New Evidence in JFK Assassination: More Mystery Deaths
Dr. Lance Moore is an ordained United Methodist minister and author of Killing JFK: 50 Years, 50 Lies--From the Warren Commission to Bill O'Reilly, A History of Deceit in the Kennedy Assassination.
By 1990, our government and the mainstream media had been forced by a preponderance of evidence to quietly concede that a second gunman conspired to kill President John F. Kennedy. After the report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the official storyline changed from "A lone-nut gunman did it," to "Maybe Mafia members were also involved... but we'll never know for sure." The new myth was really no better than the first: the public could not put a dead Lee Harvey Oswald on trial, and similarly, we cannot indict nameless, nebulous "Mafia figures." Undaunted, conspiracy researchers continued to press ahead, finding more proofs of government complicity, especially when the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was empowered by Congress in 1992 to subpoena and assemble government documents from the CIA, FBI, etc. So the mainstream establishment turned to a young, enterprising attorney, Gerald Posner, to create yet another lone-gunman counter-myth in his 1993 book, Case Closed. An aggressive ad hominem attack on "conspiracy buffs" began, and we have been in a defensive posture ever since.
Debunking the Debunker
Posner's book shrewdly deconstructed our strong case by shattering the mosaic of conspiracy into a thousand shards, then sniping at each piece one at a time, using selective quotes, twisted facts, and strained logic. Like the Warren Commission before him, he used the mantra "Not a credible witness" with abandon. "Not credible" vs. "credible" is his oscillating standard based on whether or not the witness agreed with the official cover story. Posner's involvement with a plot to steal Harper Lee's copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, and his serial plagiarism, have been widely reported, and several books have since been published that make mince-meat of Posner's JFK work. He has even been dubbed the world record-holder for plagiarism by The Gawker. Yet, his book of lies has never been removed from publication, and no mainstream publisher has promoted our truth-filled rebuttals the way that Random House and CBS boosted the hyperbolically-titled Case Closed.
This article is too brief to replay the full debunking of Posner, but new evidence has come to me that refutes two major Posner arguments: 1. His claim that Oswald was not involved with U.S. intelligence operatives in New Orleans. 2. That the mysterious deaths of witnesses and other key figures in the assassination were incidental and meaningless. Both his claims are demonstrably absurd. A new source independently confirms the Oswald/CIA/mysterious deaths connection.
Oz in NOLA: In the company of The Company
First, some background. When we agree with Oswald's self-assertion that he was a "patsy," that is not to say he was uninvolved with those who executed the plot. Documents prove "Ozzie" had ties in New Orleans to the FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, also known as The Company). NOLA District Attorney Jim Garrison prosecuted the only criminal trial of the JFK-assassination conspiracy. He famously pointed out (as dramatized in the movie, JFK) that offices for these agencies were within a four block area concentric with Oswald's hangouts. But our case only begins with what might be shrugged off as a geographic coincidence. The nexus is vast. We now see how close Garrison was to breaking the case, having discovered the mutual ties among Oswald, Guy Banister (FBI and Naval Intelligence) and David Ferrie (CIA). Ferrie was a contract pilot for the CIA, involved in a variety of nefarious activities including gun-running to Cuba and training of anti-Castro exiles--a key witness in Garrison's case, until his untimely death. Those ties, once scoffed at, have now been proven, starting with governmental acknowledgement in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) report. See Section XIII, pp. 126-137 here:
Here is a partial list of people who claim to have seen Oswald and Banister together: Dr. Michael Kurtz, CIA deputy Hunter Leake, Delphine Roberts (Banister's secretary), Bill Nitschke, Dan Campbell, Vernon Gerdes, Judyth Baker, William Gaudet, and Jack Martin (Banister's partner).2
The list of those who can connect Oswald and Ferrie is even longer, plus I have uncovered a new witness, never before reported (more on that, below).
Posner downplays the HSCA report and dismisses these as "not credible witnesses," based on specious reasoning. Yes, some were shady characters, and some had a few inconsistencies in their testimony... but when so many people say the same thing, it is absurd to dismiss them en masse. Imagine if a Mafia gunman killed someone in cold blood, and the case went to trial, and a dozen witnesses all said they saw him do it. No jury would disregard that much commonality of testimony, even if some of the witnesses had nefarious backgrounds or stuttering testimony. In many criminal cases the witnesses are themselves criminal, so it is disingenuous for debunkers Posner and Vincent Bugliosi, both being attorneys, to scratch testimony on that basis. Even more damning is that our case does not rest solely on the words of so-called "unreliable" witnesses; we also have the hard evidence of photographs of a young Oswald in David Ferrie's Civil Air Patrol group (prior to that, the government had ignored a half-dozen of his fellow cadets who adamantly stated that Oswald was part of their group), AND Oswald's "pro-Castro" leaflets on which he had stamped 544 Camp Street--the corner of Guy Banister's office building. We could cite many more examples like this, in which the "conspiracy buffs and their wild theories" have been vindicated. No matter how shrill the debunkers' denial, eye-witnesses and paper evidence cross-confirm the Oswald/Banister connection. HSCA and the ARRB documents provide similar cross-confirmation of a quadruple connection among Oswald/Ferrie/Banister/Clay Shaw. Researchers William Davy and Jim DiEugenio both have proven this with a mountain of documentation.
Another strand of the web is that Ferrie worked part-time with Banister's detective agency and even hired Banister to help him with his lawsuit against Eastern Airlines. Eastern was infiltrated with CIA contract agents, mostly pilots, as we shall see in a moment.1 Like the net of a spider web, the entanglements are multiple. We also know that Banister had a connection to the William B. Reily Coffee Company on Magazine Street, not too many steps away from Banister's office, and one of Oswald's employers. D.A. Jim Garrison had good reasons to believe that Reily and his coffee company were part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, and this association is documented in William Davy's book, Let Justice Be Done (see Chapter Four).
Ralph Schoenman wrote, in a substantiated letter to the Rockefeller Commission, that the "seemingly innocuous company called Reily Coffee... proved less than innocent. Virtually all the co-workers of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Reily Coffee Company were hired by defense and military contractors... shortly after [their] association with Oswald."
CIA contract employee Gerry Patrick Hemming confirmed that "William Reily had worked for the CIA for years." That quote is from the book, JFK And The Unspeakable (p. 62), written by my friend Jim Douglass, who adds: "When Oswald went to work in Reily's Coffee company, he was in the company of the Company."
The Suspicious Deaths List
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