Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63
A day that will live on in infamy
President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high
Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die
Read moreAssassination
Bob Dylans’ ‘Murder Most Foul’
From America’s greatest living poet, a low-key rumination on the meaning of November 22, 1963.
Dylan joins Robert Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro and a majority of Americans in believing JFK was killed by political enemies.
Or you can listen to the warbling of Chris Matthews.
Dylan illuminates two things brilliantly, I think:
Chris Matthews’ Departure Welcomed By All Serious Students of the JFK Assassination
Doug Horne, former investigator for the Assassination Records Review Board, welcomes the end of Hardball, the CNN talk show hosted by Chris Matthews.
“He was a dinosaur whose departure was long overdue,” Horne writes
Read moreTulsi Gabbard Keeps Good Company on JFK
[This story first appeared in AlterNet on Feb 20, 2019 under the headline, How the Question of Who Killed JFK Emerged in an Unexpected Way on the Campaign Trail.]
On February 17 in Fairfax Virginia, Donald Jeffries, author and talk radio host, asked Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard about a book she had been seen carrying, “JFK and the Unspeakable.” Published in 2008, the book is a Catholic philosopher’s meditation, driven by ethics and facts, about the assassination of a liberal president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, one of the great historical crimes of American politics,
Gabbard replied she had not finished the book She added:
Read moreComing Soon Oliver Stone’s JFK Documentary, ‘Destiny Betrayed’
From Variety
AGC Television, the TV production-distribution division of Stuart Ford’s still fast expanding independent content studio AGC Studios, has landed worldwide rights to another high-profile doc-series which it describes as “probing” and “explosive”: Oliver Stone’s “JFK: Destiny Betrayed.”
The AGC press release says:
Read moreCIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president
(This article, titled “Under CIA Eyes,” first appeared in Counterpunch, Vol. 25 published in January 2020.).
“I was struck by the intimacy and the smallness of the whole surroundings,” said retired CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen after his first visit to Dealey Plaza in November 2019.
Dealey Plaza, a grassy Art Deco entry point to downtown Dallas, is where President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. Hundreds of thousands of people still come from around the world to see the spot where the popular liberal president was ambushed. Many of them have the same reaction to the crime scene: the intimacy, the smallness.
Mowatt-Larssen was not just any tourist.
Read moreCIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: ‘The very top people’
[ICYMI: Part I: A veteran CIA officer analyzes the death of a president.]
“Why am I doing this?” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen asked the audience at the Coalition Against Political Assassinations’ conference in Dallas. “As a CIA officer it’s a little controversial. What is my goal? My goal is to have an answer [about who killed JFK] for myself and my children.” That may sound overly ingenuous to some, but most people in the room, myself included, had the same agenda.
Mowatt-Larssen was nine years old when he heard the news from Dallas.
Read moreCIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: the making of a patsy
[ICYMI Part I : A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president / Part II: ‘The very top people.’ / ]
CIA veteran Rolf Mowatt-Larseen proposed a “thought experiment” to the November 2019 JFK conference in Dallas. He reverse-engineered the lone gunman scenario, posing a question both novel and incisive.
“How can you get away with a really elaborate but very simple plan of deception, to end up in a place where the president is dead and it is blamed on someone else, other than the people who perpetrated it?” he asked. “Not easy.”
Read moreCIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: ‘I’m not privy to who struck John’
[ICYMI: Part I : A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president / Part II: ‘The very top people.’ / Part III: The making of a patsy ]
The killing of Lee Harvey Oswald is another key to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen’s JFK analysis. He argues that one of the conspirators had to have had access to the Mafia bosses who could induce Jack Ruby to eliminate the accused assassin as a witness.
Read moreLehrer on JFK: ‘there may have been a conspiracy’
Jim Lehrer
Former PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer appeared on the Diane Rehm’s NPR radio program yesterday and talked about his suspicions of conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy.
His careful comments broke from the orthodoxies of American journalism.
Science and the ‘single bullet theory’
On the Kennedys And King blog, Millicent Cranor reviews a recent article on the ballistic evidence in JFK’s assassination, which appears in the December 2019 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology.
Read moreNew JFK documents show CIA had ‘very intensive’ interest in Oswald before JFK assassination:
I’m re-upping this post from two years ago, because the point needs emphasizing and praise is due.
The Canadian Broadcasting Company–more than any U.S. media organization–recognized the single most important finding to come out in the very incomplete JFK document release in 2017-18.
The Fifth Estate show on CBC News understood a fact that leading historians resist: Accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was not a “lone nut.” He was the target of CIA surveillance for four years before Kennedy was killed.
Documents released recently by the U.S. National Archives on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination suggest the CIA was watching Lee Harvey Oswald much more closely than previously thought before the fatal shot was fired in Dallas, an author tells The Fifth Estate.Former Washington Post reporter and author Jefferson Morley told The Fifth Estate the official story was that Oswald came out of nowhere and shot the president on Nov. 22, 1963. “What the files show is that’s a cover story. It’s not true. High level CIA officials were paying attention to Oswald from 1959 to November 1963,” said Morley, author of several books on the assassination, the CIA and a JFK website.
The highest of those officials was counterintelligence chief James Angleton.
For the full story on the legendary Angleton, go here.
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Perception management: public relations and the JFK story
Mike Kilroy, communications executive in Los Angeles, has some interesting things to say about the JFK assassination story and the art of public relations. In a presentation to a group of young professionals in the communications industry, Kilroy dissected how the story that President Kennedy had been killed by a pro-Castro communist was disseminated on November 22, 1963. It’s a story of perception management.
You can read Kilroy’s presentation here.
New York Times publishes an erroneous letter about the JFK medical evidence by a libelous reporter
Last month the New York Times published a letter that seriously misstated the JFK medical evidence. Harris Meyer, senior report for Modern Healthcare, called out the Times with a call for a correction. Meyer’s letter contains important information that Dennis Breo, the author of the letter (and the newspaper of record) chose to omit, perhaps because the information calls into question Breo’s reporting on the subject.
Here’s Breo’s letter, “Mysteries, Solved and Unsolved,” in which he claims that he and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) had definitely resolved questions about JFK’s autopsy in 1992
Meyer responds:
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