Dark Legacy Podcast (11-08-2009)

TRANSCRIPT

Ever since the first few days after the assassination, various agents have been telling us that the Kennedy assassination was solved, that this was an old issue, that we should get over it, leave the past in the past, and so on.

At the same time, the issue continues to be news.

A recent example, and not the most recent example, is the October 16 publication by the New York Times of an article that we’ll post at the website, describing how the CIA continues to refuse to release files that are obviously extremely relevant to the question of who shot the president, and whether or not the CIA was involved.

Now you need to recall that in 1991 the Congress, under the impetus of the Oliver Stone film, JFK, ordered all the relevant files to be released. President Clinton ordered all the relevant files to be released. And assassination records review Board was established to ensure that this happened. And, what is now 18 years later, the CIA still, boldly, in-your-face, takes the position that there are files that it is not going to release.

The files in question in this NYTimes article deal with an agent, actually a high-ranking CIA officer, named George E. Joannides.  Files have already been released, no doubt by accident, indicating that Mr. Joannides was deeply involved in the supervision of the CIA’s anti-Castro Cubans, and most particularly of Cubans with whom Lee Harvey Oswald had several contacts in the days leading up to the assassination.  But what has so far been released merely indicates Joannides’ involvement, without any details.

In 1978, when the House select committee on assassinations was reviewing the evidence, with particular attention paid to the possible involvement of the CIA’s anti-Castro Cubans, who were assassins, in the assassination of the president, Mr. Joannides was assigned by the CIA to be the liaison to the House select committee. Mr. Joannides  assignment was to limit what the house committee might learn about the CIA’s activities.  Dan Hardway, a lawyer who worked for the committee at the time, recalled how Joannides  blocked the committee’s access to critical files,   Hardway says, “he handed me a thin file and just stood there. I blew up, and he said, ‘This is all you’re going to get.’ ”  Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the house committee, says that if he had known who Joannides was he would’ve sworn them in on the spot and questioned him under oath, rather than relying upon him to assist in identifying important documents.

And again, 16 years later, in 1994,when the assassinations record review board was working to identify relevant documents for release, Joannides was assigned by the CIA to help them not find those documents.  Now I’m being facetious of course. He was ostensibly assigned to help them. But no one on the review board has any doubt that his real duty was to block them in their efforts to discover and release relevant documents.

And now, today, November 2009, the CIA continues to refuse to release these documents.

Now, if you haven’t seen dark Legacy yet, allow me to fill in the blanks a little bit. Five days after the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo entitled “assassination of president John Fitzgerald Kennedy” in which he identifies “Mr. George Bush of the CIA” as the supervisor of “misguided anti-Castro Cubans”. E. Howard Hunt, the leader of the Watergate burglars, was a front-line supervisor of these misguided Cubans that Joannides also supervised. A jury found that Hunt was not slandered by a magazine article that said that he was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that he participated in the assassination. Hunt’s son, St. John Hunt, has identified his father in photographs taken of men arrested in the railroad yard behind the grassy Knoll.

This is no small stuff.  And I think it’s instructive to look at some of the statements by the CIA and others in regard to this current, present day refusal of the CIA to release documents that they were ordered by law to release 18 years ago.

 The agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ’70s, while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security.

The CIA has written, in its official court filings in this case that “The methods of defeating or deterring covert action in the 1960s and 1970s can still be instructive to the United States’ current enemies.”

Let me rephrase that ever so slightly. The CIA is arguing, in their court filings, that these files would reveal things about what they did in the 60s that would still be instructive to our understanding of what they are doing today. So, I think we have it from the CIA, that their activities in murdering the president are today instructive regarding their current activities. 

Gerald Posner also gets quoted in this article, and gives us his insights. Posner is the scumbag who wrote “Case Closed,” arguing that we should no longer investigate these matters because the evidence of a lone nut is just so overwhelming. And in his article, he seeks to reassure us that “if there really were a CIA plot, no documents would exist.  Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this.”   So what is he saying?  He’s telling us that we shouldn’t get excited about such things as getting files released, because all relevant information will have been destroyed. And while I’m sure there’s a great deal of truth to that, I think that these people, the enemies of democracy, are essentially lazy and incompetent.  So that they are reluctant to release anything for fear that they have missed some critical piece of evidence.  And they would prefer that we all wait another 30 years before they reveal that they have destroyed everything.