The Times also put together another book, The Witnesses, which contained “highlights” from testimony before the Warren Commission. All these were aimed at shoring up the lone-gunman notion.
In one instance, a witness who reported having seen a man with a rifle on the sixth floor had other portions of his testimony eliminated—namely, that he’d actually seen two men but been told to “forget it” by an FBI agent. Witnesses like Zapruder, who believed some of the shots came from in front, were left out entirely.471
As media critic Jerry Policoff put it:
Thus, the press’ curiosity was not aroused when a 7.65 caliber German Mauser mutated into a 6.5 caliber Italian Mannlicher-Carcano; or when the grassy knoll receded into oblivion; or when an entrance wound in the President’s throat became an exit wound [first for a fragment from the head wound and then for a bullet from the back wound]; or when a wound six inches below the President’s shoulder became a wound at the back of the neck. The press was thereby weaving a web that would inevitably commit it to the official findings.472
As I have also pointed out, it was the mainstream media who ruthlessly attacked Oliver Stone’s great film, JFK. Lord forbid anybody publicly suggested that maybe there were some questions about the assassination!
When Oliver Stone’s movie JFK came out in 1991, the strongest attacks came from news outlets and journalists ‘with the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the flawed Warren Commission inquiry.’ Are we surprised? They’ll cheerlead for Posner and Bugliosi’s books, but I’ll bet you a free lunch they’re not going to be reviewing this one anytime soon.473
The result of this highly questionable tangling of government and major media has been a very disturbing progression away from the notion of a free press.
Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and Congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a retraction of a true story for political reasons. In ‘Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry’ he said, ‘The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn’t stand up, who didn’t write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people.’
Until the 1980s, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. government to deregulate and privatize the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations [mostly U.S. based], working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.474
When it comes to the subject of the media and the JFK assassination, the real story is the absence of any substantive story or investigative journalism.
If the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was one of the darkest tragedies in the republic’s history, the reporting of it has remained one of the worst travesties of the American media. From the first reports out of Dallas in November of 1963 to the merciless flagellation of Oliver Stone’s JFK over the last several months, the mainstream media have disgraced themselves by hewing blindly to the single-assassin theory advanced by the FBI within hours of the murder. Original, enterprise reporting has been left almost entirely to alternative weeklies, monthly magazines, book publishers, and documentary makers. All such efforts over the last twenty-nine years have met the same fate as Oliver Stone’s movie: derision from the mainstream media. At first, the public bought the party line. But gradually, as more and more information slipped through the margins of the media business, and finally through the efforts of Congress itself, the public began to change its mind.
Today, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, an astonishing 77 percent of Americans reject the Warren Report’s conclusions. How did such a tremendous credibility gap come about? And assuming that the majority of Americans are right, how did a free press so totally blow one of the biggest stories of the century.475
I obtained a copy of an amazing document: CIA document #1035-960, entitled CIA Instructions to Media Assets: RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report. It was marked “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED” plus “PSYCH” and “CS” for Psychological Warfare unit of Clandestine Services Department of United States Central Intelligence Agency.
To those who say there’s no evidence that the CIA controls the media in the United States—read it and weep:
1. From the day of President Kennedy’s assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission’s published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission’s findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission’s report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46 percent of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results
2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination.
Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.
3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:
a. To discuss the publicity problem with friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.
b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to
theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein’s theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane’s book is much less convincing than Epstein’s and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)
4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:
a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attacks on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians [Fritz Tobias, A. J. P. Taylor, D. C. Watt] now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)
b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent—and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission’s records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.
c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy’s brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, and the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.
d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.
e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator. He was a “loner,” mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.
f. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.
g. Such vague accusations as that “more than ten people have died mysteriously” can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conducting 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the “ten mysterious deaths” line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)
5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission’s Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics. 476
About the nicest thing I can say is that at least they’ve put a lot of thought into how to distort our news and control the media!
The influence upon our “free press” is often overt, rather than covert. In fact, according to former media titan Katharine Graham, the public doesn’t really need to know anyway; the following are her words from the 1988 speech to senior CIA employees at the Agency. So here’s what those dirtbags really think; get a load of this one:
We live in a dangerous and dirty world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t.477
The death toll from that brand of arrogance has been astounding. And what’s even more alarming than the information that has been widely disseminated to the American public, is the information that has not been.
It turns out the CIA has:
• Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy, and dozens of other nations;
• Been involved to varying degrees in at least thirty-five assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle;
• Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965—67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others;
• Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire), the “Reign of the Colonels” (Greece), and more;
• Created, trained, and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists, and political opponents in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola, and others;
• Helped run the “School of the Americas” at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation, and murder;
• Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships, and creating food shortages;
• Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia, and one to two million in Cambodia;
• Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War;
• Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide;
• Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia;
• Actively traded in drugs around the wo
rld since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg—other notorious examples include Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and Noriega’s Panama;
• The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, six million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an ‘American Holocaust.’478
But hey, no problem; as long as all their friends in mainstream media put the right spin on it, or better yet, not even cover that type of stuff, everything’s apparently fine. And, as far as the public, we can just go on with the stories they force-feed us and spend most of our so-called “news” time on the truly big issues of the day: like who wore what on the Hollywood red carpet. Does it ever make you wonder why just about every evening newscast starts off with a murder or a kidnapping or an assault? So you either get nonsense or horror.
As a veteran who has defended what this country is supposed to stand for, I feel truly insulted by how the corporate-owned mainstream media has hijacked the real news in this country and replaced 90 percent of it with a bunch of asinine crap that not even a moron should be forced to watch.
If you want a real story, just try this one on for size: Corporatization has now centralized media ownership so much, that only ten companies now control everything that you see and hear on television and radio.479 Ten companies?! And you can just bet that they’re all “warm and cozy” with the CIA and their “official line” too.
They Killed Our President Page 24
