Peter Lemkin Wrote:Albert Doyle Wrote:Off-Topic: Simkin just showed his true colors on the EF by saying the FBI files might prove the Commission correct. Now I understand the context of DiEugenio's booting.
Which FBI files do you and he refer? The one's about Boggs?!
I just read that thread.
Simkin is actually writing about the Hiss case. What he is saying is that the Venona files--he calls them NSA taps--were accurate about Hiss. And therefore he was really a spy and Chambers was right.
Kai Bird has done some very good work on these Venona taps, and he shows they do not prove what people like Weinstein say they do.
Further, using Thomas Powers,(Richard Helms' official biographer) as Simkin does, to back Weinstein, is sort of like using Hugh Aynesworth to back up someone like James Phelan on the JFK case.
Read this article about Weinstein, its clearly revealing about his methods. His publisher paid the KGB for access to Soviet Cold War docs. And then he would not let anyone else see them. His translator then disagreed with how Weinstein described them in his book, The Haunted Wood:
http://www.thenation.com/article/archive...-weinstein
Further, even though he promised to give all his tapes and transcripts of interviews from his 1978 book on Hiss to the Truman Library, as of the date of that article, 2004, he still had not done so.
And I cannot help but note how Simkin casts off the fine film from 1978 about the Hiss case. The climax of that film is one of the jurors being shown the documents proving that the FBI planted the wrong tyepwriter, on the prosecution to connect Hiss to the ridiculous documents Chambers said he got from Hiss. THe defense never challenged the typewriter in court. If they had, the case would have exploded right then and there and Hiss would have been granted a mistrial. Because some think the FBI actually manufactured the typewriter.
I don't know how he can say the FBI was protecting Hiss. The declassified record shows that the FBI served as a private investigation service for the prosecution. And the typewriter was not the only thing they faked and planted. There were also records of a car sale that Chambers said he and Hiss exchanged. These records were later exposed as ersatz and very likely faked by the Bureau.
To compare the Hiss case with the JFK case is really far out there. They are not at all similar. Everything we get from the FBI shows more and more that Oswald was a patsy. Including the substitution of CE 399.
I am not aware of this new stuff he is talking about released by the FBI. But at this late date, I would look upon it with a jaundiced eye. And to say Chambers is now supported is, to me, pretty hard to accept. Chambers told so many outright lies on the stand, its breathtaking. One of the best books on that case is by the English barrister, The Earl Jowitt. It was one of the first out, in 1953. He exposed Chambers as a pathological liar to such an extent that it permanently impacted my view of that case.
Finally, John ignores the fact that Weinstein was not just exposed as using faulty research, and having his witnesses later deny what he wrote about them, but he later got his ticket punched. The Republicans made him chief archivist at NARA ( in other words he held sway over the JFK collection) and he worked with the CIA through his own group, the Center for Democracy, with the National Endowment for Democracy. This latter was the group that has spent tens of millions in places like Ukraine to ring the USSR with NATO allies. Clearly, his book was a put up job for career advancement. Which he got.
Hiss may or may not have been a spy. But the case is much more ambiguous than he depicts it.
OTOH, Oswald had nothing to do with the killing of President Kennedy. And we can prove that today in spades, nine ways to Sunday.
