An FBI Rewrite of the JFK Assassination



Chapter 9

The Corruption Built In is a Danger to All Americans

It would wrong, very wrong, to take Hosty as typical of all FBI agents. In the dim past I knew and worked with some and my recollection is that they were all good to men and honest. What Hosty's book reflects of Hosty would not be applicable to any of those many agents who worked on my FOIA lawsuits for the FBI, not those I met. Yet I have known retired agents who were not all that unlike Hosty in their thinking and in what they said and did.

What is reflected in his book is not reflected in those reports he wrote that I have seen. There he had to be more careful. He had to try to keep out of trouble in the office to which he was assigned, out of trouble with headquarters, too.

Not that he did all that well!

Yet with more that enough cause to fire him he was not fired and in the end he was repaid what had been taken from him when he was punished.

From his account, agents with whom he worked lied and what they had lied about is in the FBI's investigation of the assassination of the President. That is a crime that nullifies our system of representative government, the most deeply subversive crime in our country.

When they lie in this most important to the country of any case they can work on, is there any case in which they will not lie?

Is it not to wonder how much of what the FBI reported about the assassination can be depended upon?

This is separate from what can be independently evaluated and as my books make clear, without even pro forma denial from the FBI or any of its agents, there is simply an enormous amount of evidence provided by the FBI that not only cannot be depended upon, it is false.

No less dishonest and no less intended to be dishonest is what the FBI knew and did not report, what it knew that disproved what it reported or was not consistent with what it reported. What it reported was in support of, so to speak, the FBI's "party line" on the assassination, that Oswald was the lone assassin. There are innumerable illustrations of this throughout the hundreds of thousands of disclosed FBI assassination records. I have reported many of them in all my books, without a single complaint or protest by the FBI or by any one agent. I select one because it illustrates several aspects of this.

Walter Bent, sales service manager of the Dallas Eastman Kodak processing service division, phoned the Dallas FBI office the morning of the first working day after the assassination, Monday, November 25, 1663. He told SA Milton L. Newsom that an engineer, Charles Bronson, had taken both motion and still punctures of the assassination and that the FBI was welcome to see them and have copies. Newsom wrote a memo to Shanklin of this and after he went to Eastman Kodak, taking SA Emory E. Horton with him he wrote another memo to Shanklin reporting on it (DL 89-43-493).

Bronson had taken 35-mm color slides with his Leica and had shortly earlier taken movies. Of the movies Newsom wrote, with the conclusion of the investigation stated firmly at its very beginning, they "failed to show the building from which the shots were fired." Of the slides he wrote "they did depict the President's car at the precise time the shots were fired; however, the pictures were not sufficiently clear for identification purposes."

So, with free copies offered, the FBI declined them.

Neither of these Newsom memos to Shanklin was sent to headquarters. They were entirely unknown until I obtained them in CA 78-0322. Then Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News and Gary Mack, who then published a newsletter, looked Bronson up. He had left the state but he willingly showed them all his film.

They found that the movies Newsom said "failed to show the building from which the shots were fired" in fact had more than eighty individual frames or individual pictures of that "sniper's lair" window.

The FBI declined pictures of the President actually being assassinated because they "were not sufficiently clear for identification purposes." But the newspaper found them clear enough to enlarge and print and even with that enlargement and added lack of "clarity" from newspaper printing there are perhaps fifty of the closer witnesses to the assassination who can be identified in them. This alone is important in my investigation, identifying witnesses and being able to pin-point where they were.

But just imagine it, clear pictures of the President being assassinated and the FBI refuses copies of them!

The only identification not possible from them was of Oswald!

The only pictures the FBI wanted were of him with a smoking gun.

The importance of clear photographs of the assassination, of the positions of the bodies of the victims and of where the limousine was at identifiable times are among the more important values of these pictures- if any real investigation was ever intended.

But not only did the Dallas FBI decline copies of those pictures, it did not even bother to let headquarters know they existed!

Nobody had to give Newsom and Horton directives on what the FBI did and did not want. Nobody had to tell Shanklin that the headquarters did not want pictures of the actual assassination, only those that could be used against Oswald. So he had no problem not troubling headquarters or headquarters' files with the knowledge of the existence of this evidence the importance of which in any real investigation cannot be exaggerated.

That is the way the FBI works and it works that way spontaneously, without needing specific directives to work that way. That it is structured to work this way spontaneously should scare the hell out of every American. The corruption is built-in although it is probable that most of the agents are not aware of it. That it exists in what to the FBI are political cases -- and the FBI has the same record in the King assassination -- means it is there and can work that way in any kind of case.

Is it not to wonder, too, with what we here see about Hosty how many people in his "security" cases were hurt by him and by his political preconceptions by what he did in those cases and by what he did not do?

In most of those cases the victims have no chance to confront what is alleged against them and those to whom that information and misinformation was provided know how very well that they could be hurt by not agreeing with what the FBI sent them and by not doing what the FBI wanted done.

Is it not to wonder, too, when this kind of mind, this kind of infantile political belief that is believed so strongly, works on a criminal case how dependable the evidence it produces is? Most criminal cases are filed against those of least means, those not able to pay a lawyer. They cannot for the most part begin to conduct investigations of the FBI's investigations.

It is to wonder how many innocents have had their lives ruined in both "Security" and criminal cases with Hostian minds and mindsets doing the investigating?

Hosty represents the political perspective that was J. Edgar Hoover's and it was under Hoover that Hosty and many like him were recruited and became agents. Those who moved upward in the FBI were from these Hoover clones, of which Hosty is if not typical, is an example. Those who have since been promoted were to a degree at least promoted by those cloned on Hoover.

FBI perjury was commonplace in my FOIA lawsuits. Not one agent suffered for it and some were promoted for it.

We have seen that dishonesty is commonplace in Hosty's writing and that he lies in his book systematically. Is it not to wonder whether this was true in his work on those "Security" and criminal cases and what recourse if any those who were its victims had? Or could have had?

Can the average person defend himself or herself against dishonesty by government agents: if not, and that is what the odds are, what then is their plight? How free are we?

We hate to think of comparing ourselves or our government with those of the repressive societies we do not like, but other than in degree, is there that much difference from them in what we here see about Hosty?

The difference in degree is, of course, enormous. We have no concentration camps and we do have courts and public trials, but in principle are we not getting closer and closer to the abuses of those societies we detested?

When this can happen-did happen when the assassination of a President was being investigated -- is there any case in which it cannot happen?

For those who do not want to believe that this is possible even after reading this I remind them that when FBI headquarters prepared that five volume and supposedly definitive report on the assassination, it knowingly did not account for all the known and confirmed shooting and it did not even give the cause of death.

Of all the copies of that report that were later distributed throughout the upper levels of government -- and that was not until after the FBI had leaked the most prejudicial selections from it -- there was, in all the government, only a single one of the higher officials who had the principle and the integrity to be critical of it. In response the FBI launched a campaign of defamation against him, and he was the general counsel of the Defense Department.

Not a single newspaper looked at and commented fairly on that report.

When the FBI investigated and reported on the assassination of the President its report was a political diatribe against the dead lone accused and nothing else. It did not begin to account for the crime. It did not even pretend to.

The FBI was and remains immune from this.

I brought this to light in 1966, with facsimile reproduction of the two sentences only those five volumes that relate to the assassination itself. No newspaper or reviewer or radio or TV station or commentator paid any attention to it at all.

It has been totally ignored in the three decades since then.

How much chance then does the average person have of surviving the Hosty minds in the FBI?

These are not idle questions and these are not academic considerations.

Official dishonesties of a wide variety typified all my FOIA lawsuits. That is a law that bespeaks our basic principle, that the people have a right to know what their government does. But the principle of the law and its intent meant nothing at all to the FBI because stonewalling it was policy and because preventing embarrassment from what might be disclosed was the prime consideration in official minds.

On all levels.

Those who did the work had to worry about their careers, their futures, if they did not summon all the dishonesty demanded of them.

There was not a single department attorney who did not go along with this, accept it, and at least one of those who did all she could too enhance it was given a very big promotion.

Clerks who made it possible were promoted to agents.

Of all the many judges who sat on those cases there is but one who did not accept it without question. The FBI did not attempt perjury or other dirty tricks before that one judge. But without exception all those other judges were helpful to the FBI. Not a single one did a thing about my proofs, or making myself subject to a perjury charge if I lied, for charging that the FBI was guilty of the felony of perjury efore those courts. There was one exception, the judge that threatened my lawyer, Jim Lesar and me, over it. The other judges all just ignored the FBI's felonies in their faces and the subnoration of them by each and every department lawyer in all those cases.

This is more that a book on Hosty and on his disgrace of a book that is not on the assassination at all. It is a book in which Hosty's infantile and baseless political beliefs dominate him and what he writes. It is a book in which by any name means possible he seeks to defend himself against his own mistakes he was lucky to have survived.

But it is more than such a book.

It is a book that raises the most substantial questions of the functioning of our basic institutions and of how they can be and have been corrupted.

This is a book that raises the most substantial questions about freedom, which really means the freedom for all of us.

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