x-rays, and perhaps the photos. And clearly, some of the photos are missing. (See for example, Gary Aguilar's excellent essay in Murder In Dealey Plaza, pgs. 175-218)
But the throat wound, which was described as a small, round wound of entry by Malcolm Perry, M.D., three times during the Parkland Press Conference at Parkland Hospital, which I published as Appendix C in Assassination Science (1998) but was not provided to the Warren Commission, is very different than the large, ragged wound photographed during the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, as I display in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), page 14 (but also in my public presentations).
Perhaps the most stunning indication of the incompetence of Coogan, however, is his favorable citation of the chapter by Gary Aguilar in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000). Aguilar's study is devoted to demonstrating consistency between the observations of the massive blow-out at the back of the head as it was observed at Parkland and the descriptions of the wound as they were reported from Bethesda. We know from Horne's work that Aguilar has exaggerated their consistency, since James Humes, USN-MC, who was in charge of the autopsy, actually took a cranial saw to the head to enlarge the wound.
More importantly, however, is that, if Aguilar were right, then the film has to have been altered, since the blow-out he documents is not visible in most of the film. As I have explained to others who have wanted to endorse Aguilar's work while denying that the film has been altered, you can't consistently do both. If Aguilar is right, then the film is fake; and if the film is authentic, then Aguilar is wrong.
There are other blunders in Coogan's critique, including his taking at face value Richard Nixon's contentions that he only learned of the assassination when he arrived in New Yorkof which he gave several versions, one of which was that "Nixon says he heard a screaming woman, stopped the cab, and wound down the window". But if the window was up, how could Nixon have heard the woman scream? And surely screaming is not so uncommon in New York that it would have attracted the attention of this very self-centered and devious man. Like Bush and LBJ, Nixon was also complicit in the assassination of JFK.
I am not saying that Seamus Coogan got everything wrong or that John Hankey got everything right. But I do believe that the role of George Herbert Walker Bush in the assassination of JFK is a subject that deserves a great deal more attention than it has received in the past and which, I must infer, it most certainly is not going to receive from Jim DiEugenio and Seamus Coogan. And this, in turn, makes me think that, when CTKA was being formed, my decision not to join was wiser than I could have known at the time.
I am increasingly disturbed by the role it has taken in suppressing what we know about the medical evidence, including the alteration of the body, and the Zapruder film, which has been massively revised. If those who run CTKA can't get even the most basic of our important scientific findings about the assassination right, then it is hardly surprising that they are going to trash those who are doing decidedly better than they are at pursuing the truth about JFK.
It Never Ends MORE Startling Evidence of Bush in Dallas
by John Hankey
I don't think we are much encouraged to see History as science. Quite the opposite, actually. And of course, that's all politics. The winners write history, and the truth be damned. Even science can have trouble trying to act like science when political issues are involved, as we see with evolution, tobacco-and-cancer, and global warming. But I think History does have a lot in common with physical science.
For example, I can remember when "Continental Drift", the idea that Africa and America were once stuck together, was very much considered "just a theory"; ridiculed by some, and regarded with amusement by many, and promulgated as likely by a tiny minority. But as time goes by, the evidence accumulates; and the meaning of old evidence begins to settle in; and ideas that were once considered outrageous gradually get worn in and start to be regarded as obvious common sense. Part of this process is the continual accumulation of new evidence. New pieces are added to the puzzle and the picture becomes more clear. And sometimes the hidden meaning of old evidence, that has been lying around for years, suddenly jumps out. Evidence of the fossils and minerals that can be found on the east coast of Africa, and on the west coast of Brazil, may have been lying around for years, before someone decided to look and see if they matched, and found that they did; and proved conclusively that west Africa and Brazil were once attached.
With regard to George HW Bush and the murder of John Kennedy, Joseph McBride found this memo in 1988:
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Memo about "George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency"
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote this memo 5 days after the assassination, naming George Bush as a CIA officer. The last, and most crucial paragraph, is very hard to read. The following is a transcription:
"The substance of the forgoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. V.T. Forsyth of this Bureau."
When it was first released in 1978, George Bush was an obscure bureaucrat, a virtual unknown. So when the best researchers on the planet saw this memo in 1978, they didn't pay much attention to it. When Bush became vice president two years later, no one was able to connect his now well-known name to this obscure memo. But when Joseph McBride was messing around in 1988, Bush was running for president; and when McBride saw the memo, he jumped up and shouted "Hey, this memo is about Bush! It says he was in the CIA, way back in 1963!"
And for the longest time, the focus was on this simple isolated fact: that Hoover said Bush was in the CIA in '63. Bush said the memo must be referring to another "George Bush," because he wasn't in the CIA at that time. But over the years, people were able to assemble the facts from Bush's personal life, showing his deep involvement with the CIA at that time, and with the CIA's anti-Castro Cubans (in the memo, Hoover calls them "misguided anti-Castro Cubans"). And over time, it has become undeniable; that Hoover was referring, in his memo, to none other than George Herbert Walker Bush. And for a while, that was it. End of story.
But the title of this Hoover memo is, "Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy". Isn't that important? Well, you'd think so. But for the longest time, no one made much out it. Besides, Hoover scarcely mentions the assassination in the memo, instead focusing on these "misguided anti-Castro Cubans." The body of the memo does not appear, at first, to be in any way related to the title of the memo "the assassination of President John F Kennedy". But then Mark Lane, in Rush to Judgment , did the fabulous work of demonstrating, and in fact persuading a jury, that E. Howard Hunt, a major lieutenant in the CIA's "misguided anti-Castro Cuban" program, was in Dallas and involved in the assassination. With this backgroundwith this framework to guide the researcherit was then possible to assemble the evidence linking Bush to Hunt.
People might have taken some notice before that Bush made the unusual request, as Nixon's ambassador to the UN, to be given an office in the White House. They may have noticed that Hunt, although he was not being paid by anyone in the White House, or answering to anyone that we know of in the White House, also had a White House office. But with the Hoover memo in hand, establishing Bush as a supervisor of the CIA's "misguided anti-Castro Cuban" operation, it is possible to connect Bush to Hunt at the Bay of Pigs.
With this memo in hand, it is possible to connect Bush and Hunt as two CIA operatives with offices inside the White House. With this memo in hand, it is possible to answer who it was that Hunt answered to inside the White House; and how he got the office in the first place. And with all that, it is possible to connect Bush to Hunt, and therefore to Dallas, to Hunt in Dallas, and to the "misguided anti-Castro Cuban" assassins of John Kennedy. Which is what Hoover did for us when he wrote the title of the memo. Little by little, the pieces start to fall into place. And pieces that in isolation meant nothing, become key parts of a whole picture.
But even so, this is not a rock-solid connection: Hunt was directly involved in the murder of JFK. And Bush supervised Hunt. But Bush probably supervised a lot of CIA people, not all of whom were directly involved in the assassination. A high-ranking officer may be connected to all of the acts of all of his troops, by reason of his being their commander. But it's not a direct connection. It doesn't establish that the officer knew about, or approved of, or was involved in, all the actions of those troops.
Enter FBI memo # 2:
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Memo about the "President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company"
It will come up again in a minute, so please read the first line carefully. Bush identifies himself to the FBI as an independent oil man from Houston.
This memo establishes that sort of direct connection between Bush and Hunt, in Dallas, on the day of the assassination. This memo records Bush's phone call to the FBI, precisely an hour and fifteen minutes after the assassination. When I first encountered this memo, and when I first put it into my movie, JFK II, I simply called it "weird". I saw it only in isolation, a weird, isolated connection between Bush and the assassination. It took me years to see it in context. That is, to see that this phone call demonstrates, clearly, that George Bush, was on duty that day.
He was staying at the Dallas Sheraton because his duty assignment was in Dallas. His phone call to the FBI cannot have been random. This James Parrott worked for Bush as a sign-painter; he was not an assassin; this phone call is not what it purports to be; Bush was fulfilling some obscure under-cover function in making this call. So the phone call has to be seen as part of his CIA assignment; which was clearly connected to the assassination. This memo then establishes that Bush was in the Dallas area, and on duty; and that his duty assignment was connected to the assassination. And if his men were in Dallas shooting the President, as they were, he was certainly on duty supervising them. If he were not supposed to be supervising them, his bosses would have assigned him to be at his home office in Houston, Texas; or on his oil rigs in the Caribbean.
But, even in context, this memo and the phone call it describes is still weird, no? I mean, how could Bush have been so stupid as to make this insanely incriminating phone call? Without this FBI memo, recording this phone call, we don't know, or even have a good clue as to where Bush was, or what he was doing the day of the assassination. Do we? Bush has, until recently, simply said that he did not remember what he was doing the day of the assassination. But with this memo, Bush tells us where he was and what he was doing he hands us his head on a silver platter. What could possibly have motivated him to make such a stupid error as making this phone call to the FBI? It's a valid question. It's not an essential question. We can still value this memo, and extract a great deal of important content from it without answering the question of why, but the question remains.
Why the phony phone call?
And we can make a stab at answering it. Russ Baker in his fine book, Family of Secrets, suggests that Bush was attempting to establish an alibi. Now, by making this phone call, he, in fact, establishes that he was in the Dallas area, and that he was on duty, related to the assassination. So if he's trying to establish an alibi to cover-up where he actually was and what he was actually doing, what he is trying to cover up must be some pretty bad stuff, some pretty incriminating stuff, if it's worse than what he gives us with this alibi.
And what could be worse than what he gives us? Well, obviously, he must have actually been in Dallas. In fact, I think, this situation suggests he must have actually been in Dealey Plaza. I mean seriously. Think about it. He's so panicked about the truth coming out, that he puts his head in a noose and hands it to us. It makes me think he must have been in Dealey Plaza, he must have been in the company of the shooters, and he must have felt that there would be evidence to prove that.
We're just speculating at the moment. We'll get to the evidence right now, but I'm trying to set the scene. If a guilty party is in a panic, trying to cover evidence connecting them to a crime, they may invent an explanation, or an alibi, that seems like a good idea at the time; but that in fact constitutes a very damaging admission. Anyway, stew on that while you consider this photo:
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A familiar figure on 22 November 1963
You see this tall thin man in a suit, with a receding hair line. Many people claim this is Bush, standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository. And it might be. It might be a lot of people. And perhaps, when he called the FBI and incriminated himself, Bush was concerned that he might show up in a better picture than this, where he was positively recognizable, looking towards the camera.
Personally, I don't think this photo looks much like Bush; and in fact, I didn't think he'd be stupid enough to just be hanging around the murder scene. I thought he was sufficiently high ranking that he'd leave such on-scene stuff to his underlings. Right? At least in my mind, if you're an officer like Bush, you're the coach. You plan, you train and prepare your people, and then you stand back and watch it happen. Or so I thought.
Fletcher Prouty was certain that he saw pictures of Ed Lansdale, a military operative of the highest rank, signaling to the "tramps" arrested behind the grassy knoll to "be cool," that everything was alright. Hunt was a high-ranking CIA officer, chief of the CIA's Mexico station; and his son says he is one of the "tramps" who show up in several photos of men who were arrested behind the grassy knoll. So, some of the highest ranking members of the killers' operation were apparently there, on the front line, to make sure that when things went wrong, as they inevitably do, these high ranking officers could be there to fix whatever the problem was. So, given that high- and low- ranking CIA officers were present, this photo of this thin man in a suit might, indeed, be Bush. It's possible.
Shooters at the Dal-Tex
And now, look at this picture of the Dal-Tex building. The Dal-Tex building is across the street from the Book Depository, and many leading researchers into the assassination, including Jim Garrison, say there was certainly a team of shooters in this building:
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Altgens photo with close-up of Dal-Tex window
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Colorized version of blow-up of the Dal-Tex window
And as you can see, some imaginative individual has added some color to indicate three men in this window. Very creative, very imaginative; and at least plausible. Still, it takes way too much imagination and effort, to see Bush's face. But now observe this link about Roger Craig. Actually, you don't have to stop and read it, because I'll quote the relevant part. It's a statement from Roger Craig, winner of the deputy of the year award for Dallas in 1960, and one of the most honest men working that day in Dallas. He's an amazing and heroic fellow, worthy of all the time you could take looking into his background and character. And here, in the following passage, he is describing a conversation he had with Jim Garrison, and he says,
"Jim also asked me about the arrests made in Dealey Plaza that day. I told him I knew of twelve arrests, one in particular made by R. E. Vaughn of the Dallas Police Department. The man Vaughn arrested was coming from the Dal-Tex Building across from the Texas School Book Depository. The only thing which Vaughn knew about him was that he was an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas. The prisoner was taken from Vaughn by Dallas Police detectives and that was the last that he saw or heard of the suspect." (emphasis added)
Holy Moe Lee! Please notice that, in speaking to Jim Garrison, Craig says "in particular". Apparently he and Vaughn thought this was the most significant arrest made that day; pretty amazing given that E.Howard Hunt was arrested in the rail yard behind the grassy knoll. And the only thing Craig knew about this "particular" arrestee was that he had exactly the same singular CIA-cover, "an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas", that George Bush had used that same day in his contact with the FBI. Now, there are a very limited number of possible explanations for who this "independent oil operator" was. Let's look at them.
Who was the "independent oil operator"?
It is conceivable that the CIA had two men in Dallas area that day, supervising the shooters, who both had the designated cover of being an "independent oil operator from Houston." Bush was one, as the evidence above clearly shows; and perhaps there was another who was with the shooters in the Dal-Tex building, supervising them directly. But unless the CIA overlords were trying to set Bush up, they would not have told anyone else to use Bush's CIA cover to identify themselves to the police. If another man was involved in the crime, and was arrested for it, and he told the cops he was an "independent oil operator from Houston," this would tend to throw suspicion in Bush's direction. Bush's association with the CIA's Cubans was already widely known.
Fletcher Prouty knew and wrote of it. Fabian Escalante, the head of Cuban counter intelligence, knew and has written about it. James Files, who claims very credibly, to have been a driver for the Mafia shooters in Dallas, has spoken on-camera about it. And FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, knew about it and wrote about it in his memo. So Bush was already a suspect in Hoover's eyes. The CIA planners, then, would not have told anyone else, "in case you get arrested, tell the cops you're an independent oil man from Houston". Right? They would not have done this, since it would tend to incriminate Bush, who was already in a highly visible, highly suspicious position.
Another unlikely possibility is that this "independent oil operator from Houston" was just some innocent oil operator, who somehow managed to attract suspicion, and was arrested. Do you think it's possible that another oil man from Houston just happened to be in that corner of Dealey Plaza? I hope you think it's possible. Because, as unlikely as it seems, if you think it was possible, then certainly Bush would have been reasonable in thinking that, as he was being arrested, there were other independent oil operators in the crowd who witnessed his arrest.
You see, Bush spoke to a group of oil men in Dallas the night before the assassination (*2). If it were possible that some of them were in Dealey Plaza, he would need to be terrified of the possibility that some of them might actually have seen the arrest, and would have been able to identify him as the object of that arrest.
No wonder, then, that Bush freaked out and made this stupid incriminating phone call to the FBI. Even if it showed that he was not in Houston, or in the Caribbean, but in Dallas, at least it suggested that he was not in police custody for the murder of the President, in Dealey Plaza.
But now stop and think a minute: why was he arrested? What was he doing that drew this cop's attention at all? What could he possibly have been doing to make this cop think that he needed to arrest Bush? Perhaps walking out of a building without attracting attention is harder than it sounds; and it reasonable to suppose that the crowd outside the Dal-Tex building had heard the shots, had heard that the President had been wounded, and they were carefully scrutinizing anyone who came out of the building.
But this story shows clearly that Bush was not the sort of cold-blooded killer who could take part in the murder of a man, and then act and look like nothing was going on as he tried to leave the scene of the crime. And it turns out that as an old man, Bush continues to suffer from this character trait, of being unable to hide feelings that need to be kept secret. As you can see in this link, at Gerry Ford's funeral, Bush suddenly breaks into a wide grin while speaking of the Kennedy assassination. This is not a Mona Lisa smile. This is face-wrenching spasm of glee.
In a minute we'll take up the question of why Bush would grin at his recollection of watching John Kennedy's brains splatter; the point for us now is that he apparently had a similarly inappropriate, show-stopping expression on his face as he attempted to exit the Dal-Tex building; he had the look of a murderer in his eye, so clearly that it could not be missed; as this funereal-grin could not be missed. And the guilt plastered all over Bush's face drew people's attention. And this cop, Vaughn, arrested him.
Now remember, Roger Craig tells this story in the context of his discussions with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison about the suspects who were arrested that day and who then evaporated without leaving a mugshot, interview, fingerprint, or name. Garrison spoke not only to Roger Craig, but he no-doubt spoke to Vaughn, who made the arrest. And Garrison adds the following:
"At least one man arrested immediately after the shooting had come running out of the Dal-Tex Building and offered no explanation for his presence there. Local authorities hardly could avoid arresting him because of the clamor of the onlookers. He was taken to the Sheriff's office, where he was held for questioning. However, the Sheriff's office made no record of the questions asked this suspect, if any were asked; nor did it have a record of his name. Later two uniformed police officers escorted him out of the building to the jeers of the waiting crowd. They put him in a police car, and he was driven away. Apparently this was his farewell to Dallas, for he simply disappeared forever." (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 238)
This vision of the panicked Bush being arrested, no-doubt terrified as he was taken to the police station, and possibly even booked (though the record of any such booking has been destroyed) provides a context that explains a number of Bush's otherwise-mysterious actions. Certainly Bush was freaked out and panic-stricken! An angry crowd clamored for his arrest, and jeered his release.
Being a newbie in these dark affairs, Bush didn't have confidence in the ability of the old devils at CIA to make water run uphill, to make time run backwards, to silence the witnesses, to destroy the records, and make it all go away. And so he panicked; he acted on his own, stupidly; he called the FBI, thinking that he was "cleverly" providing evidence that it wasn't him who was arrested in front of the Dal-Tex building that day. In his panic-stricken state, this seemed like a good idea. He was unable to see that he was actually creating a permanent absolutely-positive record of his involvement.
We can now also explain the grin. He grins ridiculously at Gerry Ford's funeral, at the mention of John Kennedy's murder, not because he is such a ghoul that he thinks splattering the contents of Kenney's head all over Jackie Kennedy was funny; but because mentioning the assassination causes him to recall the comedy of errors that produced his own ridiculous panic, arrest, more panic, and so on.
Garrison wrote his paragraph about Bush's arrest in 1988. Deputy Craig's article was written in 1971 and posted in 1992. But the significance of these paragraphs was discovered last week. There hardly was an internet in 1992 when Craig's article was posted. And for 19 years, no one noticed that this phrase, "independent oil man from Houston", is a very unique description of Bush. No one noticed until last month, when one of the moderators of JFKMurderSolved showed it to me. And I wrote about it to some friends, and one of them suggested I read what Jim Garrison had to say.
So the pieces continue to fall into place. Little by little, the picture is filled in, the questions get answered. And the conclusions become more incontrovertible. This is just the sort thing that happened with the theory of Evolution and the Big Bang theory; and the theory of continental drift. And someday they may start to teach history, as a science, based on evidence, in the universities. Really! It could happen! At which point, Bush's involvement in JFK's murder will be taught, like evolution, as the only plausible explanation of the available reliable evidence.
Final note: Until recently, Bush had nothing more to say about his whereabouts the day of the assassination than that he doesn't remember where he was. That in itself is extraordinarily incriminating. Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were on 9-11, and on the day Kennedy was murdered. But, saying that he doesn't remember, however improbable, is at least consistent with Bush's autobiography, which mentions nothing.
The Oil Man's Cover Story
Lately, however, perhaps at least partly in response to my work, Bush and Co. have concocted a story that he was speaking in Tyler, Texas to the Rotary Club. The vice-president of the Rotary Club, Aubrey Irby, says that Bush was speaking when the bellhop came over and told him, that Kennedy was dead (*1). Mr. Irby passed the information on to Mr. Wendell Cherry, who passed it on to Bush; who stopped his speech. Irby says that Bush explained that he thought a political speech, under the circumstances, was inappropriate; and then he sat down. As a would-be alibi proving Bush's innocence, there are at least three huge problems with this story.
PROBLEM 1: The first is that it is inconceivable that Bush would not have remembered such an event; or that he would have left it out of his autobiography, since it shows what a fine and respectful fellow he is. If he didn't remember it sooner, or include it in his autobiography, it's clearly because it never happened.
PROBLEM 2: The second huge problem with this story is that it couldn't possibly have happened; that is, it is made impossible by Bush's original alibi, his phone call to the FBI, as you'll see.
The witness who tells this story, Aubrey Irby, says that Bush excused himself and sat down. It doesn't say that he rushed out of the room in a frantic search for a phone. The problem is that Walter Cronkite's announcement to the world that Kennedy was dead came at 1:38. Certainly, no one was listening to Walter Cronkite in the same room in which Bush was speaking. Therefore we can be sure that this bellhop, who told Irby that Kennedy was dead, was in another room. The bellhop had to make the decision that he had heard enough of the news to leave off listening to the news. This is no small point. Texas governor Connally was severely wounded. Lyndon Johnson was reportedly wounded. There was much other news to be confirmed.
At some point, then, the bellhop decided to stop listening and go make an announcement. There's no reason to think Irby would be the first person he would tell. But at some point he went to the room where Bush was speaking and informed Mr. Irby that the president was dead. This walk to find Irby took time, of course. Mr. Irby had to receive the information, and then he had to decide to inform Mr. Wendell Cherry, the president of the Kiwanis. Mr. Cherry had to decide that he should interrupt Bush's speech; Mr. Cherry had to then walk over to Bush and tell him the news.
Bush had to decide what to say; and he had to say it. And, according to the only witness, Mr. Irby, Bush "then sat down". Somehow, when he was finished sitting, without attracting Mr. Irby's attention, Bush had to seek and find a phone.
This would have been a hotel phone, so he would likely have had to go through the hotel switchboard to get an outside line. Do you suppose the switchboard was busy after the announcement of the President's death? It's a good guess. In Washington D.C. so many people rushed to make a phone call that the phone system went down.
In any case, once he got through to the hotel operator and got an outside line, Bush then had to call information and get the number of the FBI. After getting through to information, and getting the number, he then had to call the FBI; and penetrate their switchboard, which was, no doubt, very busy; and he had to locate an agent, on what must have been the busiest day in the history of the Dallas bureau. How many minutes do you suppose that would take?
Twenty seems a fair guess, though it seems implausible that a civilian could even get through, given all the official police business going on at the time. We know that the Dallas FBI was all over the murder scene, confiscating camera film and intimidating witnesses; so it's hard to imagine how Bush, an hour after the shooting, was able to reach an agent at all. Given the "sitting" that Mr. Irby observed Bush doing, for all this to have transpired in 45 minutes would be tidy work. But Bush had to do all of this, as the FBI memo states, by 1:45, seven minutes after the news of Kennedy's death first went out; which is blatantly impossible.
PROBLEM 3: The third problem is this question of why Bush would feel that it was necessary to concoct such a story at all? Why does he have to tell us this lie? Why does he have to get others, like Irby, to lie for him? The irony is that the harder he tries to make himself appear innocent, by lying, the more evidence he gives us of his guilt.
(*1) Kitty Kelley, The Family: the Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, p.213; cited by Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 54
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(*2) There are some people who manage to point to this and say "Ahha! That's why Bush was in Dallas! Not to kill the President, but to speak to the other oilmen!" But as the Hoover memo shows, being an oilman was just a cover for Bush's real occupation as a CIA supervisor of trained killers. He needed an excuse for being in Dallas. This speaking engagement provided him with one.
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FROM THE DIRECTOR
"George Bush killed Kennedy. Or was it the Mafia? Maybe Castro did it. Who cares? It was 40 years ago. What difference does it make?"
It matters.
The day he died we lost an invaluable treasure. This video documents that we lost a man of peace, who tried to cool off the cold war, and to get the American people to see their Russian enemies, not as despicable inhuman monsters, but as people like us.
On November 22, 1963, you lost the man who saved your life on October 17, 1962. At the height of the missile crisis, Kennedy's generals and advisors were urging him to launch a first strike attack against Cuba. They assured Kennedy that the Russian missiles in Cuba were not nuclear and were not ready; but that he and they should quietly slip away to the safety of bomb shelters anyway, just to be safe; and then launch an attack, leaving the rest of us out to die. Kennedy thought about it. And then he told them that nobody was going anywhere.
If anyone died, they would be the first to go, sitting as they were in the Whitehouse, the prime target of those Russian missiles. Together they then figured out a safer plan. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense at the time, recently learned from the Russians that the missiles were armed, were ready, were nuclear, and that their commanders were authorized to use them in case of an attack. If you live in the northern hemisphere, the lives of your parents, and your future, were certainly saved by John Kennedy on that day. It matters that his killers be exposed.
In his farewell address, President Eisenhower had warned Kennedy, and the rest of us, of the threat posed to democracy by what Eisenhower called "the military industrial complex." And while Kennedy famously went after the CIA, and refused to commit troops to Vietnam, I always wondered why he didn't more openly attack this military industrial complex. And then I stumbled upon a speech he gave at the United Nations. As you will see in the video, he called upon the Russians, and United Nations, to help him to take on this military industrial complex, in order to "abolish all armies and all weapons."
But he was swept away. And in the years since, millions have died in needless wars, trillions of dollars have been wasted on "defense", and millions more people have lived and died needlessly in poverty. It matters that we lost him.
In 2007, Bruce Willis told Vanity Fair magazine, "They still haven't caught the guy that killed Kennedy. I'll get killed for saying this, but I'm pretty sure those guys are still in power, in some form. The entire government of the United States was co-opted."
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Bruce Willis speaks his mind about JFK
Now Willis probably would not mind my suggesting that he's no genius. At best, his observation is common sense. 80% of the American people agree with him. Indeed, this video, proving that Kennedy was brought down by the most powerful men in the world and their hired thugs, is not based on secret documents. It is all information that has merely been suppressed. Oswald allegedly shot Kennedy from behind. But the day he died, the NY Times carried the story, told by the doctors in Dallas, that Kennedy had an entrance wound in his throat, another in his right temple, and a large gaping exit wound in the back of his head.
After talking to the emergency room doctors, Kennedy's press secretary described, to the assembled press, a shot to the right temple from the right front that went "right through the head." All of the witnesses near the right front, the grassy knoll, described hearing shots from that direction, and dozens of witnesses raced up the knoll in pursuit of the shooters. These witnesses talked to the press. But all of this information has been suppressed for the last 50 years. By whom? Who could?
You will also see in this video the overwhelming best evidence, from the best witnesses, proving beyond a reasonable dispute, that Kennedy's body was stolen from Air Force One, and the wound to his throat was mutilated, before the autopsy. Jackie Kennedy kept watch over an empty casket on the flight from Dallas to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Then the body was quietly taken to Bethesda for the autopsy, arriving 20 minutes before Jackie and the empty casket. Who had the power to arrange this?
Who HAS the power today to suppress all this evidence and to continue to bombard us with ridiculous lies about a lone gunman? It's a short list, isn't it? It doesn't include the mafia, or the Russians, or Castro. It does include the Bush family or rather their masters in Big Oil; the banking elite; the backbone of the military industrial complex. These men, and their successors, carried out the attacks of 9/11. It matters.
Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
John Hankey has been teaching history and English in the LA City Schools for nearly three decades, including alternative approaches that suggest revisions to what passes for "history".
