Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 21, 2015 9:06:22 GMT -5
JFK Files for Sale, Assassination Still a Mystery
JFK conspiracy theorists don’t normally converge on the New York Art, Antique and Jewelry Show, but they will this weekend. Item No. 30-4201 for sale at the show is, after all, the so-called Garrison Files – a collection of items from the only trial to examine whether there was a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The Garrison Files are priced at $168,500 and feature two of the only seven known copies of the famous Zapruder film – the 8mm video that captured JFK’s assassination in Dallas.
Bill Rau of New Orleans’ MS Rau Antiques told The Post he purchased the files less than a month ago from the daughter of the lead investigator for Jim Garrison, the former hard-charging New Orleans district attorney who drew worldwide attention by asserting a conspiracy and coverup in JFK’s assassination. Garrison believed anti-Communist and anti-Castro extremists in the CIA were behind the murder – and in 1969, he prosecuted local businessman Clay Shaw as a co-conspirator with Lee Harvey Oswald. After 34 days of testimony, the jury took less than an hour to acquit Shaw.
But suspicions that Oswald did not act alone have never gone away. They erupted with a vengeance after the release of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, in which Kevin Costner played Garrison. "We deal in cool, and this is one of the coolest things that has ever happened to us," says Rau, a third-generation antiques dealer whose New Orleans store has been a French Quarter landmark for 100-plus years.
The daughter of Garrison’s lead investigator, whose family had known the Raus for generations and owned the papers and video for decades, decided to unload the collection recently before moving to England.
Unsettled 52 Years Later. President Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago this Sunday, but conspiracies about his death have not been laid to rest. A report at the time concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but a majority of Americans are unconvinced. A 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll from May of this year shows only 30 percent of respondents believe Oswald was the sole killer.
Gerald Posner, author of the 1993 best-seller Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, said at first, he also wasn’t convinced. “If you had asked me before I started the book, I would’ve thought it was a conspiracy with the mob, that’s what I always believed growing up,” Posner told MetroFocus Host Rafael Pi Roman. Posner said Dallas club owner Jack Ruby’s fatal shooting of Oswald two days after Kennedy’s assassination appeared to him as a mob hit. "When I went into the case, I was leaning toward the mafia, I came out thinking it was Oswald alone, so I became a born-again convert to the lone assassin theory," he said. Posner admits many groups and people had motivation to kill John F. Kennedy, such as the CIA or the mafia, but he decided the real question was: who pulled the trigger? "I’m convinced Oswald pulled it, the harder part for me was figuring out whether he did it for himself and some warped motivation of history or whether somebody else was directing him. That’s a much tougher question to answer. In the end, I conclude that he was doing it for his own reasons, but that’s the harder question to grapple with," he insisted.
The Warren Commission Report. The establishment theory of the Kennedy assassination, arguably the most controversial event in American history, is dubbed the "lone gunman," It is the conclusion of the Warren Report, commissioned by newly sworn in Lyndon B. Johnson and chaired by then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren. It concludes Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a disturbed ex-Marine who had exhibited erratic actions and behavior and that Oswald shot the President from the 6th floor of the Dallas Book Depository building.
The Warren Report is nicknamed the "single bullet theory." This one bullet is a most miraculous bullet, in its capability of piercing the president's suit from the back, puncturing his body to the right of his spine and exiting his body through his neck. But the bullet – which became Commission Exhibit 399, or CE 399 isn’t finished. It then enters Governor John Connally's back at the right arm pit, shattering his fifth right rib bone. After exiting the front of Connally's chest at the right nipple, the bullet shot through his right wrist, breaking one of his wrist bones, before burying itself beneath the skin of Connally's left thigh. Even so, the bullet is in amazingly good condition after accomplishing all this destruction. The brainchild of this preposterous concept (Single Bullet) is none other than the late Senator Arlen Specter, the Commission’s counsel at the time.
Charles A. Crenshaw, M.D., who attended the dying President at Parkland Hospital, Trauma Room 1 Friday, November 22, 1963, said:
"I walked to the President’s head to get a closer look. His entire right cerebral hemisphere appeared to be gone. It looked like a crater – an empty cavity. All I could see there was mangled, bloody tissue. From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front, and as it surgically passed through his cranium, the missile obliterated part of the temporal and all the parietal and occipital lobes before it lacerated the cerebellum."
The Warren Commission Report's conclusions have not fared well over the years and are only supported by certain so-called "scholars" among professional academia, who as a group tremble in fear of daring to question the government’s version of events, lest they be labeled "historical revisionists." Robert F. Kennedy himself called the report, "a shoddy piece of craftsmanship."
And Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker, co-chairman of the Church Committee report entitled The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, summarized his thoughts on the Warren Commission report as follows:
"I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long-run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the coverup."
Castro Ordered the Hit. Another theory proposes that Soviet and Cuban agents set in motion the impulses behind Oswald’s shooting of Kennedy. As a thesis, it is quite threadbare and never picked up much traction, because it had little to no circumstantial evidence to connect Cuba, other than Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s resentment against the Kennedy administration for its numerous bungled attempts to terminate him. This inference centers on Oswald and the three years he spent in Russia and his bizarre antics in New Orleans handing out pro-Castro leaflets on behalf of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This and the Warren Commission’s conclusion are complimentary but not interconnected. On close examination, this explanation appears to be a CIA concocted misdirection.
It was the Mob. Next is the Mob hit postulate that Kennedy patriarch Joseph Sr., was mobbed up and leveraged Chicago area mafia boss and business associate Sam Giancana's influence in Illinois to put the Kennedy campaign over the top in the 1960 election. The argument centers on the fact the Kennedys, particularly Bobby as Attorney General, took a hostile turn in the relationship, pursuing prosecutions of Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamster’s Union, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, former kingpin of the mob empire in Cuba, and allied Mafia figures. But the Mob theory of Kennedy's killing is sketchy as a stand-alone concept. ABC News interviewed former NYPD head of detectives and nationally accredited Mafia expert, Ralph Salerno, who told them:
"I would have given a great deal when I was working with the [House Select] Committee [on Assassinations] to come up with any kind of evidence that would indicate that. I felt that would have been a singular event which would have raised the hackles of the entire nation against organized crime. So I would have loved to have found something. But in the work that I did, and the work that I saw the committee do, I didn’t find that. And if you look very carefully at the report of the committee itself, they don’t say that."
LBJ was Behind the Assassination. Completing the menu is the premise most intriguing to researchers and furnishing the most compelling circumstantial and documentary evidence: LBJ ordered the hit on Kennedy.
Not only did Jacqueline Kennedy suspect Johnson was behind the murder of her husband, so did RFK. Barr McClellan, in his book, Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, relates a story that he heard from a business partner of one of Lyndon Johnson’s chief agents in the conspiracy, Edward A. Clark. The head of the law firm which represented LBJ’s business interests, Martin Harris, was told by Clark that Johnson gave Clark instructions and an envelope during a visit to the Johnson Ranch, which contained the full outline of Kennedy’s personal security Secret Service policy manual. The LBJ murder plot is the only one that synthesizes, in a logical way, other peripheral theories involving the CIA. While others had motives, the distinguishing factor of the LBJ outline is his grasp of both the means and opportunity, according to a number of researchers including attorney Craig Zirbel and writer Roger Stone. E. Howard Hunt, told to his son, St. John, that LBJ, Cord Meyer, William Harvey, David Sanchez Morales and others in the CIA had been involved in the assassination.
Although the body of material supporting the thesis of a LBJ-directed assassination is too voluminous to outline here, many researchers see value in a synthesized theory of the assassination in which a lot of seemingly isolated data points share common elements and convergence that include the CIA, the Mafia and LBJ’s Texas-based political machine. At the hub of this alignment are figures such as Jack Rubenstein (aka "Jack Ruby"), the Chicago mob-connected operative who shot Oswald. Ruby, also agreed with Mrs. Kennedy’s conclusion regarding LBJ:
"Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts, of what occurred, my motives. The people had , that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world."
Ruby, was then asked by a reporter: "Are these people in very high positions, Jack?" He replied: "Yes." He had much more to say:
"Gentlemen, I want to tell the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me, you have to take me to Washington," Ruby announced.
When asked by a reporter to illuminate his statement, he said: "When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice president – there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy."
The reporter persisted in getting to the fine edge of the allusion to which Ruby responded, "Well, the answer is the man in office now."
The "man in office now" was Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Sources: Richard Morgan, The New York Post, November 19, 2015; MetroFocus, November 20, 2015; and Richard Cameron, CDN, October 18, 2014.
See also: whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/629/november-22-1963-oswald-jfk
