JFK Jr

[Jim DiEugenio]

Too funny, make Bob the moderator. What a mess that place is, however there are many really good JFK posters
who I wish would come over here.

Thanks Jan, I get it, the public and private post.

Still waiting to see if Seamus replies to my question. If no one is forthcoming from either
I shall have my answer.

Back to legal matters....I need another vacation, this time at home

Dawn

Dawn, Seamus never wrote about Hankey and JFK Jr. I mean I never asked him to. He never offerd to. At CTKA, or as Fetzer says, CITKA, we generally stick to the four assassinations of the sixties. Maybe the JFK Jr. thing was sabotaged, maybe not. I simply do not have the time or inclination to research that case in any serious way. I think I can be forgiven for that. Four is enough. At least I think so.

But how should that impact on Seamus' work on Hankey's bombastic and very poorly thought out and docmented film on Bush, called JFK 2. I don' t understand the logic of this. If say I like Tony Summers' book on JFK, yet I don't like his book on say 9-11 or Marilyn Monroe, why is one opinion and analysis reliant on the other?

Seamus did a very nice and thorough job on Hankey's very bad film. His work on that should stand by itself. Independent of whatever Hankey did on Kennedy Jr. Independent of whatever anyone thinks of him personally. And let me add this: I edited that long essay. And it was even longer than what we published. I must have cut out at least ten pages. Not because it was not good, but because it was simply too long. That is how many errors Hankey made.

But beyond all the many errors this guy made, he also went clearly beyond the pale when he made up stuff, literally. And then wanted us to accept it as fact. There is simply no excuse for that in this field. Yet, Hankey did it twice. First, by stuffing words in Colby's mouth which he did not say. And second, by creating a scene at the end in which Bush takes a flechette gun into Hoover's office and threatens to kill him. This kind of stuff is simply goofy. And to think that no one called this guy out before on this stuff? This is why CTKA is valuable. Since we review almost everything. Its not easy doing this stuff. I know Seamus spent a lot of time writing that long essay. And I spent hours going through it. But its necessary, since Hankey's film is really not the way anyone should go in this field. There is simply too much good stuff out there now.

Now, let me add. Does this mean that Bush was not involved with the CIA in 1963? Maybe even the Bay of Pigs? No it does not. I think he was involved with both. But has Hankey demonstrated with any degree of real evidence that Bush was involved with the Kennedy assassination? No. None that I can see. I mean if you cannot even understand that Zapata was the peninsula next to Playa Giron, or that Hunt was not working for Nixon in 1963, or that Hoover was not at all a hero in the JFK case, but a real villian, then I mean what is your work worth?

Seamus' essay was so trenchant and so damaging to Hankey that he has now taken to saying that 1.) He really did not name all that many errors, and 2.) It was a set up job in the sense it was a hatchet job.

These two assertions are complete baloney.

If you count all the errors of fact and attribution Hankey makes, it is well over sixty instances. Which is incredible for an 87 minute film. He never even looked up really easy stuff, like the actual name of the Church Committee.

Seamus and I had no strong feelings about Hankey one way of the other. One night, Seamus watched his movie online and started e mailing me questions about it. After about four of these I said, what are you talking about? He said, its in Hankey's film, JFK 2. I said, are you serious? He said yeah look at it yourself.

So I did. Seamus was right. Hankey made so many fundamental errors it was embarassing. And many of them were just lazy. All he had to do was go to a local library to clear them up. He didn't. And then he blames Seamus and me for pointing them out.

I think Seamus' essay is one of the best things we have published. It was a very in depth and thorough job that few people would take the time to do. And there is much valuable info in it.

Do I wish we did not have to print it? Yep. I wish all work in this field was like JFK and the Unspeakable. Which was a real pleasure to write. Unfortunately that is not the case. Not even close. And to me what Seamus did with Hankey, and also the Majestic Papers hoax, is as necessary as what I did with Bugliosi and Gary Mack.

Having said all that, does this mean that Bush was not involved with the assassination. Nope. It just means that Hankey has not proven it at all. And the most ludicrous scene in the film is when he shows Bush being electrocuted because of the evidence in his film. I mean, whew.

So Seamus did us all a good deed by exposing the pretension and bombast that the film really was. I wish someone had done it earlier. But it shows how threadbare our peer approval process is in this field. Seamus filled that vacuum in this case.