ustxtxb_obs_1993_12_10_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

BEEFY Ts 100% COTTON Black on White Design on back Specify L or XL A SIZZLING GIFT FOR YOUR FAVORITE HIGHTOWER FAN Send $13 to A SADDLE B 1351URRS P.O. llottrr Then high School Love TX 78711 \(price includes postage & Fl .’ DL. Box “My assessment is this: That debrief was absolutely routine, nothing in it, something they should have done, they were doing. They debriefed a marine like Oswald in May of 1961 who had just gone over to see his relatives. So the idea that they would invent this story: ‘Oh, we are not interested in Oswald at all,’ which is clearly not true when you look at these files … to cover up a routine debrief? … It doesn’t make any sense that they would lie to that extent about a stupid little debrief, so my sense Newman’s theory, if you want to call it that is that lie was concocted to cover something far more troubling, which is why the agency charged with investigating counterintelligence and espionage to protect U.S. interests abroad failed, asleep at the switch, for 14 months they failed to investigate this ‘man at a secret base who defects and admits that he was going to give the Russians military secrets. The Navy and the FBI got it. They investigated him right away. Why didn’t the agency? Very strange. “I’m going to argue in my book that somebody is interfering and manipulating Oswald’s file prior to the assassination. I’m not prepared to say exactly what happened. I’m still hot on the trail of this thing.” So there is much to be learned from the documents in the vaults of the CIA, the FBI and other government agencies, he said, but there’s no easy way to go about it. “It’s really roll up your sleeves and get the elbow grease out and burn the midnight candle. … but that’s hard, slogging, historical work. It’s not something you can write a spiffy thing about and think that you’ve done it.” It is now pretty well established from recent disclosures that the Warren Commission was set up not to get to the truth of who shot John Kennedy, but to prevent finger pointing to a broader conspiracy that might get the United States into war with the Soviet Union. Whether the intelligence community may have had other reasons for sealing Oswald as the lone assassin is another question. The Washington Post recently reported that the Commission was not told that the CIA was plotting to assassinate Castro up to the day of Kennedy’s assassination. It was not told of earlier plots to kill Castro with the help of the Mafia. And it was not told of the CIA’s files on Kennedy’s affair with a woman close to two of the Mafia’s anti-Castro plotters: Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and his lieutenant, Johnny Roselli. The FBI made what Congressional investigators later called “severely limited” efforts to determine whether elements of organized crime might have killed Kennedy. Field agents checked with their informants and reviewed wiretaps of some Mafia figures. Officials in charge of a special FBI division set up in 1961 to investigate organized crime were neither consulted nor asked to help, the Post reported. What lessons has our government drawn from the Kennedy assassination fiasco? Other than putting Kennedy’s successors in a protective cocoon, which has further isolated presidents from the people [without stopping assassination attempts], it is hard to tell any good: In the intervening years we have gone through Vietnam, the assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Watergate, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, Iran-Contra, the War on Drugs, the invasions of Grenada and Panama, BCCI, the savings and loan bailout and Iraqgate, all the while training right-wing military leaders from Central and South America the fine arts of how to suppress popular uprisings, at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. [Some distinguished alumni: General Raoul Cedras of Haiti; Rene Emilio Ponce, the Salvadoran defense minister implicated in the murder of Jesuit priests; and General Manuel Noriega of Panama.] In events as current as the morning newspaper, the Miami Herald reported the CIA, which has close ties with the Haitian military, spread false reports to Congress that Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been treated for depression and was still mentally unstable while Aristide was seeking President Clinton’s support to help him return to Haiti. On the home front, openness is not a term we associate with the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, as illustrated during the siege of the Branch Davidians earlier this year near Waco, when bungling was followed by dissembling by government officials. The investigation of the CIA and its role in subverting foreign governments is inextricably linked with the Kennedy investigation and that case is no more closed in 1993 than it was when the Warren Commission’s Report was issued in September 1964, but it depends on a stubbornly skeptical public to keep it open. Phil Cassidy, a 41-year-old electrician from New York City, said he had become interested in the assassination five years ago, after the last time Dan Rather tried to close the case. Cassidy has an answer for those who compare the assassination researchers to Star Trekkies and suggest that they get a life: “Maybe the people who get a job and have families [and ignore the assassination] are the escapists.” Assassination Bibliography New books on the assassination include Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, by Gerald Posner \(Random Cause of Death, by Cyril Wecht Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne and other cases; Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter explores the long-established ties between official and private power centers; The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi \(Thunder’s Select Committee charges the chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, with steering the investigation toward organized crime and away from renegade agents within the CIA; JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness, by Bill Sloan Hill’s version of the events; The Killing of the President: The Complete Photographic Record of the JFK Assassination, the Conspiracy and the Cover-Up, by Robert Groden ing in the Times Book Review, calls a “coffeetable book … in which these ghastly exhibits may be savored in full color”; Killing the Truth: Deceit and Deception in the JFK Case, by Harrison Edward Livingstone \(Carroll & but now says many assassination authors are actually “disinformation specialists” protecting conspiracy masterminds; The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell allegedly tried to thwart the plot and then tried to remove himself from the conspiracy; Passport to Assassination: The Never-BeforeTold Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him, by Oleg M. confirms that the KGB was suspicious of Oswald’s attempt to defect; Who Shot JFK?, an accessible guide to the plot lines; and Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination: An A-to-Z Encyclopedia, by Michael Benson \(Citadel/ of nearly 1,500 “essential people” connected with the assassination. In addition to the Warren Commission Report, republished in 1992 by Marboro Books, other recent additions to the Kennedy assassination bibliography include Accessories After the Fact by Sylvia Meagher \(Vintage Books, Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers Crossfire, by Jim Marrs High Treason, by Robert Groden and Harrison Edward LivingReasonable Doubt, by .Spy Saga, The Ruby Coverup, by Seth Kantor \(Zebra Best Evidence, by David Lifton Plausible Denial, by Fatal Hour, by G. Robert Blakey and Richard Marina & Lee, by Priscilla Johnson McMillan \(Harper & Row, THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7