There is a new book out on the JFK assassination, entitled “A Cruel and Shocking Act,” by someone named Philip Shenon, that is reviewed in the Washington Post. I have not read the book, only the review. But if this bit about Oswald is any indication of the truth of the book, the author is delusional and the book is worthless.
This helps to explain how the commission missed out on the evidence that makes up the second major theme of Shenon’s book: the possibility that Oswald was working for or with Cuba’s revolutionary government. As a veteran journalist and former New York Times reporter, Shenon knows to hedge his bets when it comes to conspiracy theories. All the same, he can’t help but engage the strange Cold War netherworld of Soviet defection, repatriation and pro-Castro activism in which Oswald lived during his brief adult life…
This is utter nonsense. Oswald was working with Guy Bannister and David Ferry – on the exact OPPOSITE side of the Cuban situation. They were all working in the anti-Castro movement. Shenon has it all bass ackward.
Then the idiot compounds his error , according to the reviewer:
Shenon is particularly intrigued by Oswald’s September 1963 trip to Mexico City, where the future assassin tried and failed to gain Soviet and Cuban visas. While in Mexico, Shenon writes, Oswald apparently had a fling with a low-level staffer at the Cuban Consulate, and he was spotted at a Chubby Checker “twist party” attended by a Cuban diplomat deeply hostile to Kennedy. Two months later, back on American soil, Oswald shot and killed the president.
Shenon goes to great lengths to emphasize his new evidence about Oswald’s Mexico trip, and understandably so. When it comes to the most-studied murder of all time, it is no mean feat to turn up even the smallest tidbit. Still, the book stops short of suggesting a Cuban conspiracy, arguing simply that the Warren Commission (along with the FBI and the CIA) should have done more to investigate the available evidence. In the end, “A Cruel and Shocking Act” offers many of the trappings of conspiracy literature — doctored evidence, a mysterious suicide, a secret affair — without quite arguing in favor of a conspiracy.
The evidence for this trip is in good measure a long distance photograph of a man purported to be Oswald, at the gate of the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.
The problem? The man is clearly NOT Lee Harvey Oswald.
TOf all the groups who have ever been discussed as possibly running the assassination, the least probable was the Pro-Castro people.
Conclusion? Shenon is a shill – a disinformation front man.
According to these two pieces Shenon doesn’t know what he is talking about. Not about the assassination itself, nor the other possible group. Focusing on the Warren Commission is also exactly the wrong place to look. NO ONE on any side gives the Commission one iota of respect. He is looking in the wrong place – in the one place no possible useful information can reside.
The book is a waste of paper.
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For footnoted info on the Baister-Oswald-Ferrie connection regarding especially the phoniness of Oswald’s activities on behalf of the Fai Play for Cuba Committee, see http://www.ctka.net/LetJusticeBeDone/chapter4.htm
The ONLY connection between Oswald and any pro-Casto activities is his passing out these FPCC sheets, and that is covered well in many books as being a cover for Oswald to get in good with the pro-Castro people.
Banister was in as thick as flies with the ANTI-Castro people, even gun running to Florida. Oswald was not only active with Banister but operated out of Banister’s office in New Orleans – something that Oliver Stone covered well – and accurately – in “JFK.”
For this author to have accepted Oswald’s pro-Castro activities at face value means the author is a numb nuts.
It is amazing to me that 50 years later people are still running disinformation campaigns about the assassination. Amazing only in the sense that they still FEAR any truths coming out. There must still be some bombshells that haven’t been uncovered, and the dissemblers are trying to find some way of heading it off at the pass.
If so, this effort is the weakest I’ve ever run across. The disinformation people were much better in past decades.
I’d like to post links to two columns I wrote that support the arguments by columnist Steve Garcia here. My columns are based in significant part on research and preparations for the nation’s leading conference in 2014 analyzing the Warren Commission report on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. The gist is that views espoused by author Phillip Shenon and the commission were demolished by experts, yet the Washington Post relied on his views in its major report covering the JFK murder — illustrating that the cover-up continues on this event. Given the stark realities, we can reasonably wonder about what current matters might be receiving the same kind of slanted coverage.
— Andrew Kreig, author, attorney and investigative reporter
Washington, DC
Justice Integrity Project, “Washington Post Still Selling Warren Report 50 Years Later,” Sept. 22, 2014.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Warren Commission report, the Washington Post published a slanted, confusing and needlessly complex retrospective in its Sept. 21 Sunday Outlook section. Author Philip Shenon ignored many major revelations of the past half century regarding the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. Instead, he focused on minor matters to conclude, once again, that the commission correctly found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to shoot the president with three shots from the rear. Yet there are many well-credentialed experts who can explain in simple terms the serious questions about the Warren report. Two conferences assemble such experts in the Washington, DC-metro region from Sept. 26 to 28. Details: http://ow.ly/BMqIj
Justice Integrity Project, “Cuban Exile Militant Claims CIA Meeting With Oswald Before JFK Killing,” Sept. 30, 2014.
A former Cuban exile anti-Castro militant told a conference audience Sept. 26 in a blockbuster revelation that he saw accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with their mutual CIA handler six weeks before the killing and there would have been no anti-Castro movement in Cuba without the CIA funding. Antonio Veciana, the acknowledged leader of the Alpha 66 assassination squad of Cuban exiles in the early 1960s, made the statements in a dignified but emotion-laden manner at this year’s major conference analyzing the Warren Commission report on murder of President John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas.
Separately, the general counsel of the last major government investigation into the killing issued a statement saying the CIA had deceived him and the rest of the public during the late 1970s inquiry into the validity of the Warren report. Former House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) General Counsel G. Robert Blakey issued the statement during the conference Sept. 26-28 organized at the Bethesda Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bethesda, MD by the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC).
Details: http://www.justice-integrity.org/faq/725-former-cia-assassin-team-leader-claims-meeting-with-oswald-before-jfk-killing
Andrew –
WaPo is at least a tacit accomplice in the Warren Commission cover-up, if not outright active. They aren’t the first USA news operation that has been guilty of that. Several apologists for the WCR have put out books, and every time they do, the “don’t make waves” news operations are all over it.
There is a principle in science that says “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.” While the establishment continually asserts that the WCR skeptics need to provide such extraordinary proofs, it is the WCR itself which make the extraordinary claims in the first place. Having SAID what the WCR said, the supporters of it pretend that the WCR is the default position. But it isn’t. Where physics is violated, the WCR’s extraordinary assertions are false until proven valid.
A few examples:
1. Bullet 399 has less missing material than was found in Connolly. Ergo, that bullet did not come out of Connolly to be discovered on his stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
2. The bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano could not be fired accurately three times in those 5.4 seconds (or whatever the number was – it’s been a long time since I’ve looked into that).
3. Where is the missing section of the Zapruder film? The film would not have been damaged during the first shot, anymore than it would have been damaged anywhere else. This is the literal equivalent of the Nixon 18-1/2 minute gap. That jump in the film is simply accepted, when there is no reason to not be 100% skeptical about it. And since it was in the hands of the government almost from minute one, all suspicioin has to be targeted in that direction. Even IF that section of the film WAS damaged, image-wise,, there is no reason that it shouldn’t have been kept in.
4. The autopsy photos do not match the X-rays one iota. It is as if the two are of completely different heads. The big floating section of the skull in the X-rays simply doesn’t exist at ALL in the photos, which show an almost pristine JFK head.
5. Being a mechanical engineer, I agree 100% with the physics of Josiah Thompson in “Six Second in Dallas”, about the head snapping backward. Newton’s First Law cannot be violated, no matter WHAT gun aficionados claim. AN object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force. In my 40 years of engineering design, never did an object move TOWARD the source of an applied force. And any mechanical engineer would tell you the same thing. It comes down to vector math/geometry – the resultant vector is the vector sum of the forces acting upon it. The assertion that human bodies react differently is fantasy physics.
Enough on that tack…
Oswald and Atsugi…
In the Army I had a Top Secret clearance, though I didn’t keep it long. But I know this: NO ONE without some flavor of Top Secret clearance would have been allowed anywhere NEAR the radar shack at Atsugi when they were flying the U-2s out of there. He would have never been allowed to step into that shack. It is an absolute certainty that not only was Oswald a highly VETTED marine, but that he would have been highly TRUSTED. As someone IN that radar shack Oswald would have been part of a very small population of obvious candidates to be a spook.
In “The Man Who Knew Too Much” its subject Richard Case Nagell revealed that he was a fellow spook in the Far East with Oswald, in a small, unknown military spy group called FOE. The group was not far from the operation depicted in “The Bourne Identity”.
More comments, but on a different tack…
The Veciana thing really raised my eyebrows. I recognized his name immediately, in connection to Alpha 66. Alpha 66 impressed itself indelibly on my memory when just after reading a good bit about them (in about 1995 or so), I found a piece of mail from them, asking for a contribution. The name Alpha 66 on the envelope was a shocker at the time.
That his admission was only 2 weeks ago – WOW!
It is clear from the totality of the evidence that Oswald was connected to Bannister’s anti-Castro work, through if not in complete coordination with the weird David Ferrie.
As an aside, Oswald’s behavior in the short film clips of that weekend portray a man who was VERY un-intimidated by the events going on around him. He was very assertive about his rights and about what he knew and didn’t know, and he didn’t bat an eye in accusing the Dallas police of brutality. None of his actions or statements were those of a solitary loser.
In addition, in his 1963 radio interview as a pro-Communist Oswald comes across as someone who is mouthing things that he had no emotional attachment to.
I could go on and on for weeks on all of this, but will leave it there. . .