The conference will be held in Washington, D.C., at the Omni Shoreham Hotel the weekend of October 20-22, 1995. The cost of attending depends on how long, and where, you stay. For more information call the Conference Hotline at (202) 310-1858.
COPA has issued a call for papers concerning new analysis and evidence, based on independent investigation and/or newly released documents. Abstracts (500 words or less) must be submitted for review by August 1, 1995. COPA requests that abstracts be sent, in Microsoft Word on Mac floppy, Word Perfect on IBM compatible floppy, or ASCII, to:
Walt Brown, Ph.D.
c/o Coalitions on Political Assassinations
PO Box 772
Washington, D.C. 20044FAX: (202) 293-3218 (after 6pm and on weekends)
More info: (202) 785-5299
An awards dinner honoring outstanding researchers is scheduled for Saturday night, October 21. "Lifetime Achievement" awards will be presented.
The Assassination Records Review Board is expected to be represented at the conference. The exact nature of the Board's participation is uncertain at this time.
The keynote speaker has yet to be announced.
A free seminar on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King will be conducted for high school and college students.
Never Again! is Weisberg's answer to the American Medical Association's 1992 endorsement of the Warren Commission. The AMA asserted that year, at a news conference and in its influential journal, that new interviews with the doctors who performed the autopsy on President Kennedy proved conclusively that JFK was shot from behind.
"I can state without concern or question that President Kennedy was struck and killed by two, and only two, bullets fired from one high-velocity rifle," said Dr. George Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Assocation, or JAMA. "The first bullet entered the back of the neck...the second bullet entered the back of the head and exploded the right side of the head, destroying the brain with a surely lethal wound. No other bullets struck the president."
These comments and the JAMA article touched off a firestorm of protest from the research community. In Never Again!, Weisberg declares that never in the long history of Warren Commission apologizing has there been a defense "as surprising, as unusual, or as improper as that by the American Medical Association."
Weisberg says that Lundberg's comments in particular, which came a week before the JAMA article was published, were "shockingly innaccurate and false. It was overtly political. It was propaganda, not medical news."
The impact of Never Again! remains to be seen. As with his previous books on the assassination, Weisberg limits his analysis to official records--the same records, he states, that were "readily available to [autopsists] Humes and Boswell and to Lundberg" and to Dennis Breo, JAMA's "at large" reporter who actually wrote the controversial articles. Needless to say, Weisberg has come to some vastly different conclusions.
The prose style of Never Again! is typically dense, but not as dense as previous Weisberg books. As he has done in virtually everything else he has published, Weisberg does not fail to remind the reader that he wrote the first book analyzing the Warren Commission material--Whitewash, which appeared in 1965. He also takes potshots at others working in the field, as he has done before. Mark Lane "wanted it believed [he] had done all the work" in discrediting the Warren Commission, Weisberg says, and director Oliver Stone said "anything at all that seemed likely to get him and his movie [JFK] attention. He lied from the very begining..."
These are minor points, however. More important is the fact that Never Again! is in the stores at last. (Weisberg took time out from writing this book to write Case Open, his answer the Gerald Posner's book.) The absurd JAMA statements are being confronted by a heavyweight.
Oddly, Never Again! has no index. One is listed in the book's table of contents, however, and the index does exist--it was just omitted, somehow, from this first edition. It is hoped future editions will restore it.
This seems passing strange, for spiney Norman has long been considered a friend of the critical community. But maybe he has been creeping toward a lone nut conclusion all along.
Way back in 1966, Mailer seemed very much in the conspiracy camp. In a review of Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement, he wrote, "I will say indeed the odds are that Oswald was an undercover agent." That doesn't say 'conspiracy,' of course, but he concluded with a definite anti-Warren stance: "The solution to President Kennedy's murder will come not from legal or government commissions, but from minds deeply grounded first and last in the mysteries of hypothesis, uncorrupted logic, and metaphor."
Years later, in an introduction to The JFK Assassination, Mailer wrote that author Carl Oglesby "is one of the few contemporaries I read for the pleasure of clarifying my own thinking." Hmm--last we checked, Oglesby still believed in, and wrote convincingly of, a likely plot to kill JFK.
Not long after writing the intro to Oglesby's book, Mailer wrote a more or less favorable review of Oliver Stone's JFK,and observed: "The Establishment has found that Oswald-as-the-lone-assassin serves a multitude of useful purposes." Apparently Norman has found it useful too, because the lone assassin scenario appears to be at the bottom line of Oswald's Tale.
We'll admit right here and now that we say "appears to be at the bottom line" because we haven't read Mailer's new book--and don't intend to. What we did read, and it was enough, were excerpts from Mailer's book in a recent Parade, the magazine that, in the States at least, shows up with your Sunday newspaper.
Cut to the chase: the excerpt begins with Mailer's question, "Did Oswald do it?" His answer: a wishy-washy Yes. Further on there is this absurd, self-serving comment: "Evidence, by itself, will never provide the answer to a mystery." In other words, forget all those indicators of other gunmen in Dealey Plaza-- published by the Warren Commission--and let me tell you why Oswald acted alone.
As the Parade excerpt continues, the literary lion embraces every Warren Commission/Warren Defender cliché in the book: "...We are dealing with Oswald. He could be hysterical on one occasion and, on another, the coolest man in the room"..."...it is too difficult...to believe that others could have chosen him to be the rifleman in a conspiracy"..."There is whole consensus that he saw JFK as, relatively speaking, a good President, and he liked him...[but] given Oswald's reflexive impulse to lie at the drop of a hat, one could question whether he was not paying lip service precisely to conceal any hint, especially to his wife, Marina, that he had...assassination already in his mind"..."His personal attitude toward Kennedy had little to do...with his act." And on and on Norman goes, to this mighty conclusion: "It would have wounded Oswald to the quick if he had known that history would not see him as a hero but as an anti-hero."
Mailer spent a couple of months in the former Soviet Union talking to people who knew Oswald when he lived there, and this is supposed to give Mailer's conclusions extra weight. We don't buy it. Why are these former acquaintences, who are rooting back thirty-five years into their memories, more believable than Oswald, the supposed compulsive liar?
It must be mentioned that Mailer's collaborator in this book was Lawrence Schiller--the same Lawrence Schiller who brought us O.J. Simpson's I Want to Tell You, and, with Richard Warren Lewis, a loathsome book called The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. This latter volume appeared in the mid-sixties and took venomous swipes at the leading anti-Warren critics of the day.
Thanks a pantload, Norman!
To: Major P.J. Trosclair
Date: November 27, 1963
From: Sgt. H. Austin & Det. R. Frey
Subject: Relative to Oswald Case - Interview with one Sidney Edward Voebel, this date.
The undersigned officers respectfully report that at about 11:45 a.m. this date, Wednesday, November 27, 1963, they entered the Quality Florists, located 4916 Canal Street, for the purpose of meeting with and interviewing Sidney Edward Voebel relative to his knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Sidney Voebel identified himself to the officers and stated that he is 23 years of age, D.O.B. 4/24/40. He stated that he was born in New Orleans and has resided at 4916 Canal Street, the Quality Florists, owned by his parents, since that time.
Voebel stated that he attended Beauregard Junior High School until 1955, and that he met Oswald while at this school as Oswald attended school there also. Voebel stated that he joined the Civil Air Patrol Cadets at Moisant Airport in 1954 or 1955 (not sure). Voebel asked Oswald to join also and Oswald did join a short time after Voebel, but only stayed about one month. Voebel stated that Oswald bought his uniform and that he, Voebel, believes Oswald received his membership card.
Voebel further stated that he first met Oswald in 1954 or 1955 and knew him for about 1 1/2 years. Voebel stated that he took music lessons at Werleins on Canal Street and would go to Oswald's home at 126 Exchange Place to see Oswald on these dates. Voebel also stated that Oswald had mentioned distributing advertising circulars while in school. When asked if Oswald ever expressed political views to Voebel, Voebel stated that Oswald had not, and that he, Voebel, believed Oswald had no leftist political views until later in his life. Voebel stated that he believed Oswald attended a party (not sure) at the home of Dave Ferrie (Captain) right after the members of the C.A.P.C. received their stripes.
Voebel was questioned about his knowledge of David Ferrie and stated that he knew very little. Voebel stated that Ferrie took over the C.A.P.C. at Moisant Airport about 6 months after he, Voebel, had joined. Voebel stated that Ferrie seemed like a "character," that he rode a motorcycle, and Voebel stated that he had heard that Ferrie was a brilliant man with many degrees. When asked if Ferrie had organized any flying group other than the C.A.P.C., Voebel stated that he did not know of any. When asked if [he] had ever heard of the Eagle Squadron, Voebel stated that he had not. When asked if he, Voebel, had ever flown with Dave Ferrie, Voebel stated that he had not, but other boys had made local flights with him. When asked if he knew of Ferrie flying on long trips, out of the country, Voebel stated that he did not.
Voebel gave the name of one other person, a member of the C.A.P.C. in 1955, as John Rondell (not sure of the spelling of the last name). Voebell stated that Capt. Ferrie wanted Rondell to get a radio license for use in the C.A.P.C.
Voebel stated that he remained a member of the C.A.P.C. about one year.
Other facts obtained from Voebel relative to himself are as follows:
Voebel was graduated from Fortier High School in 1958. He then attended the Marion Military Institute, Marion, Alabama, in 1959 and 1960. He then served six months in the U.S. Army, taking his basic at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas, and serving the remained [sic] time and being discharged from Ft. Gordon, Georgia. Voebel presently resides at 4916 Canal Street, where he assists in the operation of the Quality Florists at that address. Voebel is presently in the Reserves, Unit 7515, at Camp Leroy Johnson, New Orleans.
Voebel also stated that he has been interviewed by members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and by members of the news media. Voebel was also interviewed publicly on WWL-TV a day or so after the arrest of Lee Oswald in Dallas, Texas.
This interview was concluded at about 12:10 P.M.
Respectfully,
Sgt. Horace J. Rustin Jr.
Det. Robert N. Frey
Lincoln was Kennedy's secretary from 1953, when he started his first term in the Senate until his 1963 assassination. She was in the Dallas motorcade when he was shot.
She wrote two best-selling books, My 12 Years With John F. Kennedy and Kennedy and Johnson.
First, a lift from Anthony Summers' "Conspircy," concerning the alleged Corsican Connection to the JFK assassination.
A final solution to the mysteries of the assassination may now be impossible. In 1988, however, the FBI failed to pursue a lead that appears, on its face, to be unique, one that might conceivably identify the killers of President Kennedy and perhaps even bring some of them to justice. It is the result of years of dogged research by a California writer, Steve Rivele.
In 1985, Rivele became interested in the CIA's Executive Action program--revealed by the then Senator Walter Mondale following Intelligence Committee inquiries a decade earlier. Executive Action was the detailed planning, in 1961, for the assassination of foreign leaders, and it included the recruiting of a man known only by the code name "QJ/WIN," a foreign citizen with a criminal background recruited in Europe--as the Intelligence Committee described him.
Rivele's research plunged him deep into the history of the CIA's perilous collaboration with organized crime, at home and abroad. It led to a man called Christian David, a fifty-eight year old Frenchman nearing the end of a heroin trafficking sentence in the French Connection network, and the leader of the Corsican network in South America known as the Latin Connection. He had also worked for intelligence services, including the French SAC.
When Rivele interviewed David he was awaiting extradition to France, to stand trial for murdering a policeman, a killing committed in connection with the murder of Mohammed Ben Barka, the Morrocan politician. David told Rivele he had information on the Kennedy assassination. In return for this information, he said, he wanted a deal with the U.S. government that would block his return to France. For his part, he would tell all he knew to a grand jury.
Rivele found David an attorney. A federal judge temporarily halted David's extradition, ordering that he be taken off a plane bound for Paris and held in New York City. Although advised of the Kennedy assassination aspect of the case, the federal government got the judge to lift the stay of extradition and David was hastily flown to Paris. In prison there since 1985, he has been interviewed repeatedly by Rivele, as well as by James Lesar, a Washington attorney.
In May or June 1963, according to David, he was asked by Antoine Guérini, the Corsican Mafia boss in Marseilles, to accept a contract to kill "a highly placed American politician." Guérini made it obvious whom he meant, calling the politician "la plus grosse légume"--the "biggest vegetable." The President was to be killed on U.S. territory. David turned down the contract, on the ground that it was too dangerous.
The contract, said David, was accepted by Lucien Sarti, a Corsican drug trafficker and killer, and two other members of the Marseilles mob, whom he refused to name. They were, he said, "spécialistes de tir"-- "sharpshooters." He learned what happened some time after the assassination, at a 1965 meeting in Buenos Aires. Present were Sarti, a drug trafficker called Michèle Nicoli, David, and two others. This is how the assassination was carried out, as David tells it.
Sarti and the other two assassins flew from Marseilles to Mexico City in the fall of 1963. They stayed there several weeks, and were then driven to the United States border, which they crossed at Brownsville, Texas, using Italian passports. They were met at the border by a representative of the Chicago Mafia, who conversed with them in Italian. He drove them to a house in Dallas.
In Dallas, according to David, the assassins took photographs of Dealey Plaza, and made a detailed plan for the killing. The plan was for a cross fire. On November 22, David told Rivele, three gunmen were in position. Two were in buildings to the rear of the President when he was hit--one of them "almost on the horizontal". The third killer, Sarti, dressed in some sort of uniform as a disguise, was "on the little hill to the front, the one with the fence." He had considered shooting from the railroad bridge, directly in front of the President, but found it too exposed and moved to better cover.
Four shots were fired that day, according to David, quoting Sarti and another of the assassins. The first shot, from the rear, struck President Kennedy in the back. The second shot missed, and hit "the other man in the car." The third shot, from Sarti on the hill, struck the President in the head, killing him. Sarti used "an explosive bullet", the only member of the group to use that kind of ammunition. The fourth shot missed the car altogether.
After the assassination, according to David's allegations, the murderers laid low in Dallas for about two weeks. Then--says David--they were then flown out of the country, the last part of the journey by private aircraft, to Montreal.
Asked who could corroborate his story, David suggested Rivele locate Michèle Nicoli, who had also been with the group in Buenos Aires in 1965, when the assassination was discussed. Rivele made contact with Nicoli, after a lengthy search, with their help of Michael Tobin, a high official in the Drug Enforcement Administration. Nicoli, who testified against French Connection members in 1972, was living under the Witness Protection Program, using a new name. The DEA official vouched for Nicoli's truthfulness in the strongest terms.
Rivele's contacts with NIcoli took place over many months, and he proved extremely reluctant to talk. In the end, however, he told both Rivele and Tobin essentially the same story as had David. So far as could be ascertained, he and David had not been in touch with each other since the early seventies.
Lucien Sarti, the alleged leader of the assassination team, was shot dead by Mexican police in 1972. The identity of his two accomplices remains unclear as of this writing. Apparently they are still alive.
By late 1987, after his own meeting with Nicoli, DEA official Tobin was satisfied--because of Nicoli's proven reliability--that the matter should be pursued. He considered the legalities of the situation and decided that--since in 1963 it was not a federal offense to assassinate the President--the assassination was covered by conspiracy and civil rights statutes. On the basis of those laws, he believed, a federal grand jury could be impaneled and indictments sought through a U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C.
In December 1987 Tobin formally notified his superiors that he wanted to conduct an investigation, drawing on Nicoli's statements. DEA officials said the matter was outside his jurisdiction and turned over the information to an Assistant Director of the FBI. In Paris, a U.S. embassy official made contact with the French lawyer acting for Christian David, the witness in jail in France. But that was that. By spring 1989, nothing substantive had been done by the FBI. As ever since 1963, the will was lacking.
For those who wish to see no further progress in the Kennedy case, a much-trumpeted British television program, produced in November 1988 by Central TV, was a welcome event. Among its many follies, the program named as Gunman Two and Gunman Three [men] whose names had come up during Rivele's discussions with David, but who David had since specifically said were innocent. In the wake of the television program, one of the men produced a plausible alibi for November 22, and Rivele's exclusive story suddenly appeared--however unjustifiably--to have been exploded. Rivele's French publishers backed off, and no American publisher had been found as [Summers' Conspiracy] went to press. Rivele himself, disgusted with the Central TV fiasco, weary from years of non-stop investigation, turned to other work.
In France, meanwhile, Christian David has repeatedly avoided trial by staging "suicide" attempts, and languishes in Paris' La Santé prison. He has given his French lawyer a sealed envelope said to contain a written account of all he knows about the Kennedy assassination, which is allegedly more than he has so far told. Clearly, both he and the second witness, Nichèle Nicoli, should be extensively interrogated by the proper authorities. We should be told why David's deportation was pushed through in haste in 1985, when federal authorities knew he was offering information in the Kennedy case.
As of this writing, the fact remains that two men exist--one of them regarded by officials as a most reliable source--who say they know how President Kennedy was assassinated. From what they say, it may be that two of the assassins--not to mention those who directed them--may still be alive, and could perhaps be brought to justice. There has not been such a situation in the quarter century since the assassination. Perhaps their story is unfounded, but, if the United States is a properly functioning democracy, it should be shown to be bogus. There should be an investigation, and full public disclosure of the results.
Herewith, an excerpt from L. Fletcher Prouty's "JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy" (1992)...What follows is from the book's Epilogue, "Game Plan of the High Cabal." It should be noted that Prouty, a retired Air Force Colonel and a "former top-level `military-CIA' operative," was the model for Oliver Stone's "Deep Throat"-style character "X" in the movie JFK.
The assassiantion of President John F. Kennedy was one of the truly cataclysmic events of this century. The murder of a President was traumatic enough; but the course of events that followed and that have affected the welfare of this country and the world since that time has, in many ways, been tragic.
That assassination has demonstrated that most of the major events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one overridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom these others work. Neither is this power elite of recent origin. Its roots go deep into the past.
Kennedy's assassination has been used as an example of their methodology. Most thinking people of this country, and of the world believe that he was not killed by a lone gunman. Despite that view, the cover story created and thrust upon us by the spokesmen of this High Cabal has existed for three decades. It has come from the lips of every subsequent President and from the top media representatives and their spokesmen. They are experienced, intelligent people who are aware of the facts. Consider the pressure it must take to require all of them, without exception, to quote the words of that contrived cover story over and over again for nearly three decades.
This is the evidence we have of the significance of the Kennedy assassination. But it is only one example. Other major events, such as the development and escalation of the Vietnam War, have been manipulated in a similar manner. In bringing this work to a close I shall provide, briefly, a look at a few of the other events during the Cold War that have taken place because the power elite planned things that way.
As a result, I am aware I may be attacked in the same fashion as Oliver Stone even before his movie JFK appeared in the theaters. The attack consists of words like conspiracy and paranoia similar to the verbal accusations during the Inquisition. To attack someone as conspiracy prone because he does not believe the cover story that one lone gunman killed the President is ridiculous. By now it has become clear that there was a plan to murder Kennedy in order to escalate the Vietnam war and decimate most of the less-developed countries through a form of banker-managed, predatory economic warfare. Conspiracy is far from the operative word. This is planning at its best or worst, depending on your point of view. Furthermore, paranoia cannot properly be used to define someone who studies economics and history and reveals certain facts. As a matter of proper definition, such findings are the result of the opposite of "paranoia." Having said this, let's take a look at a few recent examples of how the game plan of the High Cabal, Winston Churchill's phrase for the power elite, operates.
Ever since the murder of the President we have been told by the highest authorities that JFK was killed by one man, who fired three shots from a mail-order Italian-made rifle. Quite naturally most Americans have wanted, at first, to believe the word of their government, especially when it involved such an important matter.
Many of the most earnest of these researchers who do not believe one man killed the President with three shots from a rifle have mistakenly spent almost three decades researching and studying the cover story and not the facts. More than six hundred books have been written on this subject. In them you can find a myriad of obscure trivia dug up by these tireless researchers. But to no avail. That is not the path to the answer to the main question, "Why was Kennedy killed?" No one will ever know who killed the President. In that business, the "mechanics" are faceless and have chameleon identities that are skillfully shielded by the system.
It is easy for anyone to learn that President Kennedy was murdered in a burst of gunfire, as reported by able and on-the-spot newsmen, that hit him at least twice, struck Governor Conally at least once and more likely two times, and that a fragment created by a stray shot hit a man named Tague who was standing on the curb of a street about a block away from where Kennedy was shot. Those are more than the "three shots" on which the Warren Commission builds its case. "More than three shots" is all the evidence needed to prove that the accounts of the crime given by the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission are wrong.
What does it take to convince able, intelligent people that the contrived cover story published by our government is nothing more than that? If nothing else a recent episode from the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association should alert the public to the seriousness of the cause underlying the decision to assassinate JFK alost thirty years ago.
This powerful, wealthy association, one of the most influential in the country, has required its spokesmen to proclaim, once again, that a bullet entered the back of the neck of the President and exited through his throat and then traveled on to seriously injure Governor Connally. "How utterly absurd," we might say; and of course it is. But that is not the point. Here is this prestigious organization being forced by a higher power, under some form of duress, to play a distasteful role before the American public by repeating a story that is untenable.
* * *