Since I recently had an exchange with Peter Dale Scott about this issue, it
may be useful for me share a (slightly abridged) version of our exchange.
A few of our more personal remarks have (appropriately) been removed.
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:12:47 -0500 [10/23/2009 01:12:47 PM CST]
From:
jfetzer@d.umn.edu
To: "Peter Dale Scott" <pdscottweb@hotmail.com>
Cc:
jfetzer@d.umn.edu
Subject: RE: The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
Peter,
Giving this matter more thought, I would be keenly interested in knowing
how they were able to reject Brad's identifications. Since he did this
from photographs, but he had met them personally, unless they were in a
comparable position in relation to the same photographs and had Brad's
familiarity with them, I am not quite sure how they could establish he
was wrong. I have known Brad for quite a few years now, and he and I
have had quite a few lunches and other meetings together. . . . Morley
and Talbot may be correct, but I would be fascinated to know how they
became convinced he was wrong, especially since altering photographs
is not a challenge, once the agency became aware that they had been
identified. Again, I am not asserting that Brad is right and they are
wrong. What I want to know is how they can be sure that they are
right and he is wrong. This is a question about methodology and even
epistemology, if I may inquire.
Warm regards,
Jim
Quoting
jfetzer@d.umn.edu:
Peter,
That's fascinating! Thanks for letting me know.
Warm regards,
Jim
Quoting "Peter Dale Scott" <pdscottweb@hotmail.com>:
Dear Jim,
. . . .
Jeff Morley and David Talbot researched at length the Joannides spotting
in the Ambassador and rejected it -- people who knew him rejected the
Morales spotting, the third man identified was already dead in 1968.
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:31:27 -0500
From:
jfetzer@d.umn.edu
To:
pdscottweb@hotmail.com
CC:
jfetzer@d.umn.edu
Subject: Re: Fw: The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
Peter,
I received this note today with a copy of your recent piece in GLOBAL
RESEARCH. Do you know Bradley Ayers, THE ZENITH SECRET? He noticed
Joannides in photographs taken at the Ambassador Hotel. I mention it
in the final paragraph of my review of RECLAIMING HISTORY, which I am
attaching for reference. . . .
Warm regards,
Jim
----- Forwarded message from
jfetzer@d.umn.edu -----
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:21:18 -0500
From:
jfetzer@d.umn.edu
Subject: Re: Fw: The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges
CIA Deceptions
To: "Mike Montesano" <mike1mo@yahoo.com>
Cc: "John Hankey" <xjhankeyx@yahoo.com>,
jfetzer@d.umn.edu
Mike,
Thanks for the note and the copy of the article by Peter Dale Scott.
I watched some of the History Channel's stuff, which was a mixed bag.
Some footage in the "3 Shots" piece I had not seen before. You are
right about Nixon and Bush having hazy memories about whether or not
they were in Dallas. Nixon flew out that morning and in Jesse Curry's
JFK ASSASSINATION FILE, there is a photo of G.H.W. Bush in front of
the Book Depository in early-to-mid-afternoon. Both appear to have
been involved. If you haven't already read it, see if you can find James
Douglass, JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE, which is an excellent study.
Best wishes,
Jim
Quoting "Mike Montesano" <mike1mo@yahoo.com>:
I don't know if this means anything to you guys (I have not read it)
but figured I should pass it on. Also, THE HISTORY CHANNEL had been
airing several shows concerning the assassination etc. On one of
them (Which one I don't recall because it was late and I was very
tired) they showed footage of Nixon and George Bush Sr getting off
Air Force One and the news reporter stated Nixon and Congressman
George Bush getting off Air Force One. They were apparently getting
off the front, while Kennedy etc was getting off the back? I'm not
a scholar on this whole thing and might have facts confused, but I
have heard others state that Nixon didn't recall where he was that
day and Bush stated that he was not in Texas, but he gave a place
other that he was at. Any ways, thanks.
Mike
--- On Wed, 10/21/09, Global Research E-Newsletter
<crgeditor@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Global Research E-Newsletter <crgeditor@yahoo.com>
Subject: The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
To:
mike1mo@yahoo.com
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 6:45 PM
The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
By Peter Dale Scott
URL of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=15752
Global Research, October 21, 2009
The New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by
Scott Shane about the CIA’s defiance of a court order to release
documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its
so-called Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer
for a Cuban exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public
engagements with Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald
allegedly killed Kennedy. For over six years a former Washington
Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, has been suing the CIA for the
release of these documents. [1]
Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more
newsworthy than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971
publication of the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for
most people to read) on the front page of the New York Times.
The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed,
perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA
has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK
assassination.
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the
Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro
and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario
Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a
month in C.I.A. support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a
directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of
ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found
Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with
him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local
radio station.
That the October 17 story was published at all is astonishing.
According to Lexis Nexis, there have only been two earlier
references to the CIA Joannides documents controversy in any major
U.S. newspaper: a brief squib in the New York Daily News in 2003
announcing the launching of the case, and a letter to the New York
Times in 2007 (of which the lead author was Jeff Morley) complaining
about the Times’ rave review of a book claiming that Oswald was a
lone assassin.
(The review had said inter alia that “''Conspiracy theorists''
should be ''ridiculed, even shunned... marginalized the way we've
marginalized smokers.'' The letter pointed out in response that
those suspecting conspiracy included Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon,
Robert Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover.)
The New York Times has systematically regulated the release of any
facts about the Kennedy assassination, ever since November 25, 1963,
when it first declared Oswald, the day after his death, to have been
the “assassin” of JFK. A notorious example was the deletion, between
the early and the final edition of a Times issue, of a paragraph in
a review of a book about the JFK assassination, making the obvious
point that “MYSTERIES PERSIST.” [2]
Apparently there was similar jockeying over the positioning of the
Scott Shane story. In some east coast editions it ran on page
eleven, with a trivializing introductory squib, "Food for Conspiracy
Theorists." In the California edition, headlined “C.I.A. Is Still
Cagey About Oswald Mystery,” it was on page one above the fold.
One can assume that the Times decision to run the story was a
momentous one not made casually. The same can probably be said of
another recent remarkable editorial decision, to publish Tom
Friedman’s op-ed on September 29 about the “very dangerous” climate
now in America, “the same kind of climate here that existed in
Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.”
Friedman did not mention JFK at all, and his most specific reference
was to a recent poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama
be killed?” [3] Four days later the Wall Street Journal expressed
similar concern, adding to the “poll on Facebook asking whether the
president should be assassinated, a column on a conservative Web
site suggesting a military coup is in the works.” [4]
Friedman’s column broke a code of silence about the threats to Obama
that had been in place ever since two redneck white supremacists
(Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell) were arrested in August 2008 for a
plot to assassinate Obama with scoped bolt-action rifles. Andrew
Gumbel’s story about them ran in the London Independent on November
16, 2008; of the fifteen related news stories in Lexis Nexis, only
one, a brief one, is from a U.S. paper.
It is possible to take at face value the concern expressed by
Friedman in his column. The Boston Globe, a New York Times
affiliate, reported on October 18 that “The unprecedented number of
death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups,
and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US
Secret Service.” [5]
But there may have been a higher level of concern in the normally
pro-war Wall Street Journal’s reference to a military coup. Such
talk on a conservative web site is hardly newsworthy. More alarming
is the report by Robert Dreyfuss in the October 29 Rolling Stone
that Obama is currently facing an ultimatum from the Pentagon and
Joint Chiefs: either provide General McChrystal with the 40,000
additional troops he has publicly demanded, or “face a full-scale
mutiny by his generals...The president, it seems, is battling two
insurgencies: one in Afghanistan and one cooked up by his own
generals.” [6]
One can only guess at what led the New York Times to publish a story
about CIA obstinacy over documents about the JFK assassination. One
explanation would be the similarities between the painful choices
that Obama now faces in Afghanistan – to escalate, maintain a losing
status quo, or begin to withdraw – and the same equally painful
choices that Kennedy in 1963 faced in Vietnam. [7] More and more
books in recent years have asked if some disgruntled hawks in the
CIA and Pentagon did not participate in the assassination which led
to a wider Vietnam War. [8]
Six weeks before Kennedy’s murder, the Washington News published an
extraordinary attack on the CIA’s “bureaucratic arrogance” and
obstinate disregard of orders... “If the United States ever
experiences a `Seven Days in May’ it will come from the CIA...” one
U.S. official commented caustically. (“Seven Days in May” is a
fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the
U.S. Government.) [9]
The story was actually a misleading one, but it was a symptom of the
high-level rifts and infighting that were becoming explosive over
Vietnam inside the Kennedy administration. The New York Times story
about the CIA on October 17 can also be seen as a symptom of rifts
and infighting. One must hope that the country has matured enough
since 1963 to avoid a similarly bloody denouement.
Notes
1. “C.I.A. Is Cagey About '63 Files Tied to Oswald,” New York Times,
October 17, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/us/17inquire.html.
2. Jerry Policoff, The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy,” in
Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The
Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House/Vintage,
1976), 268.
3. Friedman, in decrying attacks on presidential legitimacy,
recalled that “The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from
Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” It is worth recalling
also that the public outcry about Whitewater was encouraged
initially by a series of stories by Jeff Gerth, since largely
discredited, in the New York Times. See Gene Lyons, “Fool for
Scandal: How the New York Times Got Whitewater Wrong,” Harper’s,
October 1994.
4.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125452861657560895.html.
5. Bryan Bender, “Secret Service strained as leaders face more
threats Report questions its role in financial investigations,”
Boston Globe, October 18, 2009,
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washin...e_threats/.
6. Robert Dreyfuss, “The Generals’ Revolt: As Obama rethinks
America’s failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies:
the Taliban and the Pentagon.” Rolling Stone, October 29, 41.
Several other articles entitled “The Generals’ Revolt” have been
published since 2003, including at least two earlier this year and a
number in 2006, when retired generals’ pushed successfully for the
removal of Rumsfeld over his handling of the Vietnam War.
7. Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), 266.
8. See for example James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He
Died & Why It Matters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
9. Washington Daily News, October 2, 1963; discussed in Peter Dale
Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War
(Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 286.
© Copyright Peter Dale Scott, Global Research, 2009
The url address of this article is:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=15752
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