They Killed Our President
Page 11
QUESTION: On his right wrist?
OFFICER LEAVELLE: Correct.
QUESTION: Anything said as you enter the basement?
OFFICER LEAVELLE: Well, I said this several times, but anyway, I did tell him on the way down, I said, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they’re as good a shot as you are.’ Meaning they’d hit him and not me. And he kind of laughed and he said, ‘Ah, you’re being melodramatic.’ Or something like that. ‘Nobody’s going to shoot me.’ I said, ‘Well, if they do start, you know what to do, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Well, Captain Fritz told me to follow you, and I’ll do whatever you do.’210
I don’t know about you but—after all the years of what our Government and our media have been telling us; fifty frigging years of it—that conversation noted above that took place right before Oswald got shot is sure a surprise to me. After all the malarkey we’ve had force-fed to us for decades, you just wouldn’t expect that he’d be kidding around with the people taking him around the jail and subservient like that—even respectful—to the officer escorting him and in the reference to Captain Fritz, the Chief of Homicide.
Oswald consistently denied committing any crime other than a scuffle during his arrest at the Texas Theater:
• I didn’t shoot John Kennedy.
• I did not kill President Kennedy or Officer Tippit (this was later in the questioning of Oswald, and he now knows the name of the officer, which he did not previously). If you want me to cop out to hitting or pleading guilty to hitting a cop in the mouth when I was arrested, yeah, I plead guilty to that. But I do deny shooting both the President and Tippit.
• If you ask me about the shooting of Tippit, I don’t know what you are talking about. . . . The only thing I am here for is because I popped a policeman in the nose in the theater on Jefferson Avenue, which I readily admit I did, because I was protecting myself.
• I didn’t shoot anyone . . . I never killed anybody.211
Oswald’s confidence in his innocence was such that it even allowed him to focus attention on the defense of other’s rights:
• In the past three weeks the FBI has talked to my wife. They were abusive and impolite. They frightened my wife, and I consider their activities obnoxious.
• Sheriff Roger Craig saw Oswald enter a white station wagon fifteen minutes after the assassination. Oswald confirmed this in Captain Fritz’s office. Oswald then responded:
ₒ That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Ruth Paine. Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.212
Oswald constantly and confidently defended his rights while in custody.
U.S. Secret Service Inspector Thomas J. Kelley approached Oswald, out of the hearing of others, except perhaps Captain Fritz’s men, and said that as a Secret Service agent, he was anxious to talk with him as soon as he secured counsel, as Oswald was charged with the assassination of the President but had denied it. Oswald said:
I will be glad to discuss this proposition with my attorney, and after I talk with one, we could either discuss it with him or discuss it with my attorney, if the attorney thinks it is a wise thing to do, but at the present time I have nothing more to say to you.
It isn’t right to put me in line with these teenagers. . . . You know what you are doing, and you are trying to railroad me . . . I want my lawyer.
You are doing me an injustice by putting me out there dressed different than these other men . . . I am out there, the only one with a bruise on his head . . . I don t believe the lineup is fair, and I desire to put on a jacket similar to those worn by some of the other individuals in the lineup. . . . All of you have a shirt on, and I have a t-shirt on. I want a shirt or something. . . . This t-shirt is unfair.
Why are you treating me this way?
I am not being handled right . . . I demand my rights.
Can I get an attorney?
I have not been given the opportunity to have counsel.
As I said, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee has definitely been investigated, that is very true. . . . The results of that investigation were zero.
I insist upon my constitutional rights. . . . The way you are treating me, I might as well be in Russia . . . I was not granted my request to put on a jacket similar to those worn by other individuals in some previous lineups.
I have been dressed differently than the other three. . . . Don’t you know the difference?
I still have on the same clothes I was arrested in. The other two were prisoners, already in jail.
Seth Kantor, reporter, heard Oswald yell, “I am only a patsy.”
I refuse to answer questions. I have my t-shirt on, the other men are dressed differently. . . . Everybody’s got a shirt and everything, and I’ve got a t-shirt on. . . . This is unfair.213
So the bulk of the evidence, as far as what transpired while Oswald was in custody, indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald was precisely what he said he was: A patsy set up to take the fall for the actions of others.
192 Anthony Lewis, “Warren Commission Finds Oswald Guilty and Says Assassin and Ruby Acted Alone; Rebukes Secret Service, Asks Revamping,” 27 September 1964, The New York Times, Page One: nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0927.html
193 Ibid.
194 David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace, People’s Almanac #2; (Bantam Books: 1978) 47–52; “The Last Words of Lee Harvey Oswald: Compiled by Mae Brussell”
195 Ibid.
196 Ibid.
197 Ibid.
198 Ibid.
199 Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swann, The Arrogance of Power (Penguin Books: 2001).
200 “The Last Words of Lee Harvey Oswald: Compiled by Mae Brussell.”
201 Joe Nick Patoski, “The Witnesses: What They Saw Then, Who They Are Now,” Texas Monthly, November, 1998.
202 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And the Case That Should Have Changed History (Potomac Books: 2007).
203 “The Last Words of Lee Harvey Oswald: Compiled by Mae Brussell.”
204 Ibid.
205 Ibid.
206 Ibid.
207 Ibid.
208 Ibid.
209 Ibid.
210 Patoski, “The Witnesses: What They Saw Then, Who They Are Now”
211 “The Last Words of Lee Harvey Oswald: Compiled by Mae Brussell.”
212 Ibid.
213 Ibid.
21
Paper Trail on the Rifle Was Intentional
If you were going to shoot at the President of the United States, would you leave a paper trail that led directly to you? Neither would I.
The paper trail was ridiculously intentional and there was no effort to disguise it. If anything, it has the appearance of someone trying to establish a paper trail; to lead a clear trail to the person the conspirators were planning to set up which, in this case, was Lee Harvey Oswald.
But you have to ask yourself that one burning question: If you’re planning to murder the President of the United States, would you really order a junk rifle through the mail and leave an obvious paper trail showing that you did exactly that? The only scenario I can see where a person might do that would be if, after the shooting, they were just going to throw up their hands and say, “Yeah, I did it.”
But that’s not what Oswald did. In fact, if you look at what he did do, it makes no sense at all for an assassin to have done this:
In 1963, a gun could be purchased in the state of Texas without a permit or any record of the purchase. However, the rifle the Warren Commission claimed was the murder weapon was purchased by A. J. Hidell and shipped to a post office box owned by Lee H. Oswald. When apprehended by Dallas police on November 22, 1963, Oswald carried a fake Selective Service card with the name of A. J. Hidell and an expired U.S. Department of Defense card. Though he could have purchased a rifle without any paper trail, we are led to believe the following:
1. Oswald purchased a mail order rifle under an alias of A. J. Hidell.
2. Oswald’s ali
as was used on a fake Selective Service card that he kept in his wallet.
3. The Mannlicher-Carcano he purchased by mail order was sent to a post office box that was linked to his real name.
4. When he was questioned by the Dallas police, he claimed he didn’t own a rifle.214
Lord almighty, folks. So if you could walk into any gun store in Texas back then and buy a rifle with no record of the purchase, then why would a criminal buy one by mail-order instead that left a paper trail right to their own doorstep? Let me answer that one for you: they wouldn’t!
So why would somebody do that? You’d only do that if you were trying to set somebody up. That’s why Oswald—as has been proven—was actually at work when they say he was buying the money order that paid for that rifle.215
The rifle purchase and everything about it are very peculiar and not directly linkable to Oswald.216 All this leads to a very interesting chain of evidence.
We already know about Oswald’s many established links to the CIA. But in addition to that, there’s also a lot of evidence that he was working as an informant with the FBI, and part of that work seemed to be Oswald’s participation in a federal government “sting” operation aimed at mail-order rifle purchases.
In January of 1963, Senator Thomas Dodd held committee hearings on the unrestricted delivery of weapons through the U.S. mail. Dodd was interested in the unregulated traffic of Italian Mannlicher-Carcanos as well as the company that Oswald supposedly purchased his rifle from Klein’s of Chicago.217
Senator Dodd of Connecticut was a powerful influence in Congress and conducted investigations on how traffic in mail-order weapons was harming business for domestic gun manufacturers.
In 1963, as head of the Senate’s Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee, Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut was experimenting with ordering arms from mail order houses in an attempt to gather information allowing Congress to stem unregulated traffic. Senator Dodd instituted the program on behalf of Colt and other small firearms producers in Connecticut who complained of foreign imports.
Oswald might have participated in this program. Dodd, a former FBI agent and long-time J. Edgar Hoover loyalist, was also a leading member of the Cuba Lobby [which grew out of the right-wing, red-hunting, China Lobby] through which he was in touch with some of the same Cuban-exile mercenaries as Oswald. He was also investigating the Fair Play for Cuba Committee [FPCC] in which Oswald may have been an infiltrator.218
Author George Michael Evica, one of the first investigators of the JFK assassination, focused on that linkage between Oswald and the Congressional gun investigation and found that the same type of rifle used to kill Kennedy was ordered during that Senate investigation, under the name of Oswald or the known alias, A. J. Hiddel, which was used by Oswald:
I have learned that according to two unimpeachable sources, Senator Thomas Dodd indeed caused at least one Mannlicher Carcano to be ordered in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald (or in the name of ‘A. J. Hiddel’) sometime in 1963.219
The above points are some very strong links between Oswald and that government gun investigation.
Two of the gun mail-order houses that Dodd’s subcommittee was investigating were the ones from which Oswald allegedly ordered his Smith and Wesson .38 revolver [Seaport Traders of Los Angeles] and his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle [Klein’s of Chicago]. Oswald ordered his pistol two days before Dodd’s subcommittee began hearings on the matter on January 29, 1963. The subcommittee’s sample statistics later showed a purchase in Texas made from Seaport Traders. One of the groups being investigated for firearm purchases had a listing by Oswald in his address book, the American Nazi Party. One of the investigators looking into interstate firearms sales at this time was Manuel Pena, the Los Angeles police lieutenant who was later one of the pivotal officers investigating Robert Kennedy’s assassination. It was Pena who traced Oswald’s telescopic sight to a California gun shop. And one of the primary culprits, robbing domestic manufacturers of profits, was the Mannlicher-Carcano.220
Senator Dodd was also involved in the formation of the immediate associations of Oswald being a communist and, specifically in information linking Oswald to communist Cuba.
In the summer of 1963, Dodd had presided over a Senate Internal Security subcommittee investigation of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald was the only member of the New Orleans branch. In 1963, Dodd called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee a chief public relations instrument for Castro.221
So Senator Dodd was apparently a key player in everything from making sure the public perception of Oswald was as a Cuba-loving commie to expanding American military action in Cuba and the Vietnam War:
After the assassination, Dodd, using CIA sources, helped the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee publish a story that Oswald had been trained at a KGB assassination school in Minsk. At the time, Dodd was on the payroll of the American Security Council, “the leading public group campaigning to use U.S. military force to oust Castro from Cuba, and to escalate the war in Vietnam.”222
As Dick Russell established in the book The Man Who Knew Too Much, ATF Agent Frank Ellsworth, whom we discussed in the earlier entry about finding the rifle, was also involved in some of the gun investigations happening at that time in Dallas. A local undercover informant had set up an illegal weapons purchase that Agent Ellsworth was running as part of his operation. Ellsworth would never divulge the name of the informant but some surmised it was Oswald or “one of the Oswalds” that was operational in Dallas at the time. There was an Oswald “look-alike” who was a local gunsmith in Dallas and may have been the one who set up the illegal sale of the full automatic weapons to a Dallas group of anti-Castro Cubans, who was the focus of Ellsworth’s investigation.223
On the day of the assassination, Agent Ellsworth was asked by the Dallas Police Department to come and interview the suspect that he had released the day before. So Ellsworth assumed they were talking about Oswald, but it was actually in reference to John Thomas Masen, who was a dead ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald. The whole thing seemed way too coincidental to Agent Ellsworth, who certainly knew his way around the Dallas gun-running subculture very well. Masen also was closely connected to the extreme right-wing Minutemen group and oil millionaire H. L. Hunt.224
And in that same book, military intelligence operative Richard Case Nagell, whose specific intelligence mission was to investigate how Oswald was being set up and why, also shows us that H. L. Hunt was possibly connected to Oswald and to the activities that set the stage for the JFK assassination.225
Now add to all of that gun purchase drama, the point that I made earlier, that another military intelligence operative, Tosh Plumlee, in his sworn affidavit, states that when he came across Oswald in Dallas, he was acting operationally in an undercover role as part of a government-sanctioned gunrunning operation involving an anti-Castro Cuban group in Dallas.226
All of a sudden, connecting the dots, it sure looks like that’s what was actually happening with Oswald in Dallas.
So we’ve looked at Oswald’s intelligence connections and already know that he was a “false defector” to the Soviet Union as part of an intelligence operation. Looking now at all this gun evidence, it sure as hell looks like he was also working undercover for the Feds in the above-described sting operation.
By the way, Oswald even wrote a letter to a “Mr. Hunt” asking for “clarification,” and handwriting experts have substantiated that it was in Oswald’s writing.227 You’ve probably never heard that before, but it’s true. Some have speculated the Mr. Hunt was E. Howard Hunt Jr., the future Watergate burglar who was an agent specializing in Cuba for the CIA. But an even more likely suspect, if you ask me, was H. L. Hunt. Oswald’s letter was written on November 8, 1963, just a couple weeks before the assassination took place. Here’s the contents of that letter, verbatim:
Nov. 8, 1963
Dear Mr. Hunt,
I would like information concerning my position.
I am asking only for informati
on
I am suggesting that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else
Thank You,
(signed) Lee Harvey Oswald228
Speechless? You should be! But you should also be asking yourself why it is that the government has never shown the slightest interest in that letter, since it first surfaced back in 1975. Lord Almighty, it’s been fifty years of this! Can’t they just give all the evidence to the public, once and for all?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, folks:
We Can Handle The Truth!
214 John S. Craig, The Guns of Dealey Plaza, retrieved 24 April 2013: acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/11th_issue/guns_dp.html
215 Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (Paragon House: 1989), 213.
216 Michael T. Griffith, “Faulty Evidence: Problems with the Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald,” 2001, Third Edition: michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/faulty.htm
217 Craig, “Guns of Dealey Plaza.”
218 Walter F. Graf & Richard R. Bartholomew, “The Gun That Didn’t Smoke,” 1994, 1997: assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/gtds_3.html
219 Ibid.
220 Ibid.
221 Craig, “Guns of Dealey Plaza.”
222 Graf & Bartholomew, “The Gun That Didn’t Smoke.”
223 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 357–358.
224 Ibid.
225 Ibid, x, xxxii–xxxiii, 110–111, 143, 173, 189, 200, 203–204, 206, 252–254, 358–359, 374–376, 378, 519, 555, 588.
226 Belzer & Wayne, Dead Wrong, “Affidavit of William R. Plumlee,” 111–115.
227 Michael T. Griffith, “Just The Facts: Established Facts About the JFK Assassination That Point to Conspiracy,” March 5, 2002: michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/justthefacts.htm
228 news.google.com/newspapers.?nid=1891&dat=19770403&id=56QfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=PdYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3049,190328
22
The “Backyard Photo” Of Oswald Was Deemed a Forgery
The Warren Commission said that Oswald was linked to the rifle that killed JFK because two photographs were found of Oswald posing with what they said was the exact same rifle. The photographs were taken in the yard of someone’s house and have since come to be known as the “backyard photos.”