20-09-2009, 09:51 AM
The predilection of the CIA and FBI for film metaphors and similes when rewriting inconvenient testimony bears remark. Two examples:
1) In mid-1964, the CIA used two editions of a short-lived magazine Canadian magazine – entitled, with characteristic irony, Liberty - to rewrite the eyewitness testimony of an Elm Street eyewitness called Norman Similas. His initial testimony had appeared in late editions of the Toronto Star on the evening of November 22. I won’t bore you with the details of that original description. Suffice to say, it bore no relation whatever to the Liberty version. What is germane in this context is how the Agency had recourse – and not for the first or last time – to metaphors and similes derived from film in the course of the rewrite:
[*Extracts from Norman Similas, as told to Ken Armstrong, “The Dallas Puzzle: Part 1,” Liberty, July 15, 1964, p.20, as reproduced in Harold Weisberg’s Photographic Whitewash: Suppressed Kennedy Assassination Pictures (Self-published: Frederick, Md., 1976)]
2) Another fine specimen of the technique is to be found in the FBI version of the testimony of Nina Rhodes, an eyewitness to the murder of RFK. Interviewed on July 8, 1968, Rhodes only discovered the extent to which her G-man interlocutor had falsified her observations in 1992. In amongst the fabrications, we find this little gem:
[*William Klaber & Philip H. Melanson. Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (NY: St. Martin’s Press, paperback edition, June 1998), p.141]
1) In mid-1964, the CIA used two editions of a short-lived magazine Canadian magazine – entitled, with characteristic irony, Liberty - to rewrite the eyewitness testimony of an Elm Street eyewitness called Norman Similas. His initial testimony had appeared in late editions of the Toronto Star on the evening of November 22. I won’t bore you with the details of that original description. Suffice to say, it bore no relation whatever to the Liberty version. What is germane in this context is how the Agency had recourse – and not for the first or last time – to metaphors and similes derived from film in the course of the rewrite:
Quote:“More than seven months have passed since the horrors of Dallas. Never a day passes but what the projector has not flipped in my mind, and the scenes tumble out in sequence after sequence…There is a fade out and I’m next standing…*”
[*Extracts from Norman Similas, as told to Ken Armstrong, “The Dallas Puzzle: Part 1,” Liberty, July 15, 1964, p.20, as reproduced in Harold Weisberg’s Photographic Whitewash: Suppressed Kennedy Assassination Pictures (Self-published: Frederick, Md., 1976)]
2) Another fine specimen of the technique is to be found in the FBI version of the testimony of Nina Rhodes, an eyewitness to the murder of RFK. Interviewed on July 8, 1968, Rhodes only discovered the extent to which her G-man interlocutor had falsified her observations in 1992. In amongst the fabrications, we find this little gem:
Quote:“Everything appeared to her like still frames in a stop-action movie…”*
[*William Klaber & Philip H. Melanson. Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (NY: St. Martin’s Press, paperback edition, June 1998), p.141]